The questions that follow are only a sample of the questions that can be asked about multimedia.

Answering these questions requires insight and knowledge of concepts and technology.

multimedia

• Give a short description of the contents and structure of your presentation.

  Indicate how the information contained in your presentation can be made accessible (for example in search).

questions

1. digital convergence

• Sketch the developments in multimedia.

  What do you expect to be the commercial impact of multimedia in the (near) future?

• Explain what is meant by digital convergence.
• Which kinds of (digital) convergence do we have?
• Discuss the relation between the medium and the message.

• Give a brief sketch of the development of digital entertainment.
• Characterize: HDTV, SDTV, ITV.
• Discuss convergence with respect to platforms.
• Discuss convergence with respect to delivery.

questions

2. information (hyper) spaces

• (*) What factors play a role in the development of multimedia information systems? What research issues are there? When do you expect the major problems to be solved?

• Define the notion of information spaces?
• Indicate how multimedia objects may be placed (and queried for) in an information (hyper) space?
• Characterize the notion of hypermedia.

• Discuss which developments make a large scale application of multimedia information systems possible.
• Give a characterization of an object, a query and a clue in an information space.
• Describe the Dexter Hypertext Reference Model.
• Give a description of the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model.

questions

3. codecs and standards

• (*) What role do standards play in multimedia? Why are standards necessary for compression and delivery. Discuss the MPEG-4 standard and indicate how it is related to other (possible) standards.

• What is a codec?
• Give a brief overview of current multimedia standards.
• What criteria must a (multimedia) semantic web satisfy?

• What is the data rate for respectively (compressed) voice, audio and video?
• Explain how a codec functions.
• Which considerations can you mention for choosing a compression method?
• Give a brief description of: XML, MPEG-4, SMIL, RM3D.

questions

4. information retrieval

• (*) What is meant by the complementarity of authoring and retrieval? Sketch a possible scenario of (multimedia) information retrieval and indicate how this may be implemented. Discuss the issues that arise in accessing multimedia information and how content annotation may be deployed.

• How would you approach content-based description of images?
• What is the difference between a metric approach and the transformational approach to establishing similarity between images?
• What problems may occur when searching in text or document databases?

• Give a definition of: shape descriptor and property descriptor. Give an example of each.
• How would you define edit distance?
• Characterize the notions precision and recall.
• Give an example (with explanation) of a frequency table.

questions

5. content annotation

• (*) How can video information be made accessible? Discuss the requirements for supporting video queries.

• What are the ingredients of an audio data model
• What information must be stored to enable search for video content?
• What is feature extraction? Indicate how feature extraction can be deployed for arbitrary media formats.

• What are the parameters for signal-based (audio) content?
• Give an example of the representation of frame-dependent en frame-independent properties of a video fragment.
• What are the elements of a query language for searching in video libraries?
• Give an example (with explanation) of the use of VideoSQL.

questions

6. information system architecture

• (*) What are the issues in designing a (multimedia) information system architecture. Discuss the tradeoffs involved.

• What considerations would you have when designing an architecture for a multimedia information system.
• Characterize the notion of media abstraction.
• What are the issues in networked multimedia.

• Describe (the structure of) a video database, using media abstractions.
• Give a definition of the notion of a structured multimedia database.
• Give an example (with explanation) of querying a hybrid multimedia database.
• Define (and explain) the notion of virtual objects in networked multimedia.

questions

7. virtual environments

• (*) Discuss how virtual environments may be used for giving access to (multimedia) information. Give a brief characterization of virtual environments, and indicate how information (hyper) spaces may be projected in a virtual environment.

• What is meant by virtual context?
• Give an example of navigation by query, and indicate its possible advantages.
• Discuss the deployment of (intelligente) navigation agents.

• Give a brief characterization of: VRML.
• What is a viewpoint transformation?
• What kinds of navigation can you think of?
• How may intelligent avatars be realized? Give an example.

draft version 1 (16/5/2003)