The Rashomon Project:

Online Toolkit for Multi-Perspective Video Chronologies

**October 2012: Rashomon Project Among Eight Winning Ideas for Apps from the Future by the National Science Foundation / Mozilla Ignite Challenge: https://blog.mozillaignite.org/2012/09/ideation-winners/.

Recent protests, political unrest, and news events have been well documented with digital video and photos posted online on sites like YouTube. As smartphones grow in popularity, this trend will accelerate. Yet it remains difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of contested events from the many individual photos and video accounts. The result is that viewers often draw contradictory conclusions by seeing only parts of the available material. The Rashomon Project is developing an online toolkit that will facilitate rapidly assembly and public review of "Multi-Perspective Chronologies" where many videos are time-aligned and displayed simultaneously. Initial experiments with vanilla iPhone and Android video show that temporal metadata embedded in the digital files can be used to do a very close alignment. Once they are closely aligned, audio signals from video can be processed to further refine the alignment. Such a toolkit will benefit the public, citizen journalists, and ideally courts or commissions charged with investigating disputed incidents. Our goal is to allow the public (potentially hundreds of thousands of viewers) to gain a much better understanding of contested events from user-generated photos and video than is currently possible.

Advisor

Leila Hilal

Leila Hilal is director of the New America Foundation Middle East Task Force, which covers in-depth analysis and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa. Ms. Hilal has consulted widely and published on conflict mediation policies in the Middle East, including for the Chatham House, International Development Research Center, International Center for Transitional Justice, Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, and the Euro- Med Human Rights Network. Ms. Hilal obtained her J.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School and LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

(Dec 10, 2012): We are making Rashomon available to selected groups during development. If your group is interested in using Rashomon to document an event, please contact Camille Crittenden: ccrittenden@berkeley.edu

Contact: Ken Goldberg Faculty Directory, CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative IEOR and EECS, College of Engineering, UC Berkeley Dept of Art Practice and School of Information, UC Berkeley Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology, UC San Francisco Contact: 425 Sutardja Dai Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1758
twitter: @Ken_Goldberg | g+: http://j.mp/Ken_Goldberg
(510) 643-9565 | goldberg@berkeley.edu | http://goldberg.berkeley.edu