yovisto blog

New Challenge! Please help and play WhoKnows?

2011-06-25T10:12:00.004+02:00

Some of you already may know our --serious-- fun game WhoKnows? (N. Ludwig, J. Waitelonis, M. Knuth, H. Sack:
WhoKnows? - Evaluating Linked Data Heuristics with a Quiz that Cleans Up DBpedia) that has been presented inter alia at this year's ESWC 2011 (cf. picture from poster session).

WhoKnows? is a quiz game based on the DBpedia dataset; while answering the quickies the player produces data that can be used for the ranking of facts from the underlying knowledge base. Furthermore, the player has the possibility to mark strange questions often originating from inconsistencies that we want to identify this way.

Now, as a next step we want to apply the collected data for the development of an expert finder and user interest profile recommendation system. For this we would appreciate a larger data set that allows us to rate the expertise of several users in various domains. If you like to contribute this research, you can do this easily by playing WhoKnows? on Facebook. In order to make a sound statement about your expertise, we need at least about thirty questions answered and of course the more the better.

Of course all gathered data will be anonymized before analysis and evaluation.

Don't forget it's really fun and educational together!
Your help really is appreciated. Thank you for playing!

P.S. We would be pleased to inform you about the final results, if you are interested in. Just send us an e-mail.

11.111 Videos!

2011-05-17T14:57:00.002+02:00

Congrats to us! We now have 11.111 Videos in our Yovisto archive.
Thanks go certainly to you!
Also check out our new ATT Tech Channel with interesting videos about the history of physics, engineering, astronomy and computer sciece.

WhoKnows?

2011-05-12T21:57:00.002+02:00

Our fun game 'WhoKnows?' is back and better than ever! For those who haven't heard of it yet, 'WhoKnows?' is a semantic quiz based on the dbpedia.
Give it a try and test your knowledge!!

Facebook

2011-04-14T13:09:00.000+02:00

Just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg has again been accused of stealing the idea for his company 'Facebook' by business man Paul Ceglia. He claims a 50 percent interest in the company with an income of around 800 Million USD a year.
Watch our new talk with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg
and 'The Facebook Effect' author David Kirkpatrick about the
company's background information, privacy and many other topics,
you never knew about concerning Facebook and Zuckerberg himself.

Mediaglobe

2011-04-13T13:34:00.000+02:00

Besides yovisto, mediaglobe is another project we are working on at Hasso-Plattner-Institute.
In mediaglobe we are focusing on automated and semantic analysis of media as well as on the automated generation of semantic metadata and the establishment of new standards.

Let's take look:

The cultural memory is storing an increasing amount of information and data. Yet, at present, only a negligible portion of these contents is searchable or available via digital channels.

Taking media archives into the digital future, the mediaglobe project aims at providing digital availability and usability for the growing stock of audiovisual documents concerning German contemporary history. The vision pursued by mediaglobe is a web-based access to the coprehensive digital AV content compiled in media archives.

To this end, mediaglobe offers automated process for analysing audiovisual data. The application of state-of-the-art semantic technologies improves the results of multimedia search processes. A tool for maintaining sophisticated rights management supplies information on the availability of the contents. Innovative and intuitive user interfaces make the access to the cultural heritage an interactive experience.

mediaglobe is promoted by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology within the framework of the research programme 'THESEUS - New Technologies for the Internet of Services'.

Amazing lecture about Computer History

2011-04-12T20:39:00.000+02:00

Check out our new amazing lecture 'Computer History' by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. For one thing the series covers stories from the pre-World War II electronic computing program hosted by Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell. It provides information about the first computer machines like the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and proceeds with the flash memory technology of the late 1980's. Next to technological backgrounds, the impact of the WWW on today's society is given in this lecture as well. You can for instance find talks with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman about the situation of social computing today and in the future.

More than 10.000 videos ....

2010-07-23T06:39:00.000+02:00

Cheers!
By today, we have more than 10.000 videos of university lectures and scientific presentations available in our video archive. This is another milestone in our video search engine history. While celebrating on the one hand, on the other hand we are currently facing serious disk space problems and are about to extend yovisto's main disk storage as well as to upgrade it's disk storage management. Keep fingers crossed for the next 10.000 videos and keep on posting and collecting new videos here on our platform!

The Eagle has landed....

2010-07-21T08:52:00.000+02:00

Today, 41 years ago, Armstrong set foot on the moon. Incredible that it is already such a long time ago. All the engineers involved in the Apollo program surely must be retired by now. What about the knowledge of the technology? Is it still available or would they have to undergo total reengineering, when they might decide one day to return to the moon....?

yovisto also provides some footage of the first lunar landing. Just give it a try....

Job Offer: 4 Ph.D. Positions starting October 2009

2009-10-26T16:01:00.001+01:00

Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) is a privately financed institute affiliated with the University of Potsdam, Germany. The Institute's founder and benefactor Professor Hasso Plattner, who is also co-founder and chairman of the supervisory board of SAP AG, has created an opportunity for students to experience a unique education in IT systems engineering in a professional research environment with a strong practice orientation.

Project Description:
MEDIAGLOBE is part of the THESEUS research program initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi), with the goal of developing a new Internet-based infrastructure in order to better use and utilize the knowledge available on the Internet. The focus of the research program is on semantic technologies, which determine contents (words, images, and sounds) not through conventional methods (e.g., combinations of letters) but which are able to recognize and place the meaning of a content in its proper context. MEDIAGLOBE deals with digitalization, analysis, and semantic retrieval of historical, documentary audiovisual content. (for more information on MEDIAGLOBE, c.f. http://theseus-programm.de/theseus-mittelstand-2009/ )

Main research topics:
• audiovisual retrieval and analysis
• knowledge representations
• semantic web technologies
• semantic search
• innovative web development
• user interface design for audiovisual content

How to apply:

Excellent candidates are invited to apply with:
• Curriculum vitae and copies of degree certificates/transcripts,
• Writing samples/copies of relevant scientific papers (e.g. thesis, etc.),
• Letters of recommendation.

Please send your application in PDF format indicating in the subject ,Application for PhD position‘ via email or via traditional mail to the following contact.

Contact and application:

Harald Sack
Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik GmbH
Universität Potsdam
Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3
D-14482 Potsdam, Germany

phone: +49 (0)331-5509-527
fax: +49 (0)331-5509-325
email: harald.sack@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
web: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/meinel/persons/sack.html

Presenting at OpenVideoConference in New York City

2009-06-20T00:07:00.000+02:00

We are happy to have had the opportunity to give a presentation about yovisto.com at Open Video Conference in New York City. The presentation was part of a metadata round table concerned with time-dependant metadata. During the presentation I gave a short introduction of the shortcomings of educational video and how we overcome those by the use of automatically and manually created time dependent metadata. Additionally, I gave a demonstration of the yovisto.com platform, which causes incredible positive reactions in the audience.

It is exciting to participate at this conference, to join the open video community and to meet so many interesting people here.

"Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online."

Demo of yovisto

2009-04-15T19:23:00.000+02:00

Finally, we have a short demo of yovisto with "foreign" material, historical video from the city of Potsdam.

Potsdamer Stadtschloss in Gefahr

2009-04-04T15:55:00.000+02:00

Due to legal reasons we had to remove the very popular video 'Das Potsdamer Stadtschloss in Gefahr" from our collection ( including 4 other videos with historical documentaries about Potsdam from the same series). Too bad for the copyright holder...because we had also made advertisements for the copyright holder's Potsdam DVD (where you may find all the material that has been accessible via yovisto including more in higher resolution and much better quality). Also bad luck for the copyright holder, because there had been tons of Google hits on his videos at yovisto while looking for "Potsdam", "Sanssouci", or "Stadtschloss". And again bad luck for the copyright holder, because there had already been links at wikipedia to the Potsdam videos at yovisto.

From now on, the only way to access these videos will be searching the DVD at amazon.de
and buying the DVD (without knowing what kind of video material is waiting there for the potential buyer). We are rather sorry to shut away these very nice and valuable historical documentaries from the public.

BTW, have you heard of the "Monty Python" effect?
After publishing their content freely on a youtube channel, amazon sales of their DVDs increased rather significantly (about 400%)......

Yovisto has been voted to be among the top German ICT Applications

2009-03-14T12:25:00.000+01:00

Yovisto has been voted to be among the top German ICT Applications in the context of the World Summit Award 2009. The World Summit Award (WSA) is the global contest to select best practice in e-Content and innovative ICT applications. The contest shows that new media keep the promise and can contribute to a better world. It increases public awareness for ingenious content ideas and applications with a twist, thus assisting in marketing high-quality multimedia products.

e-Content products or ICT application are entered in the WSA via national contests. The national winners in the eight WSA categories are submitted by the Eminent Expert from each country based on the national jury process. In the absence of an open national contest, Eminent Experts conduct a national selection panel in order to select in an objective and fair manner the best from their countries.

Thus, yovisto has been voted to be among the top German e-Content and innovative ICT applications! Thank you very much...!!

Yovisto goes HPI

2009-03-11T14:10:00.000+01:00

Yovisto relocated from FSU Jena to Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam/Germany to become a research platform for semantic multimedia technologies.

The move was a little adventuresome: First of all, renting a car was scheduled to 8am but the Europcar staff arrived not until 9am. So we lost one hour right at the beginning of this day. Finnally, a surprise, the rental car was a brand new Mercedes Benz :-).
Driving to Potsdam was a pleasure until I the tank turns empty, so I drove to the next gas station for refueling. And then, surprise 2: I wasn't able to open the flap. The manual says: "Press slightly on the left to open the flap." I've done exactly what that manual instructs me to do. I tried to press a bit tougher, on the left, on the right, and again on the left. No way, the flap kept closed. This was embarrassing. After calling Europcar and car manufacturer - both were not able to help me - I decided to drive on with this sip of fuel. So, it was only 30km to HPI. And, thanks to my economic driving talent, I reached the HPI and the destination Europcar station.

So, whatever. The servers are now located at HPI in a well air conditined server room protected by regular backups and uninterruptible power supply. I will post some photographs soon.

Yovisto Embedded Flash Player

2009-02-20T15:26:00.000+01:00

We've created a new embedded flash player for your websites. The new version is now equipped with the same features like the regular yovisto flash player.

How to embed the player on your website?
You will find the HTML code for embedding by moving your mouse pointer onto the video display. Click on the EMBED button and select your favorite size by clicking the left or right text area (we provide 400x350 and 600x500, but of course you can change the size later manually). Copy the selected HTML code to your clipboard and paste it to your website.

Steven Pinker on yovisto

2009-01-27T11:38:00.000+01:00

Harvard linguist Steven Pinker questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others. In his best-selling books, he has brought sophisticated language analysis to bear on topics of wide general interest.

Steven Pinker’s books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds -- the patterns in which our brain cells fire -- predispose us each to think and behave differently.

His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and TThe Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

In 2003, Harvard recruited Pinker for its psychology department from MIT. Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. His latest book is The Stuff of Thought, previewed at TEDGlobal 2005. He is working on a new book that studies violence.

Watch Steven Pinker directly at yovisto (with all its posibilities for information retrieval) or take a look at the embedded video below...

REPLAY Release 0.5

2008-11-24T22:27:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Tobias Wunden for releasing the next version 0.5 of REPLAY.

"We are happy to announce the next release of Replay, ETH Zurich's solution to produce, handle, index, archive, and distribute audiovisual lecture recordings on a large scale.

Version 0.5 is an integration release and adds all the relevant parts and techniques that will make up the final version (1.0) of REPLAY. Many bugs have been fixed and a few things have been rewritten to improve existing functionality."

With REPLAY 0.5 yovisto company starts to offer professional support and integration services to setup REPLAY at your institution or enterprise.

For further informations contact: info@yovisto.com

Changelog
[ - ] General
Many bugfixes and improvements through the whole backend.
[ - ] Indexer
The index database has been removed in favor of initial support for MPEG-7 serialization.
[ - ] Store
This release of Replay is the first to sport the new user interface. It's an application developed using flex from adobe running in all modern flash-enabled browser and tries to leverage the static andisochronic metadata provided by the backend through a REST service that allows for the integration of arbitrary user interfaces.
The interface allows for various ways of browsing a recorded lecture: First of all, it can simply be viewed by hitting the "play" button. The second way of doing it is to hover over the segmented timeline and clicking on a segment to start watching. The third and last option is to hover over the slide previews and selecting one to start playing. When two tracks are ingested in one bundle (e.g. the vga grabbing and the presenter video), they are presented in "picture in picture" mode. Double clicking on either of them will hide the other, given for example that you are only interested in watching the slides.
Searching the store is now backed by solr, a search index based on lucene.
[ - ] Scheduler
The scheduler application has been heavily updated, not only with regards to fixing bugs but also by the addition of new features. The main feature enhancement compared to the 0.4 release is a documented api targeted at the integration of campus information systems (cis). Using this api, information about people, rooms and lectures may be seamlessly integrated with the scheduling application. In addition, the scheduler brings a default implementation for this api, backed by a standalone addressbook, rooms and schedule database for manual entry and maintenance. Please refer to the documentation to learn how to enable the api and roll your own implementation.
The user interface has been overhauled as well, adding better navigation within the application and ajax functionality for suggestion of field content.
The scheduler now supports job tickets, that can be added to a recording. This job ticket consists of simple key-value properties and can be leveraged in every workflow throughout the system.
[ - ] Ingestor
The ingestor has been updated to add compliance with the user experience of the other applications (ingestor, dashboard). Support for job tickets has been added. In addition, a few bugs have been fixed.

exist Gründerkongress, Sep.30 - Oct 1, 2008

2008-10-01T09:49:00.000+02:00

For 2 days, yovisto is exhibiting at the exist Gründerkongress in Berlin. yovisto was initially being funded by the exist/seed initiative for one year (formerly under the name 'osotis' which had to be changed for legal reasons into 'yovisto') before the company was being founded in autumn 2007.

We are presenting our show case 'yovisto.com' with the goal that in the near future, academic videos in the www should become synonymous with yovisto. yovisto's innovative search technology is now the basis of ETH Zürichs (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, one of Europe's most famous universities) video portal REPLAY. With REPLAY, yovisto's technology will become part of the Opencast initiative driven by international higher education institutions to empower everyone to easily find and engage with educational video, audio, and other rich media from instructors and institutions around the world.

We are hoping to find some interesting contacts for business and research collaboration, as well as to find new customers for our unique video analysis and search technology. Business angels and venture capital are alway welcome!

FrOSCon Day 2

2008-08-24T09:51:00.000+02:00

The first talk is about: "Dokumentation - Wenn aus Hass Liebe wird!" (Carola Sammy Kummert) ("Documentation - if hate becomes love.")

This was a very interesting talk about a topic which gets oftentimes neglected, even though it's just as important as writing source code.
Many projects fail because of lack of documentation, precisely because documentation is (not only) needed: To help and motivate developers to contribute some lines to the code and not to scare them by deciphering the source code; to help admins install and use the software; to help sales and support to distribute the software, and to help users understanding the programs and the use of these.
A good documentation describes the code, functionality, behavior, environment, requirements, and the maintenance of the software. And, documentation yields to more communication between developers, support, sales and customers.

The documentation is the essence off all written information accumulated while project development adjusted to a specific target group (developer, admin, support, sales, user).
Creation of documentation must not only mean to write code-, api-, workflow- and user interface descriptions. While project development, much written content is created that can be used as feedstock for documentation process, such as technical specifications or support requests.

So, now I'm expert on documentation and I love it. ;-)

Lunchtime: Pasta.

Keynote: Rasmus Lerdorf (inventor of PHP)

Talk: "Systemadministration ++" (Michael Prokopp)

"Know your tools"
"Use the shell"
"Have a comfortable working place."
"..."
"..."
"Expect problems"
"Design it"
"Avoid bloat"
"Dont trust benchmarks ... "
"... you didn't modified by yourself."
"Testing happens in staging, not in production"
"Virtual machines"

"Snapshots"
"..."

Checkout: The Admin Zen adminzen.org

FrOSCon Day 1

2008-08-23T10:40:00.000+02:00

I'm currently visiting the FrOSCon. Finding the conference location in Sankt-Augustin (near Bonn) was only possible through following cute frog graffiti on the sidewalk (I will take a picture later on), which guided me to the buildings of the University of Applied Science Bonn-Rhein-Sieg.

The first workshop I wanted to participate was about "Docebo", an open source learning platform. But unfortunately this workshop was canceled and replaced with a "MySQL sandbox" workshop, which was not of interest to me.

Second workshop (starts at 11:00): "Videoprocessing with linux tools in school." (Christoph Konkuleski)

How can students in school be motivated to produce digital video, and which software to use? Christoph Konkuleski is a school teacher. He gives an introduction on current video processing software on linux: Kino, Cinelerra, Kdenlive, Open Movie Editor, ffmpeg, and some more.

Kino and Cinelerra seem to be the most appropriate video software for students. Kino is more clearly arranged and more stable, compared to "Cinelerra" which presents a multi window tiled user interface. Although Kino is not applicable to do very advanced and professional video processing. It's more an easy-to-use tool.

"But with Cinelerra it is very important that you can to do motion tracking. So, you can make a regular sword to a shiny glowing sword, which is very important for some students."

Using video processing as a teaching design gives the students more media competences at an early age. The students (around 15-16 years old) have to learn and build competences in: Thinking in images, creation of image stories, creation of screen-plays, photographs, utilization of technical features such as (zoom, tilt, pans, etc.), and generally being creative.

But why use linux and opensource software?
First of all, it's a financial issue.
Second, its often not easy to use, compared to commercial software. What? Yes. That's it.
E.g. with Cinelerra the student needs to specify many parameters, before he/she can get a reasonable output. So, the students need to grapple much more with this parameteres, compared to "easy to use" software e.g. from Apple od Adobe. Finally, the linux tools lead to a more technical learning effect.

Lunchtime: Curry turkey with rice.

Keynote from Andrew Tanenbaum: "MINIX 3" He's a very entertaining speaker.

Scientists have proven the Existence of Dark Energy

2008-07-31T20:46:00.000+02:00

As Astronomy.com was writing yesterday, Hawaiian Scientists have found direct evidence of the existence of so called "Dark Energy". Dark energy works against the tendency of gravity to pull galaxies together and so causes the universe's expansion to speed up. The nature of dark energy (what precisely it is, and why it exists) is one of the biggest puzzles in modern science.

So, if you wonder what Dark Energy is all about, you might ask yovisto.com!

Rocky Kolb from Fermilab, Chicago, ist giving a lecture on "Gravity of Dark Energy" at the 33. SLAC Summer Institute.

If you are generally interested in recent advances in astrophysics and astronomy, you should have a look at the lecture series "Gravity In The Quantum World And The Cosmos" from Stanford University that offers 47 outstanding lectures on such things as Dark Matter, Black Holes, Gamma Ray Bursts, or Gravitational Waves..

Educamp 2008 in Ilmenau

2008-04-20T01:20:00.000+02:00

Today, we are visiting educamp 2008 in Ilmenau (April 18-20, 2008) on behalf of FSU Jena and yovisto.com. Educam 2008 is organized as barcamp, i.e. it is almost unorganized. But, with more than 150 visitors the e-learning focus of the 'unconference' obviously has attracted a lot of people.
The day started with a short introduction of everybody with 'name + 3 tags', which really is not so simple. Just try to focus your interests in 3 tags, where at least one tag is reserved for your affiliation, one for your profession, and the last tag for your interests. Oh, but wait. The day did not really start because of a lack of coffee (which is essential for any kind of scientific working...).

For yovisto, we have managed to organize a session in the afternoon (1.30pm, 'Geistesblitz'). Therefore, we have some time for visiting other sessions, connecting to people, and public relations for yovisto... ;-)

yovisto @ Cebit 08

2008-03-05T01:18:00.000+01:00

You will be able to see us on TV tonight at 7 pm at the Thüringen Journal.

P.S. Here it is, the short feature with yovisto "Thüringer Innovationen auf der CeBIT" from Thüringen Journal (via mdr.de), March 4, 2008, 7pm.

yovisto @ Cebit 08

2008-03-04T01:17:00.000+01:00

We are currently presenting our work at CeBIT Hannover at Hall 9, Stand D04!

yovisto @ Tübingen

2008-02-23T01:16:00.000+01:00

yovsito is presenting at the ExpertInnenworkshop
"Social Tagging in der Wissensorganisation – Perspektiven und Potenziale" am 21./22. Februar 2008 am Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen. The presentations of this workshop will be published in the following book:

There are very lively and interesting discussions considering social tagging. One, we consider most sticking, is Matthias Quasthoffs (from the HPI in Potsdam) idea of controlling Internet access through tags, which would increase the user friendliness of Internet security immensely.

Osotis is now YOVISTO!

2008-02-03T01:13:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately there hasn't been much time for blogging lately...
There has been lots of work and it won't stop... and we won't stop either.

Osotis is now relaunching with a new name:

yovisto.com.

Besides the new name, it will also provide a clearer structure and will be more user friendly. As already mentioned we are still and always working on it. If you discover bugs please write us and let us know.

Check the old blog: http://osotis.blogspot.com