This paper presents a novel open-source browser plug-in that aims at supporting journalists and news professionals in their efforts to verify user-generated video. The plug-in, which is the result of an iterative design thinking methodology, brings together a number of sophisticated multimedia analysis components and third party services, with the goal of speeding up established verification workflows and making it easy for journalists to access the results of different services that were previously used as standalone tools. The tool has been downloaded several hundreds of times and is currently used by journalists worldwide, after being tested by Agence France Presse (AFP) and Deutsche Welle (DW) journalists and media researchers for a few months. The tool has already helped debunk a number of fake videos

In this paper a method that re-targets a video to a different aspect ratio using cropping is presented. We argue that cropping methods are more suitable for video aspect ratio transformation when the minimization of semantic distortions is a prerequisite. For our method, we utilize visual saliency to find the image regions of attention, and we employ a filtering-through-clustering technique to select the main region of focus. We additionally introduce the first publicly available benchmark dataset for video cropping, annotated by 6 human subjects. Experimental evaluation on the introduced dataset shows the competitiveness of our method.

In this review paper, we look into how a recommendation system can be adapted to and support people with intellectual disability (ID). We start by reviewing and comparing the main classes of techniques for general-purpose content recommendation. Then, centering on individuals with ID, we collect information on their special needs that may be relevant to or affected by content recommendation tasks. We review the few existing recommendation systems specifically designed or adapted to the needs of this population and finally, based on the reviewed literature sources, we catalog the traits that a future content recommendation system should have in order to respond well to the identified special needs. We hope this listing of desirable traits and future directions in our concluding sections will stimulate research towards opening the doors to the digital world for individuals with ID.

This paper presents a Web service that supports the automatic generation of video summaries for user-submitted videos. The developed Web application decomposes the video into segments, evaluates the fitness of each segment to be included in the video summary and selects appropriate segments until a pre-defined time budget is filled. The integrated deep-learning-based video analysis and summarization technologies exhibit state-of-the-art performance and, by exploiting the processing capabilities of modern GPUs, offer faster than real-time processing. Configurations for generating video summaries that fulfill the specifications for posting on the most common video sharing platforms and social networks are available in the user interface of this application, enabling the one-click generation of distribution-channel-specific summaries.

This paper presents a new method for assessing the aesthetic quality of images. Based on the findings of previous works on this topic, we propose a method that addresses the shortcomings of existing ones, by: (a) Making possible to feed higher-resolution images in the network, by introducing a fully convolutional neural network as the classifier. (b) Maintaining the original aspect ratio of images in the input of the network, to avoid distortions caused by re-scaling. And (c) combining local and global features from the image for making the assessment of its aesthetic quality. The proposed method is shown to achieve state of the art results on a standard large-scale benchmark dataset.