SocialSensor: sensing user generated input for improved media discovery and experience

SocialSensor will develop a new framework for enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search in the Social Web. The project moves beyond conventional text-based indexing and retrieval models by mining and aggregating user inputs and content over multiple social networking sites. Social Indexing will incorporate information about the structure and activity of the users social network directly into the multimedia analysis and search process. Furthermore, it will enhance the multimedia consumption experience by developing novel user-centric media visualization and browsing paradigms. For example, SocialSensor will analyse the dynamic and massive user contributions in order to extract unbiased trending topics and events and will use social connections for improved recommendations. To achieve its objectives, SocialSensor introduces the concept of Dynamic Social COntainers (DySCOs), a new layer of online multimedia content organisation with particular emphasis on the real-time, social and contextual nature of content and information consumption. Through the proposed DySCOs-centered media search, SocialSensor will integrate social content mining, search and intelligent presentation in a personalized, context and network-aware way, based on aggregation and indexing of both UGC and multimedia Web content.