Media X announces five new research awards

February 20, 2005. The latest campuswide Media X RFP resulted in the funding of five new projects focusing on the structuring and delivery of online media content. Click here to see the full RFP in PDF.

Summaries of the funded projects are given below. Full proposals are available to Media X members only, in the Members section of the Media X website.

This RFP is the eighth to be issued since Media X was established three years ago. The innovative, campuswide RFP process is just one of several mechanisms Media X uses to encourage, support, and coordinate research into interactive technologies at Stanford. (Click here to see the archive of all previous RFPs (requires SUNet ID), and click here (public) for a list of all projects funded to date by the Media X RFP process.)

Ashish Goel (Management Science and Engineering) & Rajeev Motwani (Computer Science)
Trust, Reputation, and Anonymity in P2P Publishing and Content Sharing
Eigenvector based ranking methods in general, and Google’s PageRank algorithm for rating web pages in particular (in which one of the current researchers played a major developmental role), have become an important component of information retrieval on the Web. The researchers are investigating the design of distributed rating schemes for P2P systems. Specifically questions addressed in this project are:
1. How do we leverage axiomatic and algorithmic views of reputation (being developed in a synergistic fashion at Stanford and elsewhere) to provide a review based rating system for intellectual and artistic content?
2. How do we align the incentives of all the participants in the system so that collusive behavior is mitigated?
3. How can reviewers and content be rated in a unified fashion, so that users can place more trust in reputable reviewers?
4. How can we design more sophisticated random sampling tests to detect self-promoting collusion between different blogs in the blogosphere?

Maggie Johnson (Computer Science), Terry Winograd (Computer Science), Michael Rouan (Director, Stanford Online, Stanford Center for Professional Development)
Online Media Bookmark Manager
The Stanford Center for Professional Development has offered engineering courses in this interface for nearly a decade. While successfully publishing classes, the interface does not allow for the kind of academic discourse that is available to the student inside the classroom. This project will develop a new online learning/streaming media interface which will provide an enhanced end-user experience. The new UI will feature a bookmarking tool for creating personal notated bookmarks in synchronization with the online media.

Clifford Nass (Communication) & David R. Danielson (Communication)
Interacting with Integrated Information
Information seekers in computing environments are more and more commonly encountering content that integrates, summarizes, or synthesizes information from disparate sources, and personalizing how this content is gathered, filtered, organized, and presented. Such content manipulation can obscure both the source of information and how it was produced. This project seeks to understand user attitudes and behaviors towards integrated content, and to determine how to best support user interaction with systems that integrate information from multiple sources. The research involves a series of both lab-based and Web-based experimental studies to assess social and psychological aspects of user interaction with integrated information, systematically varying a set of content manipulation, presentation, and personalization dimensions to observe the effects on perceived quality, perceived origin, and information usage.

Roy Pea, Michael Mills, Ken Dauber Joe Rosen (SCIL), Richard Holeton (Residential Computing Director)
DIVER ROMP: Research on Online Media Personalization
Today, media companies are vigilant about consumer pirating of media content, including the use of peer-to-peer technologies such as BitTorrent and Kazaa for video file exchanges. But pirating is also a sign that consumers are vitally interested in media content. This projects seeks to develop a mechanism that on the one hand enables media companies to preserve digital rights management for their media content, while at the same time providing consumers with new video viewpoint expression and sharing functions for these media objects? The project builds upon the existing DIVER Project at Stanford (Digital Interactive Video Exploration and Reflection), a desktop application, and more recently a web-browser approach to providing very user-friendly capabilities for people to make a ?dive? into an existing digital video source file to personalize it, share it, and collaborate around it.

Margaret Jane Radin, (Professor, Law), JuNelle Harris (J.D. candidate, Law), Rufus J. Pichler (Attorney, Technology Transactions Group, Morrison & Foerster LLP), Peter Thiel, (President, Clarium Capital Management), Roland Vogl (Executive Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology)
Issues in Internet Law
Many of the problems facing companies that deliver online content are not technological but legal. The Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology (LST) combines the resources of Stanford Law School - including renowned faculty experts, alumni practicing on the cutting-edge of technology law, technologically savvy and enthusiastic students from around the globe, and a location in the heart of Silicon Valley - to address the many questions that arise as science and technology play an increasingly prominent role in both the national and global arenas. In this project, LST will investigate the legal challenges associated with consumer publication and use of online content and suggest ways to overcome those challenges.

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