Islam is a hotly debated topic on YouTube, comprising approximately a half-million videos, tagged with this word. The study presents empirical material regarding three aspects of Islam’s representation: (a) how Islam is framed in user-created videos; (b) how it is visualized; and (c) what are the motivations of the YouTubers who create these videos. The theoretical framework of the study is bas...

We present a study on using storytelling for teaching skills to low-income workers in the developing world. Taking a cue from work on using dramatized stories and video to promote technology use and agricultural and HIV/AIDS education, we investigated storytelling’s ability for teaching lowliteracy populations. We created a series of videos to teach domestic workers in urban India bed-making an...

We propose a semi-supervised learning based computational model for aesthetic classification of short animation videos, which are nowadays part of many web pages. The proposed model is expected to be useful in developing an overall aesthetic model of web pages, leading to better evaluation of web page usability. We identified two feature sets describing aesthetics of an animated video. Based on...

We present a novel algorithm for weakly supervised action classification in videos. We assume we are given training videos annotated only with action class labels. We learn a model that can classify unseen test videos, as well as localize a region of interest in the video that captures the discriminative essence of the action class. A novel Similarity Constrained Latent Support Vector Machine m...

Manual analysis of pedestrians and crowds is often impractical for massive datasets of surveillance videos. Automatic tracking of humans is one of the essential abilities for computerized analysis of such videos. In this keynote paper, we present two state of the art methods for automatic pedestrian tracking in videos with low and high crowd density. For videos with low density, first we detect...

Older adults are more susceptible to fraud than younger adults offline. This may be true online as well. Older adults are also increasingly using the Internet for various activities, including managing their financial assets. Therefore, there is a need to develop risk communication technologies targeted towards older adults. These technologies should leverage mental models of end users to commu...

Facial expression play an important role in signaling interest and opinion about a product. In this paper we present a negative affect classifier that detects nose wrinkles (AU9) or brow lowerer (AU4). Our approach uses an automatic mechanism for extracting the frames of interest in videos. We employ an automatic facial feature tracker to detect the area of interest in each frame, we then apply...

Manual analysis of pedestrians and crowds is often impractical for massive datasets of surveillance videos. Automatic tracking of humans is one of the essential abilities for computerized analysis of such videos. In this keynote paper, we present two state of the art methods for automatic pedestrian tracking in videos with low and high crowd density. For videos with low density, first we detect...