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I nformation retrieval is an i ncreasingly complex process, due to digital integration of video, audio, and text resources. An experimental project will explore the challenges posed by these digital video libraries. Computer he Informedia Digital Video Library project' will establish a large, on-line digital video library featuring full-content and knowledge-based search and retrieval. Intelligent, automatic mecha nisms will be developed to populate the library. Search and retrieval from digital video, audio, and text libraries will take place via desktop computer over local-, metropolitan-, and wide-area networks. Initially, the library will be populated with 1,000 hours of raw and edited documentary and education videos drawn from video assets of WQED/Pittsburgh, Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Schools, and the Open University (United Kingdom). To assess the value of video reference libraries for enhanced learning at different ages, we will deploy the library at Carnegie Mellon University and local schools, from elementary school through high school. Our approach applies several techniques for content-based searching and video-sequence retrieval. Content is conveyed in both the narrative (speech and language) and the image. Only by the collaborative interaction of image, speech, and natural-language understanding technology can we successfully populate, segment, index, and search diverse video collections with satisfactory recall and precision. This collaborative interaction approach uniquely compensates for problems of interpretation and search in error-ridden and ambiguous data sets. We start with a highly accurate, speaker-independent, connected speech recognizer that automatically transcribes video soundtracks. A language-understanding system then analyzes and organizes the transcript and stores it in a full-text information retrieval system. This text database permits rapid retrieval of individual video segments that satisfy an arbitrary query on the basis of the words in the soundtrack and in associated annotations and credits. Image and language understanding lets us locate and delineate the corresponding "video paragraph" context through combined source information about camera cuts, object tracking, speaker changes, timing of audio and/or background music, and change in content of spoken words. Controls let the user interactively request corresponding video paragraphs to full volumes, browse the results, intelligently "skim" the returned content, and reuse the stored video objects in different ways. Figure 1 illustrates a typical user retrieval display. The data and network architecture we have implemented provides a distributed data multilevel hierarchy and enables networking on commercial data services. To protect data rights in intellectual property and to provide security and privacy, we've incorporated network billing, variable pricing, and access control. All digital libraries share common technical and sociological issues, attributes, features, and challenges 2 The digital video library exacerb...

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ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE RELATIVELY novel tools for research and daily care in long-term care (LTC) facilities that are faced with the burgeoning of the older adult population and dwindling staffing resources. The degree to which stakeholders in LTC facilities are receptive to the use of these technologies is poorly understood. Eighteen semi-structured focus groups and one interview were conducted with relevant groups of stakeholders at seven LTC facilities in southwestern Pennsylvania. Common themes identified across all focus groups centered on concerns for privacy, autonomy, cost, and safety associated with implementation of novel technologies. The relative importance of each theme varied by stakeholder group as well as the perceived severity of cognitive and/or physical disability. Our findings suggest that ethical issues are critical to acceptance of novel technologies by their end users, and that stakeholder groups are interdependent and require shared communication about the acceptance of these emerging technologies.