Staying Together: People, Media, and Synchronous Connected Systems
The things we do together spawn conversations; gathering with our friends and families to watch programs, concerts, and events, we share the experience through backchannel conversations, social asides and mutual displays of agreement and disagreement. How do these sharing of experiences in turn shape how we understand the actual event? This talk presents real-world applications designed to facilitate synchronous conversations while sharing media. First, I will examine how people use status updates, such as on Twitter, while they watch live events on TV. By accounting for temporal and conversational features, one can use tweets to segment a long political debate into logical questions. I will also describe new methods for retrieving conversationally salient, not document salient, terms. Second, I will present Zync, a system for synchronized video sharing over instant messaging; in effect this is conversational video on demand. From observing how a YouTube video is shared within a conversation, we develop methods for media segmentation and summarization. Finally, I will show how using implicit conversational data can outperform explicit annotations in automated classification tasks for online videos. Throughout the talk, I will discuss how these examples extend online infrastructures to build highly connected experiences.
David Ayman Shamma is a research scientist in the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research. He researches synchronous environments and connected experiences both online and in-the-world. Focusing on creative expression and sharing frameworks, he designs and prototypes systems for multimedia-mediated communication, as well as, develops targeted methods and metrics for understanding how people communicate online in small environments and at web scale. Ayman is the creator and lead investigator on the Yahoo! Zync project.
Using models of creativity and sharing from his research, Ayman creates media art installations that have been reviewed by The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Chicago Magazine and exhibited internationally, including Second City Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum, SIGGRAPH ETECH, Chicago Improv Festival, and Wired NextFest/NextMusic.
Ayman holds a B.S./M.S. from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition at The University of West Florida and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University. Before Yahoo!, he was an instructor at the Medill School of Journalism; he has also taught courses in Computer Science and Studio Art departments. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he was a visiting research scientist for the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA Ames Research Center.
