peroni” instead of a recipe.
This hybrid of improved language
analysis, command languages making use of structured knowledge
bases, and interaction may well lead
to more intelligent interfaces and
expanded dialogue-like interaction,
as discussed earlier regarding the
Siri system. The IBM Watson project, which famously beat the top two
human champions in the television
game show “Jeopardy!” in February
2011, also employs massive language
analysis, knowledge-base analysis,
and speech recognition, likely setting
the stage for future highly advanced
natural-language question-answering
systems.
9
importance of Video content
Increasing evidence reflects a preference among ordinary information
consumers for video and audio content over textual content. Movies have
generally replaced books as cultural
touchstones in the U.S. A report by Pew
Research included a quote from a media executive saying email messages
containing podcasts were opened 20%
more often than standard marketing
email messages.
32
Also according to Pew, 52% of U.S.
adults have watched online videos,
with seven in 10 Internet users saying
they have.
31 According to Hitwise, the
YouTube video-sharing site was the
fifth most visited Web site in the U.S
in 2010,
14 and comScore reported in
March 2010 that You Tube users generated a greater search volume than Yahoo or Bing.
6
Video communication is taking
some of the trappings of textual communication; for instance, YouTube
supports the notion of a video “reply.”
And when video questions were accepted for the 2008 U.S. presidential
primary debates, most citizen-sub-mitted videos selected by the moderators consisted of people pointing the
camera at themselves and speaking
their question aloud, with a backdrop
consisting of a wall in a room in their
homes. There were few visual flour-ishes, and the video did not add much
beyond what a questioner in a live audience would have conveyed. Video is
fast becoming a conventional way to
communicate.
Mobile devices make it easier to cap-
still lacking are
truly useful tools for
cogently skimming
video content,
summarizing it in
a meaningful way,
and, more to the
point, searching
within and across it,
though research is
active in this area.
ture video, increasing the likelihood of
video becoming an even more important form of communication. According to Pew, almost 20% of American
adults had, as of 2010, tried video calling on phones or computers, and 23%
of U.S. Internet users had used a video
chat service (such as Skype). Further,
14% of U.S. Internet users had created
and uploaded videos.
31
No doubt, the technology to support full video use lags significantly
behind that of text, but we can surmise that some handy inventions are
not far off. Better tools for quick edits
are also likely soon, as they have been
for image processing; a popular mobile iPhone app called Instagram allows users to snap a photo with their
phones, quickly apply filters to produce an “artsy” look, then immediately share the image with a social network. Instagram claimed it attracted
one million users within two months
of its introduction, October 2010, and
seven million by August 2011.
Still lacking are truly useful tools
for cogently skimming video content,
summarizing it in a meaningful way,
and, more to the point, searching
within and across it, though research
is active in this area.
27 YouTube provides tools that automatically provide
textual closed captioning over spoken language and can also be used
for search; so has a startup company
called SpeakerText. Faceted navigation37 has become the method of
choice for browsing image collections;
perhaps the same will be possible
with video collections. However, serious breakthroughs are still needed for
both image and video content analysis
before such search performance rivals
that of text search.
Time constraints imposed by YouTube have resulted in a culture of
short videos characterized by focused
topics, making title search more effective than it would be if most online
videos were longer in duration; for
instance, the excellent educational
video courses of the Khan Academy
( http://www.khanacademy.org) are
each shorter than 10 minutes, with
subject matter easily browsable by
title (as in “Circles: Diameter, Radius,
and Circumference” and “
Distributive Property of Matrix Products”).
But just as search over collections of
