Early, effective director-producer communication enables detection of resource-demanding film production requirements so that a workable production plan can be formed. Traditional communication tools are limited to articulating standard production elements as lists. Yet, production complexity can be affected by latent variables with indirect impact which remain unarticulated. An ontology-driven, interactive visualization system is proposed for exposing production complexity. The system is built upon a visual language for recording directorial choices, employed for system input. By exploiting Ontologies, the visual input is analyzed in real-time and semantic metadata are extracted representing production complexity with focus on latent variables. The metadata are transformed back into an aggregate visual form which combines with the visual input, creating useful synergies. In this way, the system creates a collaborative virtual workspace facilitating director-producer communications. A real-world deployment and an evaluation demonstrated the system's advantages over traditional tools.

The paper shows how different concepts and technologies, such as high quality multimedia content production and delivery, social media interaction, and methodologies for monitoring and analysing social network activity, can be practically combined with traditional virtual reality installations into an innovative experimental system that enhances the experience of the visitors in cultural educational centers. Apart from offering a modern, immersive, richer experience to the visitors, the proposed system involves significant benefits for the organizers as well, supplying them with valuable feedback extracted from the monitoring and analysis mechanisms. The experimental system has been successfully deployed and used in the Foundation of the Hellenic World cultural center.

In this paper we present ANSWER, an innovative approach to film direction. Here we describe a methodology to semantically model the film domain in a way which is coherent with the directorpsilas intent during film production. To achieve this, we are developing a system architecture which will provide the director with the necessary tools and services to author a scene description through intuitive gesture based graphical user interfaces, which in turn populate the underlying model with a rich set of semantic descriptions. These semantic descriptions was used to render the scene graphically through animated pre-visualizations. A director using the ANSWER methodology will be able to understand and assert certain film making decisions before film production begins.

We present a technology which enables wide-scale deployment of a unique and powerful data access and search tool. This tool makes it possible for content owners on the Internet to offer end-users the ability to search, assess, or otherwise examine their nondisclosable private data. The end-users may use arbitrary, distrusted assessment algorithms and receive the results which are produced. These results take the form of a meaningful digest, e.g., a useful statistic, a relevance assessment, etc. There exists some controllable danger of information theft which, however, is quantitatively dependent on system parameters and can be tuned accordingly. We consider a broad class of practical applications where brute force attacks exist which are easier and cheaper to implement than an attack through appropriately configured PIVOTS, making our system, effectively, very trustworthy. The actual creation of the search algorithm may be performed by the end-users themselves in specialized applications, or by third-party search-engine operators who offer their services to end-users. Sophisticated data mining technologies which are very often not directly available to content owners can thus be exploited to mine even private data collections. Users discovering interesting items in private data sets may purchase this specific data, but other desirable exploitation possibilities are also analyzed. A novel business model is presented and its potential for great impact on e-commerce is explored. Three diverse and important real-world applications are presented in conclusion.