Diogo Cabral — “Pen-Based Multimedia Interfaces” (Digital Media)

15 Jun 2010

Diogo Cabral's PhD research proposes the use of pen-based technology, a natural-input interface, to manipulate digital videos.

Diogo Cabral has a BS and an MS in computer science engineering from FCT/UNL. During his undergraduate studies, he participated in the EU Socrates exchange program at the Facoltà SMFN, Università di Pisa, Italy. In his PhD work, Diogo proposes the usage of pen-based technology for the manipulation of digital multimedia, particularly digital video.

Video can be considered one of the more complete and complex mediums. Besides pictorial and verbal (both written and spoken) attributes, video includes motion and time characteristics. The recent increase in popularity of digital video makes video manipulation and editing a crucial task. Video annotations are also an important feature for video analysis. They foster active watching, a process that combines watching and critical thinking. This issue, combined with video's dynamic properties, generates an additional level of complexity.

In Diogo’s research, he proposes the use of pen-based technology. It can be considered a natural-input interface for humans to improve video manipulation. Pen-based technology, or pen computing, can be used directly with video manipulation and editing through pen gestures and pressure; and it can be used indirectly through digital ink. Pen-based video annotations take different forms, such as sketches, words, or symbols. They implement the concept of hypermedia by linking different data, including video segments. Tablet PCs, due to their recent developments that make them very similar to laptops in size and computational power, would be used as a pen-based platform.

Main Research Interests

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Pen-Based Technology
• Video Processing and Interfaces
• Electronic and Interactive Paper