EventWeb
Vision
EventWeb is application, infrastructure and way of life all wrapped
up into one of the most exciting computer science visions currently
available. EventWeb begins by capturing all multimedia data that is
capturable in a connected environment. Once captured, EventWeb sets to
work distilling the poetry out of the events captured in the media.
This
poetry can then be used to rehydrate the flat, course multimedia data
into visual representations capturing what really happened.
As seen in Figure 1, EventWeb captures multimedia and does simple
media feature extraction to detect simple data features. The simple
data features are then aggregated into more complex events that can
be aggregated into larger subsuming events. These events might be as
simple as a person entering a room or a person using a whiteboard, but
by labelling actions of the people in the space, a more complete view
of
what is happening in the space can be discerned. These events, when
linked to the underlying media, can be used to better represent the
media to the user.
Figure 1
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EventWeb Applications
While EventWeb itself is a fairly complete application set, there are
specifically interesting browser front-ends that might be used to
interact with EventWeb event database and the related media
database. Some of those applications are listen below.
Automatic Scrapbook
If the system can already see what is happening in and around your
house, you might want to authorize it to archive all exciting events
that happen in your house automatically. The family camera will never
again be dug out for birthdays and anniversaries, the system will
automatically create scrapbooks full of memories.
Digital Surveillance
In our world today, we are more concerned than ever about our safety.
EventWeb might be used to look out for suspicious activity wherever it
might be occurring or it might be used in a disaster recovery
situation to relate the last known position of everyone in the vicinity
of a terrorist bombing.
Meeting Replay
During the moments of intense collaboration in a research meeting, it
is sometimes difficult to write down every thought coming across the
plate. EventWeb might be used to distill an hour long meeting into a
greatest hits summary.
Television Watching
EventWeb might also prepare a summary of sporting events based on user
preferences. Instead of watching three hours of sport or the thirty
minute SportsCenter (r) recap, the system might provide each user with
a
customized replay of every homerun, buzzer-beater and touchdown in
games
featuring teams the user is interested in.
Research Efforts
We are currently leveraging our existing
MediaBroker infrastructure in building EventWeb. We are also
exploring the creation of a purely distributed MediaBroker capable of
archiving all the media EventWeb sees. To support
application-level event queries, we are working on a novel continuous
query framework that interoperates with a distributed MediaBroker
backend and browser frontends.
Publications
We have presented our work on an architecture for EventWeb at FTDCS
2004:
- M. Modahl, I. Bagrak, M. Wolenetz, R. Jain and U. Ramachandran, An Architecture for EventWeb, In
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Future Trends of
Distributed Computer Systems, Suzhou, China, May 2004.
Collaborators
- Martin Modahl
(mmodahl at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Ilya Bagrak (reason at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Matthew Wolenetz
(wolenetz at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Ramesh Jain (jain
at ece dot gatech dot edu)
- Umakishore
Ramachandran (rama at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Phillip Hutto (pwh at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Bikash Agarwalla (bikash at cc dot gatech dot edu)
- Bin Liu (bliu at ece dot gatech dot edu)
- Derik Pack (gtg009k at mail dot gatech dot edu)
- Rahul Singh (rsingh at ece dot gatech dot edu)
- Sean Brennan (sean at gatech dot edu)
- Zachary Crowell (ztc at cc dot gatech dot edu)