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Open House - Call for Interns

Update 1/31/07: Call For Interns posted.

We are hiring interns for Spring and Summer of 2007. To kick it off, we are opening our doors and inviting you (and hopefully you are an aspiring research intern) to come on down and check out our digs in Berkeley. We’ll be demo-ing our latest research prototypes, presenting our research vision, talking to you about projects and finding out a bit about you as well. Our current interns will be on-hand to give you the real dirt about how cool it is to work here. Yeah, really. And of course, what open house is complete without a prize and free stuff? An iPod Nano will be raffled away, where your resume is your raffle ticket. Swag, refreshments and drinks will be served. See the upcoming.org event details for more info. If you can’t make it, then check out the Call for Interns page. Hope to see you there!

2007

• Yiming Liu, David A. Shamma, Peter Shafton, Jeannie Yang. Zync: the design of synchronized video sharing. (DUX 2007), November 2007, Chicago, USA.
• David A. Shamma, Ryan Shaw, Peter Shafton, Yiming Liu. Watch what I watch: Using Community Activity To Understand Content. In the workshop Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR): Special Session on Semantic Indexing of Consumer and Web Videos at the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia, (ACM MM 07), September 2007, Augsburg, Germany.
• Lyndon Kennedy, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, Tye Rattenbury. How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections. In proceedings, Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia, (ACM MM 07), September 2007, Augsburg, Germany.
• (short) Amy Hwang, Shane Ahern, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair and Jeannie Yang. Zurfer: Mobile Multimedia Access in Spatial, Social and Topical Context. In proceedings, Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia, (ACM MM 07), September 2007, Augsburg, Germany.
• Tye Rattenbury, Nathan Good, Mor Naaman. Towards Automatic Extraction of Event and Place Semantics from Flickr Tags. In proceedings, Thirtieth International ACM SIGIR Conference, (SIGIR 07), July 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• Shane Ahern, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair, Jeannie Yang. World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections. In proceedings, Seventh ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, (JCDL 07), June 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Winner, Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award.
• Workshop Course: David A. Shamma and Ryan Shaw 2007. Supporting creative acts beyond dissemination (a.k.a Pulling Back the Shroud: Modeling Creativity). In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition (Washington, DC, USA, June 13 - 15, 2007). C&C ‘07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 276-277. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1254960.1255012
• (poster) Tye Rattenbury, Nathan Good, Mor Naaman. Towards Extracting Flickr Tag Semantics. In The Sixteenth International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), May 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada.
• (poster) Shane Ahern, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair. Summarization of Online Image Collections via Implicit Feedback. In The Sixteenth International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), May 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada.
• Morgan Ames and Mor Naaman. Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI 2007), San Jose, CA, USA, 2007.
• Shane Ahern, Dean Eckles, Nathan Good, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair. Over-Exposed? Privacy Patterns and Considerations in Online and Mobile Photo Sharing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI 2007), San Jose, CA, USA, 2007.
• Shane Ahern, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair, Jeannie Hui-I Yang. ZoneTag: Rich, Community-supported Context-Aware Media Capture and Annotation. In the Mobile Spatial Interaction workshop (MSI) at the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI 2007), San Jose, CA, USA, 2007.

Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps

Can we automatically extract information from Flickr geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? The answer is: you bet.

Introducing: World Explorer. While the amazing PhotoSynth (from Microsoft!) allows you to explore a specific landmark in depth, World Explorer opens a window to explore the entire world through the eyes of the users of Flickr.

We use the public geotagged photos contributed to the world by the lively and active Flickr community, and the tags associated with these images, to help you explore the world like never before. Our system automatically extracts the tags that are relevant and representative for each map region or zoom level — and connects these tags to the photos that represent that area.

Ok, enough with this high-level blah blah. Start exploring! Find out what’s important in Paris. Check for what you could see if you go north of Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Discover whether there is anything interesting on the west coast of England. Decide whether you should go for vacation in Maui or Kauai. Make serendipity lead your way around your own home town (Yoda in San Francisco?). Or simply explore Africa. If you discover something interesting, don’t forget to let us know right here.

To add to the fun, we also introduce Night Explorer and Trip Explorer. Night Explorer visualizes Flickr night photos in the same way, giving you a view of how Flickr users see the world after dark. Trip Explorer, on the other hand, is not based on Flickr at all - but rather, on the contribution of Yahoo! Travel’s Trip Planner users. What are the interesting Trip Planner items in Vermont? What do people visit (ahem, plan to visit) when they go to Austin, Texas? What are the non-obvious locations to visit in Los Angeles? It may be interesting to compare the three different views (Night, Trip and World Explorer) for the same map area.

Still with me? Not exploring yet? Well, good news: you can embed a version of TagMaps / World Explorer on your blog, web page, or anywhere else. Just like we did here:

As you can see, this embedded element is set to take you to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. When you put it on your blog, you can choose whichever place you want to start with.

Still reading? You should be really be exploring by now. If you are reading this far, you must be a developer. Well, we have something for you, too.

World Explorer is using two main components. The first is TagMaps, a Flash/SWF object that visualizes tags (i.e., text terms) on a map. The second component is a data APIs - an API that provides the tags to display, including the location and size for each tag. Both of these elements are available for developers to use. Mash it up! you can use both elements together to have a version of our World Explorer on your own page. Or, you can use TagMaps with your own data source to plot tags from your own application on a map. Finally, you can use our World Explorer tag data for your own map-based application. Check here for more details.

One last note for the curious people out there - you can learn more about how the World Explorer data is created here, or on our TagMaps FAQs. Enjoy!

Finally, a word of thanks - to Flickr users - keep uploading all these geotagged images that help us extract such wonderful data.

Camera-phone Users in Ecuador: Report from the Field

A short winter break trip to Ecuador was a chance to casually examine mobile phone usage in a developing country — because you can get the researcher out of the lab, but, evidently, you cannot get the lab out of the researcher (warning: there is nothing “scientific” in the observations below).

Firstly, I was not suprised to discover that mobile phones abound, in every class and income level. In a country that is relatively low of infrastructure, mobile phones can prove much more feasible than regular phone lines. In those countries where the “phonebooth shops” can be easily found, I expect to see huge growth in mobile - as it means the phone line infrastructure cannot easily support the population.

It was also natural, then, to see the text is king. Given an aggressive pricing structure, most usage instances I encountered were short voice calls, and plenty of SMS messaging.

I was a bit taken by surprise, though, by the many instances of camera-phone usage. As I was in Ecuador over both Christmas and New Year’s, I had to chance to see the local celebrations in the big cities (Christmas in Cuenca and New Year’s in Quito). In both cases, the events had the locals documeting the proceedings. I would say, roughly, that I have seen as many camera-phone being used by the locals as digital cameras.

Now, what did they do with these photos after they were taken? The most popular phone was, by far, the RAZR… which made me think that they could all have been using ZoneTag, making sure their photos last forever on Flickr. Of course, we know from research that many people — even in the US, at least as of 2004 — end up just leaving their photos on their phones, unclear as to how to move the photos off the phone, how much it would cost them, and so forth.

In the meantime, I enjoyed taking (non-cameraphone) photos of the camera-phone photographers. Has anyone witnessed “the rise of the cameraphone” in other developing countries?