This site is a brief illustrated introduction to the Mobile Media Metadata 2 (MMM2) prototype. Below are screenshots showing both the MMM2 cameraphone and web applications, and sample Nokia 7610 cameraphone photos. The Mobile Media Metadata (MMM) project leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture to infer the content and the sharing recipients of media captured on cameraphones. Over the past two years, we have deployed and tested MMM1 (context-to-content inferencing on cameraphones to infer media content) and MMM2 (context-to-community inferencing on cameraphones to infer sharing recipients) with 60 users in the fall of 2003 and another 60 users in the fall of 2004.

MMM2 consists of an application that resides on the cameraphone (currently the Nokia 7610) and a web-based application. The MMM2 cameraphone client application uses a modified version of the ContextPhone application developed by Mika Raento from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) Context project to upload captured media and metadata and to automatically launch the Series 60 Opera for Mobile browser for additional phone-based user interaction. The MMM2 cameraphone client application automatically uploads cameraphone photos along with automatically gathered contextual metadata collected at the time of capture and any manually created metadata, such as a photo caption, to the MMM2 web server. Photos are also easily shared from the MMM2 phone client because it suggests to the phone user a short list of likely share receipients based on the user's and the community's prior sharing history and the contextual metadata from the point of capture such as the time of capture, CellID and GPS location, and Bluetooth-sensed human co-presence. Additional captioning, messaging, albuming, and photoblogging may be done from the MMM2 phone user interface in the Opera for Mobile browser.

Each MMM2 user also has a personal MMM2 website where their photos can be viewed, rotated, captioned, annotated, organized into albums, and most importantly, shared with system-supplied suggestions about likely sharing receipients. Photos may be shared with other MMM2 users, or with anyone with an email or SMS address, either directly from the cameraphone at the time of capture, or from the MMM2 website (accessible from the phone or from a computer). Recipients receive a URL and, in their email, a phhoto thumbnail.

We have seen a 2189% increase in the number of photos uploaded per user per day in MMM2 (1.31) compared to MMM1 (0.06). Our upper third most active MMM2 users upload on average more than 3 photos per day. Our MMM2 "context-to-community" sharing recipients guesser has enabled MMM2 users to maintain a high rate of photos shared to photos uploaded (26%) and on average, for every 100 photos uploaded, 18 instances of sharing occur (some of which have multiple photos per sharing instance). Sharing instances are distributed equally between the MMM2 phone and web applications, but on average twice as many photos are shared per sharing instance on the web as from the phone application. Our qualitative and quantitative studies have shown that MMM2 users are pleased with the share guesser's ability to suggest sharing recipients based on prior sharing history and contextual metadata. The current share guesser guesses the correct intended sharing recipient 60% of the time in the first 5 guesses and 70% of the time in the first 10 guesses. We are working with Prof. John Canny of the UC Berkeley Computer Science department on a next generation share guesser which uses contextual metadata in conjunction with collaborative filtering to provide even better guesses of likely sharing recipients. We believe our MMM research will help solve a fundamental problem in personal media production, sharing, and reuse: the need to have simple and effective applications for users to be able to upload, share, and reuse media captured on mobile devices.

The MMM project is closely associated with the Social Uses of Personal Media project which is co-lead by Prof. Nancy Van House. The Social Uses of Personal Media project studies the higher order purposes or "social uses" of personal photos, and how networked digital images and cameraphones are being used for pre-existing and emerging social uses. The MMM2 project and the Social Uses of Personal Media project are working together to study and refine the MMM2 prototype as well as to develop new methods for integrating social science and design research in the construction of sociotechnological systems for mobile media and metadata creation, sharing, and reuse.

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