In this paper we describe a multiscreen-oriented approach for segmenting web pages. The segmentation is an automatic and hybrid visual and structural method. It aims at creating coherent blocks which have different functions determined by the multiscreen environment. It is also characterized by a dynamic adaptation to the page content.Experiments are conducted on a set of existing applications that contain multimedia elements, in particular YouTube and video player pages. Results are compared with one segmentation method from the literature and with a ground truth manually created. With a 81% precision, the MSoS is a promising method that is capable of producing good segmentation results.

Creating web applications for the multiscreen environment is still a challenge. One approach is to transform existing single-screen applications but this has not been done yet automatically or generically. This paper proposes a refactoring system. It consists of a generic and extensible mapping phase that automatically analyzes the application content based on a semantic or a visual criterion determined by the author or the user, and prepares it for the splitting process. The system then splits the application and as a result delivers two instrumented applications ready for distribution across devices. During runtime, the system uses a mirroring phase to maintain the functionality of the distributed application and to support a dynamic splitting process. Developed as a Chrome extension, our approach is validated on several web applications, including a YouTube page and a video application from Mozilla.

Multimedia applications are challenging software and require collaboration of very different components such as networking, rendering, or scripting to provide a nice user experience. GPAC is an open source multimedia framework that implements a vast number of components and helps experimenting with different types of multimedia applications. It provides a multimedia packager, some servers and a player for dynamic and interactive multimedia content. In this paper, we present the recent additions to the project which allow experimenting with new applications such as dynamic home networking or rich broadcasting of interactive content on the latest devices, including with 3D displays. Such experiments can be useful in research work and, as illustrated, in academic environment for educational purposes.

Widgets are small and focused multimedia applications that can be found on desktop computers, mobile devices or even TV sets. Widgets rely on structured documents to describe their spatial, temporal and interactive behavior but also to communicate with remote data sources. However, these sources have to be known at authoring time and the communication process relies heavily on scripting. In this paper, we describe a mechanism enabling the communication between widgets and their dynamic environment (other widgets, remote data sources). The proposed declarative mechanism is compatible with existing Widgets technologies, usable with script-based widgets as well as with fully declarative widgets. A description of an implementation is also provided.

In this paper, we present our work on context aware semantic adaptation of multimedia structured documents. We propose semantic annotation of multimedia scenes, expressing semantic information on each media object, as well as on the dependencies between all the media objects of the scene. We use these annotations in order to perform a semantic adaptation on multimedia presentations. We use our proposed description tools under the framework of MPEG-21, and we show that, in order to preserve the consistency and meaningfulness of the adapted multimedia scene, the adaptation process needs the semantic information of the presentation.

Our work focuses on the encoding of two-dimensional (2-D) graphics animated cartoons with MPEG-4. This stems from a need to stop encoding cartoons as videos and to start using methods more adapted to animated 2-D vector graphics sequences. We expected this could be an efficient coding with good versatility for various types of terminals. First, we present some technical specification for such cartoons. Next, we give an overview of MPEG-4 BIFS encoding methods. Then, we analyze how to optimize the use of these methods; some of our proposals could be useful for 2-D graphics applications other than animated cartoon. Last, we show some results with significantly better encoding efficiency over simple BIFS encoding.

Bringing much new functionality, MPEG-4 is expected to be the future standard for multimedia applications. However, these numerous capabilities imply a complex authoring process, requiring many different competencies from audio/visual/BIFS encoding to the different delivery scenarios: local access on CD/DVD-ROM, Internet or broadcast. From multimedia history, we can see that however powerful the technologies underlying multimedia computing, it is the authoring suite(s) that determines the success of these systems. From this assumption, our solution for an MPEG-4 authoring system has focused mainly on two aspects: provide a powerful interface for an MPEG-4 author and define an open and modular architecture able to progress with MPEG-4 versions and easily extensible with better and higher-level authoring features.

Preform stick is a symbolic design method for CMOS VLSI cells. It is an alternative to hand-crafted mask design allowing good density and electrical performance while designing process independent cells. Its principle lies between the gate-matrix layout and virtual grid sticks. The authors introduce the notion of a process independent stick syntax and present two compilers that enable the Preform tool to be independent of both process and design strategy. Preform has been used for the design of three chips with up to 300000 transistors.>

The Stickizer, a tool for conversion from layout to symbolic, is presented. Thinning, a method borrowed from mathematical morphology is used to achieve Stickizing of polygons. Stickizer's main features are applicability to Manhattan-geometry and 45 degrees -geometry layouts, extraction of transistors of any shape, strict symbolic/layout equivalence for Manhattan-geometry cells (reversibility of the translation), adaptation of 45 degrees -geometry cells to Manhattan compactors, independence from the technology, hierarchy handling with minimal user intervention, adaptability to a wide range of layout formats and design conventions, and reasonable execution time. It has been used on over 300 cells with sizes up to 6000 transistors and 2 Mbit.>