Researchers

Bram Lievens (SMIT)

Jo Pierson (SMIT)

Karen Torben Nielsen

Onderzoeksgroep

VUB SMIT research group

 CITIZEN MEDIA is a collaborative research project which unites leading creative and technology experts from across Europe on research, development and validation of A/V systems to enable multiple non-professional users to co-create networked applications and experiences based on their own user-generated content. In this project new ways are investigated on how to exploit the huge amount of user-generated content in innovative ways to support people in their daily lives and how technology will enable social change to strongly involve users for co-creating networked applications. This work will introduce new concepts that may modify the role of stakeholders in the classical value chain for content delivery.

To this end, applications, services, systems, infrastructure, technology and architectures are developed based on a user-centric approach. The goal is to enable any user at any location with any device to consume, author and publish his own content towards a networked A/V system.

Based on user-generated media recorded by different users at different times, an open and flexible architecture will be proposed that creates a novel networked application or experience each time a user uploads new content. The underlying infrastructure hides the complexity of content handling for the end user by supporting trans-coding of formats, customization and mixing of personal and private content. To facilitate co-creation by multiple non-professional users based on their own user-generated content, the A/V system has to be able to handle a massive amount of user-generated content in different formats in real time, annotate and store this content in huge databases, search, retrieve, process and render all these pieces of user-generated content to create a new experience. Combined with new technology for collaborative communication and easy and multimodal user interfaces, this will lead to appealing new applications. To build successful applications that assure strong user involvement to co-create the application by uploading their user-generated content, user-centric design methods are used. End-to-end service delivery, network and operational scalability are considered over converged broadcast and IP communication networks, over mobile and fixed access networks to heterogeneous terminals in and outside the home.

Related publications

• Vermeir, Lotte, Van Lier, Tim, Pierson, Jo & Lievens, Bram (2008) Making the online complementary to the offline: social requirements to foster the ‘sense of community’. Presentation at Communication Policy and Technology section for the IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research) congress ‘Media and global divides’, organised by Stockholm University & IAMCR, 20-25 July 2008, Stockholm, Sweden.
• Bram Lievens, Karen Torben Nielsen, Jo Pierson & An Jacobs (2008) Proxy technology assessment as a multi-method approach for identifying social requirements of co-creative media. Paper presented at NordiCHI 2008 Workshop: New approaches to requirements elicitation. Lund, 20-22 October.
• Karen Torben Nielsen, An Jacobs, Bram Lievens & Jo Pierson (2008) Faking the real thing? Proxy technology assessment as a method for participative design. Paper presented at Participatory Design Conference 2008. Bloomington, 1-4 October.
• Amela Karahasanovic, Petter Bae Brandtz, Jan Heim, Marika Lüders, Lotte Vermeir, Jo Pierson, Bram Lievens, Jeroen Vanattenhoven, Greet Jans (2008) Co-Creation and User-Generated Content - Elderly People's User Requirements. In: Computers in Human Behavior. Elsevier, October 2008.

Recent weblog posts

• IBBT-SMIT well represented at Transforming Audiences 2 conference (06 September 2009)
• SMIT Research in De Standaard en Het Nieuwsblad (29 January 2008)
• SMIT research on TV Limburg (04 December 2007)
• Open innovation and living labs: User perspective (04 November 2007)

Link to the project: http://www.ist-citizenmedia.org:8080/display/PU/Home
Link to the street comittee: http://www.beukenhoflaan.be

Period: sept.2006-feb.2008