Bayesian TV: A Concept of Real-time Media for Emergency Information

What is TV or television? My definition of TV is as follows. 1. Content is pushed to the audience based on the preference of channels. 2. Content is presented in an audiovisual form. 3. Content is presented as the series of programs in the form of time division rather than space division. TV, or television, literally means visual information sent from a remote station. The architecture of TV has evolved for several decades, but the present TV is not the only solution for sending visual information. World Wide Web is transforming the style of communication and the emergence of real-time Web indicates the convergence of TV and Web in the near future. To reinvent the TV in the Web era, however, just mimicking the TV on Web standards is not enough. We believe that " what is TV? " is an important question to have a unified view on TV on Web and Web on TV, or a new name for a thing that integrates both worlds. The present Web and the present TV both have problems from the viewpoint of emergency information, which is the target of this paper. Firstly, the present Web does not satisfy the needs of users in emergency situations as follows. 1. Users do not have time to make queries for search engines by a trial-and-error approach. They need answers as soon as possible. 2. Due to an uncertain situation, appropriate actions of users are not clear; hence users may not come up with right queries. 3. Observation data such as rainfall and water level are important sources of information, but they are not friendly with text-based search. The present TV satisfies those needs, because users just need to turn on the TV set, and get relevant information from the screen, which is recommended by people in a broadcasting station. Users can just " entrust " the TV set, and watch the screen to pick up relevant information from the stream of programs. Here a big difference between TV and Web is that Web is based on the " pull " model of information access which is useful under normal circumstances, but TV is based on the " push " model of information access which is more useful under emergency circumstances. We hope that Web also offer the push interface of emergency information by automatically recommending relevant information for the audience. Secondly, the present TV …