Media Impact: Games in the Classroom: Using Games as a Motivator for Studying Computing: Part 1

Editor's NoteIt's no secret that undergraduate computer science enrollment, which has suffered through one of its periodic downturns, seems to have bottomed out but is now on an upswing. This cyclic behavior has been occurring for many years now, producing many exciting ideas concerning how to revamp introductory computer science courses to make them more exciting and relevant, and to show beginning students that computer science entails more than just programming. Georgia Tech, one of the active participants in this revamp, has developed the concept of threads (a means to connect chunks of related knowledge across different courses) and is devising techniques to enrich beginning courses using minirobots and multimedia. The present article, written by Andrew Phelps and his group at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes a parallel effort to use gaming as a way to improve learning and to demonstrate to students that computer science is indeed exciting and cool.—William I. Grosky     

Media Impact: Games in the Classroom: Using Games as a Motivator for the Study of Computing: Part 2

It's no secret that undergraduate computer science enrollment, which has suffered through one of its periodic downturns, seems to have bottomed out but is now on an upswing. This cyclic behavior has been occurring for many years now, producing many exciting ideas concerning how to revamp introductory computer science courses to make them more exciting and relevant, and to show beginning students that computer science entails more than just programming. Georgia Tech, one of the active participants in this revamp, has developed the concept of threads (a means to connect chunks of related knowledge across different courses) and is devising techniques to enrich beginning courses using minirobots and multimedia. The present article, the second of two parts, written by Andrew Phelps and his group at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes a parallel effort to use gaming as a way to improve learning and to demonstrate to students that computer science is indeed exciting and cool.     

A model-driven approach to content repurposing

The multimedia metamodel defines platform-independent multimedia concepts, opening the way for novel approaches to designing content repurposing solutions. Designers can use the metamodel to create content and add metadata to existing content, simplifying content analysis and repurposing. This model-driven approach and proposed design solutions are useful not only for many multimedia designers and researchers, where the model-driven tools can help them create better multimedia interfaces, but also for lecturers and students of multimedia courses. In the latter case, the unified multimedia metamodel offers context for sometimes subtle relationships between multimedia concepts. The metamodel can also facilitate the collaborative creation of broader knowledge about multimedia phenomena. In our future work, we plan to extend the proposed metamodel and include domains from related fields, such as user modeling and intelligent tutoring systems that deal with high-level user models. We are also designing multimodal test environments, reusable multimedia components, and data mining tools for evaluating various aspects of multimedia and multimodal communication.     

Multimedia goes corporate

Although many people may think of consumer multimedia as more exciting or cooler than corporate multimedia, the luxury of a more powerful and up-to-date platform often means the opposite is true. Many IT managers mandate a consistent desktop configuration, where the public/consumer Web is a morass of platforms and versions. In addition, although corporate multimedia is essentially utilitarian, it still must employ good design, pleasing aesthetics, and a certain degree of excitement. Effective corporate multimedia must be compelling, cost-effective, and productive. As a result, some great content and content models have emerged that merit attention from the research community; there is much to learn from both the successes and failures. The author distinguishes between multimedia as content and multimedia for conferencing.     

Presence/absence: the 2005 ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Exhibition

Multimedia computing is a technical field with strong and pervasive connections to contemporary art. Arguably, multimedia has been an artistic medium since its beginnings; many of the most technical fields of multimedia are about delivery of creative content, and artists have always been quick to harness the expressive potential of all kinds of multimedia technology. For its second year, the ACM Multimedia Interactive Arts Program provided an explicit forum for the presentation of technical multimedia art papers that describe novel multimedia tools, applications, and artwork. The arts program, in addition to the conference track in which long and short papers are presented, included an exhibition of multimedia artwork. As in 2004, the exhibition was organized in a gallery space to run concurrently with the conference, this time around the theme of presence/absence.     

新概念多媒体快捷技术体系在计算机类课程教学中的应用——以成都体育学院为例

计算机类课程理论抽象、技能点多、难度较大,使得部分学生缺乏学习兴趣和动力。为了激发学生的学习兴趣和动力,提高计算机类课程的教学质量,将新概念多媒体快捷技术体系应用于计算机类课程教学的教学内容、教学资源、教学策略、教学评价等方面,使专业知识二度消化、三度转换后变成视觉艺术品,将知识与操作技能以形象生动的方式传达给学生,充分尊重了学生的认知规律和主观能动性,提高了课程教学质量。     

试论高校多媒体网络教学存在的问题及改进方法

多媒体网络教学在高等院校中是基本普及的教学方式,采用此方式教学可以使优质的教学资源推广共享,致其发扬光大,它不仅能减轻教师的教学工作量,还有助于学生对所学知识的深化巩固和加强.但是,多媒体网络教学确实存在着一些容易被人忽视的问题,如课件内容陈旧,动态性较差;学生缺乏学习主动性;师生互动不畅等,对此,文章提出了加强检测与考查,强化过程监管和输通互动机制的改进意见.     

Effective adaptation of multimedia documents with modality conversion

Besides content scaling, modality conversion is an important aspect of content adaptation. In this paper, we study modality conversion of a multimedia document under the constraints of available resource and human factor (user preference). We first formulate the content adaptation process of a multimedia document as a general constrained optimization problem and then extend it to effectively support modality conversion. To represent conversion boundaries between different modalities, we propose the overlapped content value (OCV) model that relates the content value of different modalities with resources. Also, the human factor is specified in the form of modality conversion preference, and then integrated into the framework by modifying the OCV model. We apply the Viterbi algorithm of dynamic programming and its fast approximation to the optimization problem with a practical resource constraint, namely the total datasize. Experiments demonstrate that modality conversion (in combination with content scaling) brings a wider range of adaptation for QoS support. Moreover, the proposed approach is shown to be effective to apply in practice.     

Multimedia Retrieval and Delivery: Essential Metadata Challenges and Standards

Multimedia information retrieval (MIR) and delivery plays an important role in many application domains due to the increasing need to identify, filter, and manage growing amounts of data, notably multimedia information. To efficiently manage and exchange multimedia information, interoperability between coded data and metadata is required and standardization is central to achieving the necessary level of interoperability. In the context of this paper, the term retrieval refers to the process by which a user, human or machine, identifies the content it needs, and the term delivery refers to the adaptive transport and consumption of the identified content in a particular context or usage environment. Both the retrieval and delivery processes may require content and context metadata. This paper will argue that maximum quality of experience depends not only on the content itself (and thus content metadata) but also on the consumption conditions (thus context metadata). Additionally, the rights and protection conditions have become critically important in recent years, especially with the explosion of electronic music commerce and different ldquoshoppingrdquo conditions. This paper will review existing multimedia standards related to information retrieval and adaptive delivery of multimedia content, emphasizing the need for such standards, and will show how these standards can help the development, dissemination, and valorization of MIR research results. Moreover, it will also discuss limitations of the current standards and anticipate what future standardization activities are relevant and needed. Due to space limitations, the paper will mainly concentrate on MPEG standards although many other relevant standards are also reviewed and discussed.     

网页格式多媒体课件的开发与应用

作者利用计算机多媒体技术(包括动画和网页制作)开发出了一种新型的多媒体课件,并在“通信原理”课程的教学中加以应用。课件设计采用了灵活的结构设计和交互式导航策略,既方便当前的使用更利于今后的扩充和更新。在内容展示上,根据多媒体教学的特点突出展现虚拟实验室演示部分。这种网页格式的多媒体课件比基于Powerpoint的课件用户界面更为友好,互动性高。课件的使用显著地地提高了学生的学习热情,有效地改善了课堂教学效果。     

JAVA反编译技术和代码安全

JAVA语言今天在全世保获得了广泛的应用。在Internet数据库、多媒体、CGI及动态网页的制作方面随处可见JAVA程序的身影。随着编译技术的基本定型，反编译技术有了很大的发展。这使得代码变得越来越不安全，JAVA语言中这个问题尤其突出，本文对时当前主流的反编译技术进行分析介绍，进而提出一系列安全措施用以提高代码的安全性。     

Digital Boundaries: The 2004 ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Program Exhibition

At no time in history has multimedia technology had the prospect of making a stronger impact on cultures. Multimedia is everywhere: regardless of where we are we can access multimedia originating in many parts of the world as easily as we can create content to be shared with people from different cultures across the globe. The gap between the haves and the have-nots, however, is growing (the "we" above refers to a very few). Wealthier countries are using multimedia to reinforce physical boundaries(for example, requiring fingerprints and photographs at airports) and multimedia content from only a few cultures is proliferating.     

Advances In Peer-To-Peer Content Search

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computer networks have recently received tremendous attention due to their inherent scalability and flexibility, which facilitates a broad spectrum of innovative multimedia applications. Such networks rely on the power of participant nodes of the network (called peers) for communications and computation. Traditional applications of P2P multimedia include decentralized file sharing and content distribution. Yet, the value of the virtually unlimited amount of data distributed in the P2P network will be sacrificed if effective and efficient ways to locate the content are missing. This challenge has stimulated extensive research in recent years, and many new P2P content search methods have been proposed. This paper provides a timely review of influential work in the area of peer-to-peer (P2P) content search. We begin with a survey of text-based P2P search mechanisms and continue with an exposition of content-based and semantic-based approaches followed by a discussion of future directions.     

Large-scale cooperative caching and application-level multicast in multimedia content delivery networks

The Internet and multimedia technologies have greatly changed our lives. With the increasing popularity of multimedia entertainment applications over the Internet, innovative infrastructures and technologies are needed to efficiently distribute the surging amount of multimedia contents. Content delivery networks provide an intermediate layer of infrastructure that helps to deliver the contents from content providers to a large community of geographically distributed users. Cooperative caching and application-level multicast are two technologies that can be implemented in a multimedia content delivery network for delivering on-demand and live multimedia contents respectively. This article introduces the ideas and approaches of implementing cooperative caching and application-level multicast under a hierarchical architecture to achieve large-scale multimedia content delivery.     

基于4A网络平台的“EDA技术”研究型教学

研究型课程教学模式有助于培养学生的创新精神、团队精神,帮助其形成好的科研方法和科研态度。4A网络教学平台为教师开展研究型教学提供了一个基于Web的完整的教学支撑平台,教师不必掌握复杂的网站编程技巧,便可以快速便捷地完成在线网络学习系统开发,从而合理有效的利用网络和其他优质教学资源为课程教学服务,很好的弥补了研究型教学形式存在的课时量不够问题,并能大大增加学生对于所学知识理解和掌握过程的趣味性,实现学习内容多媒体化、学习方式的交互性。     

A novel monitoring architecture for media services adaptation based on network QoS to perceived QoS mapping

One of the future visions of multimedia networking is the provision of multimedia content at a variety of quality and price levels. Of the many approaches to this issue, one of the most predominant techniques is the concept of Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS), which extends the traditional engineering-based QoS concept to the perceptual satisfaction that the user receives from the reception of multimedia content. In this context, PQoS monitoring is becoming crucial to media service providers (SPs) for providing not only quantified PQoS-based services, but also service assurance based on multimedia content adaptation across heterogeneous networks. This work proposes a novel cross-layer monitoring architecture that utilizes a new Network QoS (NQoS) to PQoS mapping framework at the application level. The resulting QoS monitoring should allow the content delivery system to take sophisticated actions for real time media content adaptation, and aims to provide perceived service performance verification with respect to the QoS guarantees that have been specified in contractual agreements between providers and end-users. A subsequent performance evaluation of the proposed model conducted using a real test-bed environment demonstrates both the accuracy and feasibility of the network level measurements, the NQoS to PQoS mapping and the overall feasibility of the proposed end-to-end monitoring solution. This work is partially funded by European Commission (ENTHRONE EU project IST 507637). See . The authors would like to thank ENTHRONE EU project partners for their inputs and valuable discussions.     

试论多媒体创作工具软件的设计思想

以Ａｕｒｔｈｏｒｗａｒｅ为例从面向对象的操作环境，模块化，结构化，多媒体集成开发环境，辅助程环节等五方面阐述了多本创作工具折设计思想，最后实例加以说明。