The podcasting landscape is undergoing a significant transformation due to the integration of generative AI, which is reconfiguring creators’ roles and how podcasts are experienced by listeners. In this paper, we present findings from a corpus of scientific articles identified in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore, which examine the intersection of podcasting and AI. Based on our analysis, two pillars emerge for AI integration into podcasting: (i) AI as a productivity tool, supporting human creators through smart editing and analytics, and (ii) AI as an autonomous content generator, enabled by agent-based processing, zero-shot audio generation, and high personalization in podcast delivery and consumption. These two pillars provide an account of how scientific contributions position AI within the podcasting landscape, and surface a transition from “podcasting then,” as predominantly handcrafted and human-produced media, toward “podcasting now,” as an increasingly AI-driven and personalizable audio experience.

Abstract Recognizing emotions from physiological signals has proven to be important in various scenarios. To assist in developing emotion recognizers, software frameworks and toolboxes have emerged, offering ready-to-use components. However,these have limitations regarding the type of physiological signals supported, the recognition steps covered, or the acquisition of multiple physiological signals. This paper presents metaFERA, an architectural meta-framework for creating software frameworks for end-to-end emotion recognition from physiological signals. The modularity and flexibility of the meta-framework and the resulting frameworks allow the fast prototyping of emotion recognition systems and experiments to test and validate new algorithms. To that end, metaFERA offers: (i) a set of pre-configured blocks to which we can add behavior to create framework components; (ii) an easy way to add behavior to the pre-configured blocks; (iii) a channel-based communication mechanism that transparently and efficiently supports the exchange of information between components; (iv) a simple and easy way to use and link components from a resulting framework to create applications. Additionally, we provide a set of Web services, already configured, to make the resulting recognition systems available as a service. To validate metaFERA, we created a framework for Electrodermal Activity, an emotion recognizer to identify high/low arousal using the aforementioned framework, and a layer to offer the recognizer as a service.

Music and movies are powerful art forms that elicit deep feelings and emotions and help us reflect on our and other people's lives on subjects such as: dreams, mental states, routines, society and culture. The evolution of technology has been easing access to these forms of entertainment and education for everyone, everywhere in the world. Given the easy and frequent interaction with a huge amount of movies and music daily, and the impact of these in our emotions, it becomes more and more relevant to address and think of ways to augment people's emotional perception and awareness of multimedia content in and through movies and music. In this paper, we present the motivation and describe the background for these challenges, and propose an approach for the design, development and expansion of interactive features that allow users to visualize and access emotions felt while engaging with movies and music. A special focus is put on the content in these forms of entertainment that have in some way meant something or can be associated with a significant memory, providing insights and helping to manage and regulate emotions, allowing to revisit content with an increased awareness or even recommend new content, taking into account users’ personality.

Movies are one of the most important and impactful forms of entertainment and a powerful vehicle for culture and education, due to the cognitive and emotional impact on the viewers, and technology has been making them more accessible in pervasive services and devices. As such, the huge amount of movies we can access, and the important role emotions play in our lives, make more pertinent the ability to access, visualize and search movies based on their emotional impact. In this paper, we characterize the challenges and approaches in this scenario, and present interactive means to visualize and search movies based on their dominant and actual emotional impact along the movie, with different models and modalities. In particular through emotional highlights and trajectories, the user's emotional state, or a music being played. Music contributes greatly to the emotional impact of movies and it can also be a trigger to get us into one of them in serendipitous moments.

We examine the concept and characteristics of “Augmented Reality Television” (ARTV) using a four-step investigation method consisting of (1) an analysis of commonly-accepted perspectives on Augmented and Mixed Reality systems, (2) a literature survey of previous work on ARTV, (3) relevant connections with other areas of scientific investigation from TVX/IMX, such as Ambient Media, Interactive TV, and 3-D TV, and (4) by proposing a conceptual framework for ARTV called the “Augmented Reality Television Continuum.” Our work comes at a moment when the excitement and hype about the potential of AR for home entertainment has overlooked rigorous analysis and clear-cut examinations of the concepts involved, which should be the hallmark of any exact science. With this work, our goal is to draw the community’s attention toward fundamentals and first principles of ARTV and to tease out its salient qualities on solid foundations.

AltMM 2018 is the 3rd edition of the International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities at ACM Multimedia. Our ambition remains to engage researchers and practitioners in discussions on how we can successfully create meaningful multimedia 'alternate realities' experiences. One of the main strengths of this workshop is that we combine different perspectives to explore how the synergy between multimedia technologies can foster and shape the creation of alternate realities and make their access an enriching and valuable experience.

AltMM 2017, the 2nd International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities at ACM Multimedia aims to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners concerned with multimedia that enables experiencing "alternate realities". Such experiences may allow us to access other worlds, to live other people's stories, to communicate with or experience alternate realities. Different spaces, times or situations can be entered thanks to multimedia contents and systems, which coexist with our current reality, and are sometimes so vivid and engaging that we feel we are living in them. Advances in multimedia are making it possible to create immersive experiences that may involve the user in a different or augmented world, as an alternate reality.

Multimedia experiences allow us to access other worlds, to live other people's stories, to communicate with or experience alternate realities. Different spaces, times or situations can be entered thanks to multimedia contents and systems, which coexist with our current reality, and are sometimes so vivid and engaging that we feel we are living in them. Advances in multimedia are making it possible to create immersive experiences that may involve the user in a different or augmented world, as an alternate reality. AltMM 2016, the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities at ACM Multimedia, aims at exploring how the synergy between multimedia technologies and effects can foster the creation of alternate realities and make their access an enriching, valuable and real experience. The workshop program will contain a combination of oral and invited keynote presentations, and poster, demo and discussion sessions, altogether enabling interactive scientific sharing and discussion between practitioners and researchers.

This ACM International Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences is in its 3rd edition. Since 2013 in Barcelona, it has been a meeting point of researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the area of immersive media environments, applications and experiences. After the successful first edition at ACM Multimedia 2013 and the consolidation of the theme and the team at Orlando in 2014, ImmersiveMe'15 aims at bringing to the stage new ideas and developments that keep this topic as appealing as in the previous editions. ImmersiveMe'15 will now take place in Brisbane and, again, it will be a platform to present interesting and out-of-the-box new work that contributes to make the world more interactive, immersive and engaging.

The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences (ImmersiveMe'14) at ACM Multimedia aims at bringing together researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the emergent area of immersive media experiences, through the exploration of different scenarios, applications, and neighboring fields. This second edition, after a successful first edition at ACM Multimedia 2013, provides a platform for presenting on-going work, to consolidate and tie different research communities working on this engaging area, as well as to point directions for the future.

Immersive media has the potential for strong impact on users' emotions and their sense of presence and engagement. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the area of emergent immersive media. The workshop will provide a platform for a deep discussion on ongoing work, recent achievements and experiences. It is expected not only to consolidate experiences but also to identify aspects where strong collaboration among all the interested players is needed and to point towards future working directions.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how new video based technologies, such as hypervideo, can provide authentic contexts to support meaningful learning. We approach the issue from both cognitive-psychological and technological perspectives. First, we discuss how cognitive and socio-cognitive processes generally involved in learning and collaborative knowledge building relate to the specific characteristics of hyperlinked videos, informing their design. Then, with regard to technology, we introduce two concepts, which provide tools for crafting and interacting with non-linear knowledge structures based on dynamic video information. Case studies and first research findings are presented and prospects for future research are outlined.

Considerable effort has been devoted at# # # to increase and broaden our speech and text data resources. Digital Talking Books (DTB), comprising both speech and text data are, as such, an invaluable asset as multimedia resources. Furthermore, those DTB have been under a speech-to-text alignment procedure, either word or phone-based, to increase their potential in research activities. This paper thus describes the motivation and the method that we used to accomplish this goal for aligning DTBs. This alignment allows specific access interfaces for persons with special needs, and also tools for easily detecting and indexing units (words, sentences, topics) in the spoken books. The alignment tool was implemented in a Weighted Finite State Transducer framework, which provides an efficient way to combine different types of knowledge sources, such as alternative pronunciation rules. With this tool, a 2-hour long spoken book was aligned in a single step in much less than real time. Last but not least, new browsing interfaces, allowing improved access and data retrieval to and from the DTBs, are described in this paper.

This paper describes the principles and a model for adding content and structure to existing video materials, based on annotation.Annotations in printed media promote active reading and, in a similar way, annotations in video promote active watching.The principles and model are illustrated by a prototype system for video annotation and browsing, named AntV (Annotations in Video).