Avoid Crowding in the Battlefield: Semantic Placement of Social Messages in Entertainment Programs

Crisis situations often require authorities to convey important messages to a large population of varying demographics. An example of such a message is maintain a distance of 6 ft from others in times of the present COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we propose a method to programmatically place such messages in existing entertainment media as overlays at semantically relevant locations. For this purpose, we use generic semantic annotations on the media and subsequent spatio-temporal querying on these annotations to find candidate locations for message placement. We then propose choosing the final locations optimally using parameters such as spacing of messages, length of the messages and confidence of query results. We present preliminary results for optimal placement of messages in popular entertainment media.