There has been extensive research in the clustering community on formalizing the definition of the quality of a given data clustering. However, is it possible to measure the quality of a clustering unless human judgment is taken into consideration? The notion of quality is subjective: for example, given the task of clustering a set of movie reviews, some users might want to cluster them accordi...

Horror movies consistently reflect metaphorical associations between verticality and affect, as well as between brightness and affect. For example, bad events happen when movie characters are going downwards, or when lights go off. Monsters and villains emerge from below and from the darkness. And protagonists get lost and stuck in dark underground caves, dungeons, tunnels, mines, bunkers or se...

Many variables that we would like to predict depend nonlinearly on two types of attributes. For example, prices are influenced by supply and demand. Movie ratings are determined by demographic attributes and genre attributes. This paper addresses the dimensionality reduction problem in such regression problems with two predictor vectors. In particular, we assume a discriminative model where low...

This thesis on multimodal fusion and semantics extraction, focuses on automated detection and annotation of harmful content in video data. The aim is not only to reason out the existence of violence or not (i.e. the binary problem), but also to determine the type of violence (e.g. fight, explosion, murder). Acknowledging the lack of knowledge representation and reasoning approaches for the prob...

With the apparent return of the historical epic movie – Braveheart, Gladiator, The Passion of Christ, Troy, King Arthur and several films of Alexander and Boudicca (Boadicea for those over 40), attention is again focused on the authenticity of the genre. Was it really like that? Is the costume and architecture true to life? And, most commonly asked by those who enjoyed Gladiator, was the grippi...

S everal years ago, Prof. Randy Pausch, a young superstar in computer science, gave a much-discussed lecture at Carnegie Mellon. In an address that was advertised as his last, Pausch entertained a packed hall with his stories about his fulfillment of some rather spectacular childhood dreams (e.g., experiencing zero gravity; becoming an Imagineer for Disney). A leader in the creation of virtual ...

With the advent of image age, popularity war-themed film and television dramas in new century has promoted a wave thematic narratives. Facing era computer graphics, main theme narrative adopts series reconstruction strategies, namely: spectacle strategy visual expression, typification subjects, striation character modelling. As an important genre Chinese movies, themed movies often focus on edu...

This paper details our analysis of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), a free, user-maintained, online resource of production details for over 390,000 movies, television series and video games, which contains information such as title, genre, box-office taking, cast credits and user's ratings. We gather a series of interesting facts and relationships using a variety of data mining techniques. I...

Information Retrieval (IR) research has recently started addressing the information need of exploratory search. where the searcher may be unfamiliar with the domain or not have decided what is the goal of his query. A popular tool to support exploratory search is the use of faceted search. The implementation of faceted search requires that documents be annotated by metadata in the form of attri...