Next-generation content representation, creation, and searching for new-media applications in education

Content creation, editing, and searching are extremely time-consuming tasks that often require substantial training and experience, especially when high-quality audio and video are involved. "New media" represents a new paradigm for multimedia information representation and processing, in which the emphasis is placed on the actual content. It thus brings the tasks of content creation and searching much closer to actual users and enables them to be active producers of audio-visual information rather than passive recipients. We discuss the state of the art and present next-generation techniques for content representation, searching, creation, and editing. We discuss our experiences in developing a Web-based distributed compressed video editing and searching system (WebClip), a media-representation language (Flavor) and an object-based video-authoring system (Zest) based on it, and a large image/video search engine for the World Wide Web (WebSEEk). We also present a case study of new media applications based on specific planned multimedia education experiments with the above systems in several K-12 schools in Manhattan, NY.