Congratulations to my MSc student Hussein Ajam, who just had a paper accepted by ACM TVX Work-in-Progress (WiP) track. His work was inspired by a collaboration with Rajiv and Matt at the BBC R&D on prototyping a solution to 1) assist TV producers authoring immersive experience for TV programmes and 2) orchestrate multiple (IoT) user devices at home to convey the sense of immersion through synchronised media playback. Hussein’s work was also briefly supervised by Marie-Jose Montpetit, a renowned Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab, as part of ACM TVX’s Mentoring Programme. Since I am chairing the WiP track, Hussein’s submission was handled by the general chair for conflict-of-interest and fairness, and I am very pleased to see the positive result, especially in a track with an acceptance rate of just above 50% (I will write a chair’s summary of the 10 papers accepted). For Hussein, there is still a lot of work to do for his ambitious work plan and I am sure he will enjoy the conference in June.

Ajam, H., and Mu, M., A Middleware to Enable Immersive Multi-Device Online TV Experience, to appear in 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (TVX 2017) Work-in-Progress track, Hilversum, The Netherlands, 06/2017

Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed the boom of great technologies of smart devices transforming the entertainment industry, especially the traditional TV viewing experiences. In an effort to improve user engagement, many TV broadcasters are now investigating future generation content production and presentation using emerging technologies. In this paper, we introduce an ongoing work to enable immersive and interactive multi-device online TV experiences. Our project incorporates three essential developments on content authoring, device discovery, and cross-device media orchestration.