ZipfAllocation: an algorithm for static allocation of movies in a cluster of video servers

When a single video server provides a streaming service, there are many limitations. Thus, clusters of multiple video servers are widely used today to provide better service. How movies are allocated to each server in a cluster is an important and ongoing research topic because the movies are large, and there are so many of them. We have developed a movie allocation algorithm based on the observation that client accesses follow a Zipf distribution. We have developed an algorithm in which servers use their storage to their full capacities, movies are assigned to servers as evenly as possible, servers receive requests as evenly as possible, and all movies are allocated to at least one server. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Popularity-based assignment of movies to storage devices in a video-on-demand system

A video-on-demand server must satisfy a large customer base and a diverse archive of movies under changing movie popularity and daily load peaks. These requirements must be satisfied under the constraints imposed by storage device costs, capacities, I/O bandwidths, and geographic locations. In this paper we describe a partitioning of video data (movies) onto a video-on-demand storage hierarchy to achieve efficient storage and I/O bandwidth use. Our approach uses a probabilistic model of movie popularity in data distribution and replication to balance user requests with available disk I/O bandwidth. The results can be applied in the design of a general, distributed video-on-demand system.     

用PremierePro制作影片的滚动字幕

在影片或电视节目制作中,一般来说滚动字幕都是在影片或电视节目的开始和结尾处出现的,在Premiere Pro中,这样的滚动字幕可以通过设置“字幕设计”编辑窗口来实现。根据滚动的方向不同,滚动字幕分为垂直滚动字幕和水平滚动字幕。该文将通过案例讲解如何用Premiere Pro来创建影片或电视节目片头或片尾的垂直滚动字幕。     

Subjective measures of presence and discomfort in viewers of color‐separation‐based stereoscopic cinema

Abstract— The experience of various people related to a real 3‐D cinema visit has been studied, and the results will be discussed. This study has two distinct parts, which includes the comfort of the viewers and their sense of presence. Eighty‐four viewers filled out questionnaires about comfort and visual strain. Forty‐one subjects described their presence experience during the movie presentation. A majority of the people felt comfortable after the movie viewing; they experienced only mild‐eyestrain‐related symptoms. People evaluated the movie world as highly realistic, but they did not feel that they were actors in the virtual‐movie world. Most of the participants would recommend 3‐D cinema to friends because it was a very entertaining experience.     

Occupant model for human motion

A two-dimensional model of a human being has been developed for display on a computer graphic terminal. The model was designed for use with the simula program which predicts the positions of an occupant within a vehicle cabin during a crash. However, the model can also be used in the simulation of other human motions, such as walking, etc.Also presented is the design of a simple device to automatically generate movies from a terminal screen. Triggered by the bell on the terminal, one frame is taken of each position of any time-varying event, thus creating a movie depicting simulated motion.     

3TNet视频点播中内容分发策略设计与实现

在3TNet视频点播系统中,为了保障IP网中视频点播服务的QoS,在媒体服务器和内容服务器之间引入了内容分发平台,用来缓存内容服务器的一部分影片数据,因此内容分发平台中的调度策略直接关系到数据块的命中率和内容服务器的性能。论文提出了一种基于预测的新的调度策略,该策略能很好地提高热门影片的命中率。     

Leaving the third dimension: no measurable evidence for cognitive aftereffects of stereoscopic 3D movies

Stereoscopic 3D (S‐3D) is becoming an increasingly important display technology. Parallel to this, concern about the potential negative effects of exposure to S‐3D movies has been growing. Some manufacturers place disclaimers on their TVs advising people to limit the time they watch S‐3D. However, surprisingly little experimental research has been conducted estimating the genuineness of these concerns. Therefore, an experiment was designed to assess the potential impact of viewing an S‐3D movie on visual, spatial, and general attention performance. To mimic the real‐world experience of watching a movie in the living room, participants (N = 61) watched a full movie in either 2D or S‐3D. Our results do not show evidence for cognitive aftereffects of S‐3D movies. A second experiment (N = 32) that focused on possible aftereffects on visual attention also failed to find reliable effects. We therefore conclude that cognitive functioning is not altered by watching an S‐3D movie, at least not to an extent that is measurable through well‐established cognitive tasks.     

Effects of stereoscopic movies: The positions of stereoscopic objects and the viewing conditions

The present study investigates the effects of relative positions of stereoscopic objects (PSO) (‘Far’ (from viewers) vs. ‘Near’ (to viewers) vs. ‘Both’) and seat location on viewers’ psychological responses. People who watched a movie with ‘Both’ conditions reported more arousal and satisfaction compared to people who watched a movie with either the ‘Far’ or ‘Near’ condition. More importantly, interaction effects were reported such as more dizziness (a) with the ‘Near’ condition if sitting on the left or right side in the cinema and (b) with the ‘Far’ condition if sitting in the middle of the cinema. Additionally, people who wore glasses felt more eye fatigue than those who did not. Secondly, people felt less presence, sensation of depth, and arousal if they had prior experience viewing stereoscopic movies. The results indicate that viewing experience with different PSOs and/or seat locations can influence psychological response.     

Social serendipity: mobilizing social software

Many mobile devices incorporate low-power wireless connectivity protocols, such as Bluetooth, that can be used to identify an individual to other people nearby. We have developed an architecture that leverages this functionality in mobile phones - originally designed for communication at a distance - to connect people across the room. Serendipity is an application of the architecture. It combines the existing communications infrastructure with online introduction systems' functionality to facilitate interactions between physically proximate people through a centralized server. A new mobile-phone-based system uses Bluetooth hardware addresses and a database of user profiles to cue informal, face-to-face interactions between nearby users who don't know each other, but probably should.     

Threshold-Based Dynamic Replication in Large-Scale Video-on-Demand Systems

Recent advances in high speed networking technologies and video compression techniques have made Video-on-Demand (VOD) services feasible. A large-scale VOD system imposes a large demand on I/O bandwidth and storage resources, and therefore, parallel disks are typically used for providing VOD service. Although striping of movie data across a large number of disks can balance the utilization among these disks, such a striping technique can exhibit additional complexity, for instance, in data management, such as synchronization among disks during data delivery, as well as in supporting fault tolerant behavior. Therefore, it is more practical to limit the extent of data striping, for example, by arranging the disks in groups (or nodes) and then allowing intra-group (or intra-node) data striping only. With multiple striping groups, however, we may need to assign a movie to multiple nodes so as to satisfy the total demand of requests for that movie. Such an approach gives rise to several design issues, including: (1) what is the right number of copies of each movie we need so as to satisfy the demand and at the same time not waste storage capacity, (2) how to assign these movies to different nodes in the system, and (3) what are efficient approaches to altering the number of copies of each movie (and their placement) when the need for that arises. In this paper, we study an approach to dynamically reconfiguring the VOD system so as to alter the number of copies of each movie maintained on the server as the access demand for these movies fluctuates. We propose various approaches to addressing the above stated issues, which result in a VOD design that is adaptive to the changes in data access patterns. Performance evaluation is carried out to quantify the costs and the performance gains of these techniques.     

Mining movie archives for song sequences

Music and songs are integral parts of Bollywood movies. Every movie of two to three hours, contains three to ten songs, each song is 3–10 min long. Music lovers like to listen music and songs of a movie, however it is time consuming and error prone to search manually all the songs in a movie. Moreover, the task becomes much harder when songs are to be extracted from a huge archived movies’ database containing hundreds of movies. This paper presents an approach to automatically extract music and songs from archived musical movies. We used song grammar to construct Markov Chain Model that differentiates song scenes from dialogue and action scenes in a movie. We tested our system on Bollywood, Hollywood, Pakistani, Bengali, and Tamil movies. A total of 20 movies from different industries were selected for the experiments. On Bollywood movies, we achieved 97.22% recall in song extraction, whereas the recall on Hollywood musical movies is 80%. The test result on Pakistani, Tamil and Bengali movies is 87.09%.     

基于WebServer 的移动应用结构分析与系统建设

移动学习通过便携式移动计算设备能够在任何时间、任何地点进行学习,在移动应用系统的建设过程中,利用SSH整合框架进行Web Server程序的开发,把表现逻辑和控制逻辑分离开来,分别由表现层、业务逻辑层来处理,降低了系统总架构的耦合性,使软件结构清晰,可扩展性和可维护性更高。     

Real-Time Communication Scheduling in a Multicomputer Video Server

In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling communication over the interconnection network of a distributed-memory multicomputer video server. We show that this problem is closely related to the problem of data distribution and movie scheduling in such a system. A solution is proposed in this paper that addresses these three issues at once. The movies are distributed evenly over all nodes of the multicomputer. The proposed solution minimizes the contention for links over the switch. The proposed solution makes movie scheduling very simple—if the first block of the movie is scheduled, the rest of the movie is automatically scheduled. Moreover, if the first block of the movie stream is scheduled without network contention, the proposed solution guarantees that there will be no network contention during the entire duration of playback of that movie. We show that the proposed approach to communication scheduling is optimal in utilizing the network resources. Extensive simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Assignment of Movies to Heterogeneous Video Servers

A video-on-demand (VOD) system provides an electronic video rental service to geographically distributed users. It can adopt multiple servers to serve many users concurrently. As a VOD system is being used and evolved, its servers probably become heterogeneous. For example, if a new server is added to expand the VOD system or replace a failed server, the new server may be faster with a larger storage size. This paper investigates how to assign movies to heterogeneous servers in order to minimize the blocking probability. It is proven that this assignment problem is NP-hard, and a lower bound is derived on the minimal blocking probability. The following approach is proposed for assignment: 1) problem relaxation—a relaxed assignment problem is formulated and solved to determine the ideal load that each server should handle, and 2) goal programming—an assignment and reassignment are performed iteratively while fulfilling all the constraints so that the load handled by each server is close to the ideal one. This approach is generic and applicable to many assignment problems. This approach is adopted to design two specific algorithms for movie assignment with and without replication. It is demonstrated that these algorithms can find optimal or close-to-optimal assignments.     

普适计算环境中移动电话一种新的应用模式

随着计算技术和通信技术的发展,各种兼有通信和计算能力的手持信息设备将变得无处不在。它将为人们提供各种方便的服务,但它们的资源和能力又严重受限。因此如何通过利用环境拥有的资源来增强用户手持设备的能力是一个尚待解决的热点问题。该文针对移动电话,讨论了它在普适计算环境下一种新的应用模式,然后论述了实现该应用模式需要解决的一些关键技术,并描述了支持该应用模式的体系结构。文章最后给出了该应用模式的一个实例———利用移动电话个性化使用公共显示设备。     

Analysis of Collaborative Brain Computer Interface (BCI) Based Personalized GUI for Differently Abled

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) use Electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded from the brain scalp, which enable a communication between the human and the outside world. The present study helps the patients who are people locked-in to manage their needs such as accessing of web url’s, sending/receiving sms to/from mobile device, personalized music player, personalized movie player, wheelchair control and home appliances control. In the proposed system, the user needs are designed as a button in the form of a matrix, in which the main panel of rows and columns button is flashed in 3 sec intervals. Subjects were asked to choose the desired task/need from the main panel of the GUI by blinking their eyes twice. The double eye blink signals extracted by using the bio-sensor of NeuroSky’s mind wave device with portable EEG sensors are used as the command signal. Each task is designed and implemented using a Matlab tool. The developed Personalized GUI application collaborated with the EEG device accesses the user’s need. Once the system identifies the desired option through the input control signal, the appropriate algorithm is called and performed. The users can also locate the next required option within the matrix. Therefore, users can easily navigate through the GUI Model. A list of personalized music, movies, books and web URL’s are preloaded in the database. Hence, it could be suitable to assist disabled people to improve their quality of life. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is also carried out to find out the significant signals influencing a user’s need in order to improve the motion characteristics of the brain computer interface based system.     

基于Spark和微服务架构的电影推荐系统设计与实现

推荐系统广泛应用于人们生活的多个领域,日常生活中常见的有电商、电影、音乐和新闻推荐等。推荐系统根据用户的历史偏好主动推送相关的信息,节约了用户的时间,极大地提升了用户的体验。随着大数据技术的发展成熟,数据处理的速度变得更快。该文选取MovieLens电影数据集,并基于大数据分布式处理框架Spark和交替最小二乘法ALS等算法搭建数据处理平台,然后再结合Spring Boot和Spring Cloud等搭建电影后台服务,实现一个基于微服务架构的电影推荐系统。     

Ordinal classification/regression for analyzing the influence of superstars on spectators in cinema marketing

This paper studies the influence of superstars on spectators in cinema marketing. Casting superstars is a common risk-mitigation strategy in the cinema industry. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the presence of superstars is not always a guarantee of success and hence, a deeper study is required to analyze the potential audience of a movie. In this sense, knowledge, attitudes and emotions of spectators towards stars are analyzed as potential factors of influencing the intention of seeing a movie with stars in its cast. This analysis is performed through machine learning techniques. In particular, the problem is stated as an ordinal classification/regression task rather than a traditional classification or regression task, since the intention of watching a movie is measured in a graded scale, hence, its values exhibit an order. Several methods are discussed for this purpose, but Support Vector Ordinal Regression shows its superiority over other ordinal classification/regression techniques. Moreover, exhaustive experiments carried out confirm that the formulation of the problem as an ordinal classification/regression is a success, since powerful traditional classifiers and regressors show worse performance. The study also confirms that talent and popularity expressed by means of knowledge, attitude and emotions satisfactorily explain superstar persuasion. Finally, the impact of these three components is also checked.