Irfan Essa’s Academic Activities

ACM Siggraph 2008 Class on Computional and Journalism

• Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 August 2008 | 1:45 pm - 5:30 pm
• Location: Room 502 A, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Fundamentally, journalism is the process of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists in the form of a news story. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news is gathered, reported, and distributed, and how stories are authored and told. New technologies for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are becoming increasingly popular. They are challenging the traditional practices of journalism and directly affecting the future of news production and consumption. Computation and journalism share a deep interest in information and the value it provides to society, and they are deeply involved in the future of storytelling in various contexts, especially current events. This class summarizes how these new technologies affect journalism, both at the core of the journalism discipline and in its practice and business. Topics include: the technologies that have empowered citizen journalism and related citizen media production and authoring; mobile and sensing technologies that allow journalism to become ubiquitous and pervasive; the changes in photo, video, and broadcast journalism; and how web, online, and science journalism are changing the basic processes of reporting. Instructors focus especially on areas of special interest to the SIGGRAPH community: photography and video, large-scale information visualization, and social networking.

Presentations will be made by:

• Irfan Essa (Georgia Institute of Technology) [website]
• Brad Stenger (WIRED NextFest)
• Maneesh Agrawala (University of California, Berkeley) [website]
• Jeffrey Heer (University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University) [website]
• Eric Ulken (LA Times) [website]
• Chloe Sladden (Current TV) [website]

This course is open to all registrant of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 and has not pre-requisite requirements. See the info on ACM SIGGRAPH Site

Audio Puzzler Alpha (ONLINE DEMO)

By Nick Diakopoulos (My PhD Student)

Audio Puzzler is a new kind of puzzle game based on unauthored content found online. The audio for the puzzles is taken from popular or interesting video clips from different genres such as news, documentary, or television. The audio puzzler is the type of game that harnesses people’s play to also provide valuable data which enriches the content played with. This is in the same vein as the ESPGame, the Listen Game, and PhotoPlay, which are all games which gather data in the process of game play. But while the data collected by these other games is useful for machine learning, the data collected with audio puzzler is immediately valuable as a transcription of the speech in the video. A similar effort (but in a much grander domain) is the Fold It project which seeks to harness playtime to solve protein folding problems. Much more detailed information about the evaluation of the technology will be forthcoming in a paper to be published at ACM Multimedia in October.

The Changing Newsroom | Project for Excellence in Journalism PEJ

An analysis of the changing world of Journalism.  Worth a read. States how the newsroom and the print media are especially impacted.

 The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done an amazing report on “The State of the News Media 2008″
with reference to American Journalism.  It is a very interesting read and very interesting with reference to our efforts on Computation and Journalism.

Award#0813831 - Symposium on Computation and Journalism

ABSTRACT:

Fundamentally, journalism is aimed at collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news information is gathered, reported and distributed. Furthermore, new avenues for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are increasingly becoming popular and challenging traditional practices of Journalism. Following the success of text search, image and video search questions are now poised to make a bigger impact to journalism and other related fields. Computation and Journalism individually share a deep routed interest in Information, and the value it provides to society. The concept of Information Quality, the measure of the value that the information provides to the user of that information, brings these two disciplines together. In computing and information sciences, information quality is used to describe the degree of excellence in communicating knowledge or intelligence and is composed of different facets such as accuracy, reliability, comprehensiveness, currency, and validity. In journalism, where the conveyance of quality information is paramount, principles such as accuracy, fairness, thoroughness, and transparency guide journalists in communicating quality information. Traditionally, journalism has also entailed an ethos of working on the side of the citizenry to provide them with quality information they need to make informed decisions in the process of their daily lives. However, the plethora of un-vetted blogs, podcasts, videos and other online media, generated by users or by corporations with subjective biases have led to significant compromise in information quality. Collaborative knowledge generation (wikipedia), and citizen journalism, are showing new ways of how information and (global) news can be shared. However, as the Web and the Internet continue to grow and as computing technologies pervade through the planet, a thorough study of the process of journalism and the deep computational aspects of such processes need to be undertaken. To this end, the PI’s research group at Georgia Institute of Technology is interested in understanding how computational advances impact the field of journalism. The long term aim is to make novel contributions by developing computational technologies to better support the goals of journalism. To launch this effort, they are organizing a Symposium on Computation + Journalism at GA Tech, in Atlanta, GA, February 22-23, 2008. The goal of this symposium is to bring together stakeholder from the all aspects of Journalism, Media, and Computation. Participants in panels, presentations and breakout groups will discuss these issues and create a roadmap towards answering these questions that bring together computation and journalism.

Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field (A Symposium on Computation and Journalism) was a huge success.

• We had over 230 registered attendees. Thanks to all participants, panelists, and speakers.
• Use our Social Network (http://cj.crowdvine.com/) to continue the conversation.
• Join the FACEBOOK group (http://git.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18427444784)
• Use the tag “CnJ” on all blog posts and photo/video posts on the web, so we can collect them
• Videos of the event are now available here.

N. Diakopoulos, K. Luther, Y. Medynskiy, I. Essa (2007) The Evolution of Authorship in a Remix Society, ACM Hypertext 2007 Conference, Manchester, UK, September 2007 Abstract

Authorship entails the constrained selection or generation of media and the organization and layout of that media in a larger structure. But authorship is more than just selection and organization; it is a complex construct incorporating concepts of originality, authority, intertextuality, and attribution. In this paper we explore these concepts and ask how they are changing in light of modes of collaborative authorship in remix culture. We present a qualitative case study of an online video remixing site, illustrating how the constraints of that environment are impacting authorial constructs. We discuss users’ self-conceptions as authors, and how values related to authorship are reflected to users through the interface and design of the site’s tools. We also present some implications for the design of online communities for collaborative media creation and remixing.

• N. Diakopoulos, K. Luther, Y. Medynskiy, I. Essa. The Evolution of Authorship in a Remix Society. In Proceedings of Hypertext and Hypermedia. Manchester, UK, September 2007[PDF]
• N. Diakopoulos, K. Luther, Y. Medynskiy, I. Essa. Remixing Authorship: Reconfiguring the Author in Online Video Remix Culture. Georgia Tech, Technical Report. GIT-IC-07-05. 2007. [PDF]

Mandatory human participation: a new authentication scheme for building secure systems (IEEEXplore#)

Xu, J. Lipton, R. Essa, I. Sung, M. Zhu, Y.
In Proceedings. The 12th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, 2003. ICCCN 2003. , 20-22 Oct. 2003, pp 547 - 552, ISSN: 1095-2055, ISBN: 0-7803-7945-4, DOI: 10.1109/ICCCN.2003.1284222

Abstract

Mandatory human participation (MHP) is a novel authentication scheme that asks the question “are you human?” (Instead of “who are you?”), and upon the correct answer to this question, can prove a principal to be a human being instead of a computer program. MHP helps solve old and new problems in computer security that existing security measures cannot address properly, including password (or PIN number) guessing attacks and application-level denial of service. A key component of this “are you human?” authentication process is a character morphing algorithm that transforms a character string into its graphical form in such a way that a human being won’t have any problem recognizing the original string, while a computer program (e.g., an optical character recognition program), will not be able to decipher it or make a correct guess with nonnegligible probability. The basic idea of the MHP scheme is to ask an agent to recognize the string before its login attempts or transaction requests can be honored. Here a protocol is needed to send a puzzle to an agent, check if the answer supplied by the agent is correct, and most importantly make sure that the agent cannot cheat in the process. A number of system and security issues that relate to the protocol need to be addressed for the protocol to be secure, efficient, robust, and user-friendly. The MHP scheme contributes to the foundation of the computer security by faithfully implementing novel security semantics, “human,” which existing cryptographic measures cannot express accurately. As many real-world security applications involve the interaction between a human and a computer, which naturally contains “human” as a part of its protocol semantics, we believe that the MHP scheme will find many new applications in the future.