This paper presents user evaluation of the FreeEye tool for intuitive browsing and summarization of large-scale photo collections. The tool was tested in three different personal photo selection scenarios: a short-time event, a vacation and a yearbook. The experiments were conducted with five participants, evaluating their satisfaction with the summarization result and the overall process. The results demonstrate good usability of the FreeEye tool and improvement when compared to the standard methods of the participants for selection from large personal photo collections.

Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that s

Social interaction is increasingly computer mediated. Part of the mediated interaction is being automated by the technology used, especially in mobile phone technology. Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

Camera phones have been viewed simplistically as digital cameras with poor picture quality while neglecting the utility of the two key functionalities of mobile phones: network connection and access to personal information. This is the first HCI paper to examine mobile photos from a systemic perspective: how assignment of phases of mobile photo lifecycle to different platforms affects social discourse around shared photos. We conducted a 6-week user trial of MobShare, a tripartite system with dedicated functions and task couplings for a mobile phone, a server, and a PC browser. We analyze how MobShare's couplings and distribution of functionalities affected the observed types of social discourse that formed around mobile photos: in-group post-event discourse, self-documents and reports, greetings and thanks. Several central design issues arising from the systemic view are discussed: heterogeneity of environments, integration and distribution of functionalities, couplings and decouplings of interaction tasks, notification mechanisms, and provision of necessary UI resources for different tasks.

Camera phones offer a new platform for digital imaging that integrates capture, programmable processing, networking, and rich user interaction capabilities. This platform can support software that leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of image capture and (re)use to infer media content. Our mobile media metadata prototype (MMM) uses a small custom client on the camera phone and its XHTML browser along with a metadata server to enable annotation at the time of image capture, leverage contextual metadata and networked metadata resources, and use iterative metadata refinement on the mobile imaging device.

The recent popularity of mobile camera phones allows for new opportunities to gather important metadata at the point of capture. This paper describes a method for generating metadata for photos using spatial, temporal, and social context. We describe a system we implemented for inferring location information for pictures taken with camera phones and its performance evaluation. We propose that leveraging contextual metadata at the point of capture can address the problems of the semantic and sensory gaps. In particular, combining and sharing spatial, temporal, and social contextual metadata from a given user and across users allows us to make inferences about media content.

This demonstration presents the Digital Content Distribution Management System (DiMaS). DiMaS proves as a concept that it is possible to make a system for multimedia producing communities to publish their work on highly popular P2P networks, and importantly, the system enables producers to insert content metadata, to manage intellectual property and usage rights, and to charge for the consumption. All this can be done without introducing another new content or metadata file format and a dedicated client application to read the format.

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a mobile one picture sharing system MobShare that enables immediate, controlled, and organized sharing of mobile pictures, and the browsing, combining, and discussion of the shared pictures. The design combines research on otogray, personal image management, mobile one camera use, mobile picture publishing, and an interview study we conducted on mobile one camera users. The system is based on a client-server architecture and uses current mobile one and web technology. The implementation describes novel solutions in immediate sharing of mobile images to an organized web album, and in providing full control over with whom the images are shared. Also, we describe new ways of promoting discussion in sharing images and enabling the combination and comparison of personal and shared pictures. The system proves that the designed solutions can be implemented with current technology and provides novel approaches to general issues in sharing digital images.

The amount of personal digital media is increasing, and managing it has become a pressing problem. Effective management of media content is not possible without content-related metadata. In this paper we describe a content metadata creation process for images taken with a mobile phone. The design goals were to automate the creation of image content metadata by leveraging automatically available contextual metadata on the mobile phone, to use similarity processing algorithms for reusing shared metadata and images on a remote server, and to interact with the mobile phone user during image capture to confirm and augment the system supplied metadata. We built a prototype system to evaluate the designed metadata creation process. The main findings were that the creation process could be implemented with current technology and it facilitated the creation of semantic metadata at the time of image capture.