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



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:

Collaborators