Agent-based multimedia presentation and adaptation service

In this paper, we aim to provide adaptive multimedia services especially video ones to end-users in an efficient and secure manner. Users moving outside the office should be able to maintain an office-like environment at their current locations. First, the agents within our proposed architecture negotiate the different communication and interaction factors autonomously and dynamically. Moreover, we needed to develop a user agent in addition to service and system agents that could negotiate the requirements and capabilities at run time to furnish best possible service results. Thus we designed and integrated a video indexing and key framing service within our overall agent-based architecture. We integrated this video indexing and content-based analysis service to adapt the video content according to run time conditions. We designed a video XML schema to validate the media content out of this multimedia service according to specific requirements and features, as we will describe later.

Guest Editorial: Modeling Multimedia Information and Systems

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

A mobility prediction architecture based on contextual knowledge and spatial conceptual maps

User Mobility prediction represents a key component in assisting handoff management, resource reservation, and service preconfiguration. However, most of the existing approaches presume that the user travels in an a priori known pattern with some regularity; an assumption that may not always hold. This paper presents a novel framework for user mobility prediction that can accurately predict the traveling trajectory and destination using knowledge of user's preferences, goals, and analyzed spatial information without imposing any assumptions about the availability of users' movements history. This framework thus incorporates the notion of combining user context and spatial conceptual maps in the prediction process. The main objective of this notion is to circumvent the difficulties that arise in predicting the user's future location when adequate knowledge about the history of user's traveling patterns is not available. Using concepts of evidential reasoning of Dempster-Shafer's theory, the user's navigation behavior is captured by gathering pieces of evidence concerning different groups of candidate future locations. These groups are then refined to predict the user's future location when evidence accumulates using the Dempster rule of combination. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework.     

Visual modeling for agent-based applications

The authors describe a tool that lets nonprogrammers create mobile agents and distributed itineraries using a small set of generic icons. In preliminary experiments, users were able to generate even complex agents in three to four minutes     

A multimedia interhospital communications system for medicalconsultations

The authors present a study whose main objective has been to explore the use of high-bandwidth multimedia communications technology for medical applications physically distributed among hospitals, that is to say an interhospital multimedia communications system. The design and development issues of a prototype are described, as well as the results of an in-field trial. From the results of this trial, a performance study has been developed for evaluating the expected communications requirements of a large-scale configuration of the system     

The Mobile Agent Paradigm Meets Digital Document Technology: Designing for Autonomous Media Collection

Mobile agents have emerged as a new paradigm for computing and are proving to be more flexible and dynamic than the average client in the client-server model. In the mobile agent model the program is sent to, and runs on, the remote machine, thereby operating closer to and more interactively with the remote document resource. While for the most part industry is currently cautious, research laboratories have embraced the concept and effective prototypes have emerged. AgentSys is one such mobile agent system developed by the Agent Group at the Multimedia Information Research Laboratory [26]. This prototype implements the protocols (AgenTask, AgenTransact, AgenTransfer) necessary to allow agents to autonomously roam around a network of digital resources, collect information intermittently, and return to the user with results. While both network bandwidth and user search time can be reduced using the mobile agent paradigm, such a system requires protocols at the agent language, ontology, transfer, and application levels. This paper proposes: (i) an agent-stack to enable a mobile agent system, (ii) the agent protocols necessary for agent-digital document interaction, (iii) a profound new way of thinking of documents within the mobile agent paradigm, and (iv) solutions to critical issues in mobile agent transfer and task specification as they relate to autonomous digital document collection. This includes both the transfer of multimedia mobile agent cargo and novel techniques for the specification of agent behavior within the document task. A brief quantitative analysis of the Web surfing paradigm versus the mobile agent paradigm is included to justify claims of network traffic savings using agents.     

A temporal model for interactive multimedia scenarios

Many authoring tools let authors create scenarios, but very few let them create an active multimedia scenario that will not only play itself back, but will change course dynamically, depending on user interactions. Our temporal model provides a new way to represent asynchronous and synchronous temporal events, allowing authors to create scenarios that offer viewers seamless, transparent options     

Meta-Data and Media Management in a Multimedia Interactive Telelearning System

This paper describes the system design and the components of a web-based multimedia interactive Telelearning system (MITS) with emphasis on metadata and media content management mechanisms. Metadata model is defined and exploited in designing the overall architecture to support courseware creating, management, delivery, and learner performance evaluation. Multimedia document architecture is used to describe the media contents which represent the course material. Metadata and media contents are generated, stored, and utilized to facilitate the search and on-demand presentation of learning objects. Learner preference, performance and progress information is maintained by profile database to make courseware presentation adaptable and more interactive. The system provides a multimedia interactive learning environment with easy-to-search and highly reusable learning objects.