Nowadays radio shows are much more than a linear broadcast feed — they're all about user engagement. At the same time, many users are no longer only connected to a radio station brand through the linear broadcast channel, but also through digital platforms, and interaction through social media is becoming ever more important. Digital services enable broadcasters and users to customise the radio experience. Radio is thus a medium embedded in a context of social media, interaction and personalisation. For this reason, radio is not only about audio, but also about the text, image and video content exchanged through these interactions.
Despite the increasingly interactive nature of the radio experience, this topic has been neglected so far at TVX and other conferences addressing interactive media. This workshop thus aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on tools, services and applications enabling interactive radio experiences.
Accepted papers can be found on Zenodo.
Programme
09:00 Welcome and introduction
09:30 Invited talk: Chris Roberts (BBC): Automated Segmentation of Audio in the BBC publishing pipeline
10:00 Break
10:30 Paper session
Alexander Erk and Fabian Sattler. DAB over IP
Chris Baume. "Even More or Less": A data-rich interactive podcast player
Nicky Birch. Should radio ever talk back?
Sandy Claes and Sebastiaan Jansen. 360 Radio Experience: Connecting Live Listening with User Interaction and Visual Radio
11:50 Fishbowl discussion: Future research directions
12:45 Wrap-up
Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):
Personalisation of the radio broadcast signal
Creating interaction bridges between radio creators and consumers
Use of different media to complement and augment the radio experience
Steps towards more immersive radio experiences
Use of object-based audio for personalised and immersive audio presentation
Using smart speakers (which may include screens in future versions) in the context of radio consumption
The potential role of radio in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) setups
Discovery and recommendation systems for radio and audio content
Big data analysis for profiling listeners and customising radio experiences
Technological support enabling new radio formats and programmes
We are interested to receive both academic and industrial contributions related to these topics. While demonstration of results and outcomes of experiments and validation are considered relevant for the workshop, this does not exclude submissions at earlier stages. That being said, the focus of this workshop is on contributions that have at least some technological support. Stated differently, we are not targeting submissions that are purely conceptual in nature or that are still residing in an ideation phase. We are interested in contributions that also describe approaches that did not work out, gaps in the state of the art that have been identified and lessons learned from creating (tools for) interactive radio experiences.
The expected outcome of the workshop is a collection of emerging topics and research collections related to interactive radio experiences, as collected in the discussion session of the workshop. The outcome will be documented as a poster to be presented in the main conference. In addition, the aim is to also create a more detailed write-up of the results.
The H2020 MARCONI project will run open pilots in late 2019. When feasible, selected contributors of submissions presented at the workshop could be invited to take part in those pilots.
Call for contributions
We call for two types of contributions for this workshop:
Short papers
Contributions describing original work in the area of interactive radio experiences. The work being described should have some technical background, and preferably contains evaluation results. The contribution should contain a discussion on who are the expected users of the solution, and how it fits in radio production workflows. Short papers should be submitted in ACM CHI Extended Abstracts Format with a length of up to 2,500 words.
Industry presentations
Contributions about work done at a broadcaster (or technology provider for radio). These contributions should focus on lessons learned, open challenges and future research work needed.
Proposals for industry presentations are submitted as an abstract (also describing whether documentation of trials/demos could be shown), and contain a short CV of the presenter(s).
Submission
Please submit your paper at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ire2019
The review process is single blind. For short papers, please use the ACM CHI Extended Abstracts Format template, for industry presentations any format is accepted, but please do provide the abstract as a PDF document.
Timeline
8th March 2019: EXTENDED submission deadline
5th April 2019: acceptance notification
5th June 2019: workshop day
Tentative workshop schedule
The workshop is planned as a half day event, with the following tentative schedule:
Introduction (30min)
Invited talk (30min): Invited talk from the industry
Presentations I (45min): A block of three short oral presentations, including short papers and industry presentations.
Presentations II (45min): Same format as Presentations I.
Discussion (60min): Discussion about the inputs from the presentations, and inputs from other workshop participants with the aim to identify research directions related to interactive radio experiences and define a set of future challenges.
Workshop organisers
Rik Bauwens, VRT
Hendrik Lievens, Hasselt University
Maarten Wijnants, Hasselt University
Iris Jennes, imec-SMIT
Chris Pike, BBC Research & Development
Werner Bailer, JOANNEUM RESEARCH
