Rene Kaiser is key researcher at JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz, Austria. His main research expertise and interests are in the fields of content personalization, media semantics, knowledge representation, event processing, social computing, videoconferencing and telepresence, and non-linear video production, with particular focus on “Virtual Director” technology for automatic framing and selection of live video streams. Rene studied Software Engineering at FH Hagenberg, is a PhD student at TU Graz and a member of the Wissensmanagement Forum Graz. He contributed to European research projects NM2, Clinicip, Aposdle, TA2, FascinatE and Vconect. You may contact Rene on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Selected topic: Rene's current research focus is on Virtual Director technology, i.e. intelligent software that is executing cinematographic principles for automatic camera selection on live AV streams. He is currently exploring different application domains such as social videoconferencing [1] and automatic live broadcast production [2]. Enhancing social group communication through an orchestrated audiovisual link is a multifaceted research challenge. The term telepresence is widely used to describe the desired effect of making the technology transparent to the user in mediated communication. In the Vconect project, we aim to support complex conversation topologies, by which we mean dynamic subgroups splitting and joining over time. Besides defining a body of Orchestration knowledge, i.e. a set of principles which can support communication in a certain setup, we developed a software framework for automating the reasoning process of communication understanding and decision making, taking a rule-based approach. Other than utilizing real-time audiovisual content analysis to inform the component, we focus on extracting knowledge about and social media related to the participants of the videoconference by analyzing their social network profiles.

Keywords: Virtual Director, audiovisual communication, social videoconferencing, telepresence, interactive media, live broadcast

References:

[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6266253

[2] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-27355-1_73