Community media is all around us. News is broadcast everywhere: from websites to Facebook feeds. In many cases, the conversation about news is as important as the news event itself. News media providers are seeking ways to aid the production of content though the merger and analysis of video and social streams. This raises many questions:
• What kinds of social streams can be aligned in real time to live media?
• What video content features align to social streams (such as what’s the relationship between a stadium video of camera flash bulbs and an onset of social status messages, like Twitter.com tweets about someone’s dress)?
• How could social streams be used to find highlights and summarizations of events?
• How is this video segment important to a community? What deeper insight can the analysis of social streams add to news reportage?
application
We are seeking applications that produce insightful social media analysis of news and events, e.g. breaking new stories, political events (speeches, elections, press conferences, legislative voting), major media events (e.g. Oscars, Grammys, Pulitzer Prizes announcements, etc), etc.. These applications can be autonomous or semi-autonomous. In the latter case, the applications could require some minimal human intervention to ‘curate’ the production of new media. For a live broadcast scenario, the application could, for example, find relevant commentary from social sites aligned in real time. For a recorded broadcasts, applications can align the show to a set of time-delivered social comments and discover highlights. Given the plurality of social sources, performing video and text analysis at scale will be an issue for the live events, and perhaps even for recorded broadcasts.
Input—Any video stream of the type described above (or others) plus any combination of social sources (blog posts, Flickr Photos, Twitter tweets, Facebook Status messages, etc.). Content can be pulled from any number of public sources via public APIs or via any other feasible mechanisms. Live broadcasts can be ‘simulated’ for demonstration purposes.
Output—A filtering of social media aligned to the video stream. Once aligned, the social media should be analyzed to illuminate why a video segment is meaningful. There could be various paths for the analysis, perhaps based on categories. For example, a category of visual commentary includes information that relates to items and objects in the video: does this relate to the motorcade or the speech? Is it the speaker or their attire? What is the most insightful commentary about the identified objects? A topical commentary will show: Is this about a domestic or foreign issue? Is this about national security or health care? In another example, a sentiment analysis might show mood and reaction. For all analyses, being able to identify why an event is meaningful via the social commentary is key.
Evaluation
We will look for success in the following areas:
- Efficacy of the filtration and categorization.
- Speed of the application
- Presentation novelty or attractiveness
- Curator user Interface for the cases that require human curation
- Quality of aggregation of community contributions over time, with best representative samples. I.e., for any segment, find representative topics and categories and the best sample social media excerpts for:
- What did the majority of people say? (100-80%)
- What did the core population say? (79% - 20%)
- What did the outliers say? (< 20%)
Sample past and future events:
• Election night: November 4th, 2008
• Inauguration day: January 20th , 2009
• Oscar night: February 22nd, 2009
• Macworld
• CES
• Graduation Day, high school and college
• American Idol finale
• Baseball World Series
Sample past breaking news:
• Hudson River plane crash, January 15th, 2009
• Australian bushfires: early February 2009
• Major stock market fluctuations (past and future, starting in Sept 2008)
