Culture affects the preferences of users and their expectations of the elements found in the user interfaces of programs. This study investigates the influence of culture, as well as the specific experience and expectations of Saudi Arabian users, with respect to the design of the user interface of the Arabic version of Facebook. As the Arabic version of Facebook has issues with the engagement of users, this research therefore sought to develop a deeper understanding of the causes of this and to propose viable solutions. This involved a comprehensive examination of the implications of translating user- interface elements from one language to another, looking in particular at the specific cultural needs of Saudi Arabian users, with the intention of improving users’ engagement. This study uses an interpretivist research based on the social construction that was utilised in data collection, consisting of interviews and two sequential questionnaires. The main issues identified in the design of the Facebook user interface were the icons and page layout. The current icon images were shown to be unfamiliar and difficult for Saudi users to understand. This was exacerbated by the labels used, which were also found to be too abstract to be meaningful. Regarding the page layout, the alignments were mixed and inconsistent, the positions of elements were horizontally displayed, the pages were too complicated for effective navigation, and the list of options was too long, adversely affecting comprehension. In addition, there were many language errors in the translated Arabic version. These issues led to confusion and overload among Saudi users, causing stress when navigating through the pages. These factors combined to contribute to a lack of engagement with the Arabic version among Saudi users. The consequences of this experience on users’ behaviour was also investigated. First, some users were found to confine their interaction with Facebook to the home page and to avoid the setting page. Many users expressed a preference for the English version of Facebook over the Arabic version, although some acclimated to the use of the Arabic version, while others migrated to other social media platforms. The findings show that application of the localisation theory demonstrates that user interfaces designed for one culture cannot always be easily modified to suit another culture without significant modification. Therefore, this research has contributed to the knowledge through the development of design guidelines to aid designers in the creation of a more suitable Arabic version of Facebook. Based on the above findings, this design guidelines proposes to guide user interface designers to incorporate elements that take into account cultural issues into the user interface.

This project describes a novel approach to the development of a multimodal video segmentation system for the analysis of multimedia data. The current practices of multimedia data analysis rely either solely on one of the video and audio components or on the presence of both together. The proposed approach makes use of both the video and audio inputs in parallel, complementing each other during the video processing stage, towards optimising both the accuracy and speed of the method. Unlike in the other commonly established methods, the video analysis here is carried out using both the luminance and the chrominance values of the colour images, instead of relying on either of them. The approach considered in the proposed method of video cut detection primarily uses a modified luminance based histogram analysis algorithm, supported by the additional sub-sampling and median filtering options. They improve the efficiency of the method through enhancing its speed and the accuracy of detection respectively. The algorithm mentioned above uses a progressively varying threshold for indicating a significant variation in the measurement of successive histograms for a window length of 2 image frames. The method worked successfully for the videos with varying rates and sizes of the frames that have been under investigation. Because of the degrading effect of chrominance histogram analysis on the processing speed its use is kept to a minimum. This is restricted only to verify the existence of possible cuts, failed to be identified by the luminance analysis. The indication of such cuts could be obtained through audio classification analysis.

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The postmodernist technique of cut-ups, that is, creating new art from the pieces of old material, has insinuated itself throughout contemporary culture. Everything is connected; everything is a remix. Taking these principles as its premise, this thesis explores the design and implementation of an expressive, computer-aided, batch audio creation environment, and then further extends those principles to hypothesise a cloud-based, distributed environment for supporting long-range collaboration. Traditional multimedia editing and creation tools are dominated by a direct manipulation interface, and generally depend greatly upon user expertise to find and splice samples of interest. When distributed multimedia manipulation systems are studied, discussion is typically dominated by the challenges faced by systems and network to deliver multimedia data with high throughput and reliability.

Contemporary techniques for web service description and discovery are insufficient when considering diverse and variable organisational contexts. Strategic objectives, organisational structures, business processes and technology when placed into a climate of constant change impact the normative behavioural patterns of people working in all kinds of organisations. Such dynamic conditions profoundly affect the discovery of appropriate web services. To overcome this challenge, a stratagem based upon semiotic theory is used to define a mechanism that enriches existing web service description approaches with techniques that enable the varied and erratic character of web service consumer organisational contexts to be captured and added as pragmatic information to web service description. Calibrated against an established sign classification scheme, the signs exchanged between web service providers and consumers reveal areas that pragmatic information complements existing web service description methods. United with established semiotic techniques for understanding organisational behaviour - affordances and norms, semiotic theory is used to form shared semiosis in joint action between web service providers and consumers. Encapsulating the signs exchanged in communication and supplementing them with pragmatic information made it possible to specify and apply a norm- based software agent to describe and discover web services on behalf of web service consumers. Assisted by speech act theory in a communication architecture specialised for web service description, the norm based software agent follows a dedicated negotiation protocol to add and make use of pragmatic information related to web services. To demonstrate the effectiveness of adding pragmatic information to web services, a case study shows that such descriptions when augmented with pragmatic information enhances the matching of web services to organisations with diverse and unpredictable contexts. The case study validates the approach taken to defining and building a mechanism for web service description and discovery and the relevance of semiotic theory to challenge the issues associated with web service utilisation.

The increasingly important role of networked media applications and services is set to continue with the emergence of the next generation of digital media formats. These formats, collectively referred to as beyond High Definition (BHD) formats in this thesis, offer stronger sense of presence and greater impression of reality compared to all pre-existing media formats. This increased quality translates into far greater computational and bandwidth requirements compared to pre-existing media formats. Therefore, the deployment of future networked Media Infrastructures (MMIs) requires highly distributed and scalable media processing and storage resources interconnected via dynamic high-speed optical networks. This thesis proposes a novel service-oriented control framework, the Advanced Media Services Control (AYISC) framework, to coordinate the heterogeneous media resources, mediate between the media and network layers, and resolve user requests to deliver high quality networked media services. A),'ISC comprises the novel Media Applications Description Language (MADL), a novel semantic description framework proposed to describe resources and services offered by the NMI. It also comprises novel online and offline joint scheduling mechanisms proposed to facilitate intelligent and autonomous use of available resources. The motivation behind and core contributions of this thesis are discussed. The state-of-t he-art in relevant areas including drivers for future NMIs, optical networking technologies; and application-aware control frameworks are detailed. The AMSC framework is then presented as an intelligent framework for deploying user-, media-and network-aware future NMIs over dynamic high-speed optical networks. The novel MADL semantic description framework is proposed as a unified description mechanism to overcome heterogeneity in future NMI s. Several user- and resource-aware online and offline joint scheduling heuristic algorithms and optimal mathematical formulations are proposed to provide high acceptance of user requests with effective and efficient utilization of available resources. Finally, fundamental proof-of-concept testbed demonstrators of the AMSC framework are presented in the context of a networked media ecosystem.

The development of multimedia applications and distributed data retrieval systems that facilitate the exchange of real-time data in the Internet has increased in the past few years. As a result it has become evident that different types of traffic may have certain requirements that need to be addressed when the traffic is injected into the network. Mechanisms that consider such requirements and give preferential treatment to identified flows of traffic are called Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms. QoS metrics that are often used and are specific to packet level traffic characteristics are bandwidth, latency (delay), jitter and loss probability. Streaming multimedia may require guaranteed bandwidth to maintain certain quality levels while Voice over IP (VoIP) requires low delay as round-trip delays may be noticeable and degrade quality. QoS has historically been achieved mainly through differentiated forwarding, i.e. by maintaining different queues on a router level for traffic of different needs. There has also been research on differentiated routing, i.e. routing traffic with different needs through different paths. This is achieved mostly by using MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS). In this thesis we present a QoS mechanism, Intra-Domain Differentiated Routing (IDDR) , that provides qualitative delay differentiation in plain IP networks. We first show that we can get substantial delay differentiation, around 30% on average, between two traffic classes within a network whilst retaining in many cases the throughput of successfully delivered flows. We can further double the delay differentiation with a minimal drop on throughput by optimising link weights using a genetic algorithm. The work is validated by simulation on multiple topologies and against many different traffic matrices to increase robustness. We then show that the IDDR can be modified and adapted for inter-domain delay differentiation. To test the inter-domain variant of IDDR we need a valid AS-level topology. Therefore, another contribution of the thesis is the AS-level topology generation that retains the properties of the internet.

This thesis considers the potential of interactive multimedia as a new medium for communicating ideas and arguments. In focusing on the relationship between interactive multimedia and anthropology, the aim is to look at possibilities for the creation of single authored texts which represent aspects of long-term studies of cultural change. Using data gained from empirically based fieldwork study, the thesis considers how photographic and moving image records of culture might be presented alongside descriptive and analytical text to communicate ideas and arguments. Key issues raised by the thesis relate to the problems and possibilities involved in using interactive multimedia to seamlessly integrate diverse forms media, and in giving the user a sense of agency without compromising the integrity of the author's ideas and arguments. Possibilities for creating both tightly structured and more open-ended forms are considered. A key possibility that is explored relates to ways in which authors can use the medium to communicate discrete points by creating sets of moving image juxtapositions which can be linked together to create an argument. It is argued that this enables ideas and arguments to be presented using techniques of comparison, offering an alternative to the moving image convention of sequential editing. I suggest that this creates new possibilities for scholarly discourse which are not necessarily predicated on the concept of a linear Chain of reasoning, and I relate these possibilities to well-established debates about the use of moving images within anthropology. In so doing, I suggest new ways in which moving image records might be used to help deliver anthropological ideas and arguments as opposed to serving as an illustrative adjunct to text-based discourse. The thesis has been written from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining debates within anthropology with issues relating to media production.

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