Watch what I watch: using community activity to understand content

This paper presents a high-level overview of Yahoo Research Berkeley's approach to multimedia research and the ideas motivating it. This approach is characterized primarily by a shift away from building subsystems that attempt to discover or understand the "meaning" of media content toward systems and algorithms that can usefully utilize information about how media content is being used in specific contexts; a shift from semantics to pragmatics. We believe that, at least for the domain of consumer and web videos, the latter provides a more promising basis for indexing media content in ways that satisfy user needs. To illustrate our approach, we present ongoing work on several applications which generate and utilize contextual usage meta-data to provide novel and useful media experiences.