We have two vacancies on the Bridge project, for a (fully funded) PhD student and for a scientific programmer, both for a four year period. The Bridge (Building Rich Links to Enable Television History Research) project addresses access to television archives. Television is not an isolated medium, but a key node in a complex information landscape. From an exclusive focus on producing radio, television and publishing program guides, broadcasting organizations have moved to cross-media production companies where users are directly involved in online follow-up discussions. To be meaningful, these additional materials need to be cross-linked to the traditionally archived television materials so as to arrive at a meaningful web of information.

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The University's ICTO program (ICT for education) has decided to fund a project lead by Martha Larson aimed at generating re-usable snippets from video lectures. The proposal (and planned work) is based in part on ISLA-tv.

Listening to ''Sketch For Summer'', by The Durutti Column (Play Count: 68)

Krisztian Balog will defend his PhD thesis People Search in the Enterprise on September 30, this year.

Listening to ''Manian'', by Rokia Traore (Play Count: 3)

VideoCLEF is a new track for CLEF 2008. This track aims to develop and evaluate tasks in processing video content in a multilingual environment.

The VideoCLEF track for 2008 is centered on the Vid2RSS2008 task. This comprises a number of subtasks including topic classification performed on dual language videos. The longer term overall objective of VideoCLEF is to combine and extend these subtasks and perform completely automatic generation of RSS feeds specific to a particular information need and personalized to a particular language preference. The video data for Vid2RSS2008 are Dutch television documentaries and contain Dutch as a dominant language, but also contain a high proportion of spoken English (i.e., interview guests often speak in English).

The main task for Vid2RSS2008 involves assigning topic class labels to videos of television episodes. Speech recognition transcripts, metadata records (containing title and description) and video keyframes (and shot boundaries) for each episode are supplied. The output format is a set of RSS-feeds, one for each topic class. The RSS-feeds are created by concatenating the metadata records for the episodes assigned to a given topic class. (The RSS-feed format is trivial to generate and is used as an output format because it can be easily visualized in a feed aggregator.)

There is one mandatory task: classifying videos of television episodes using speech transcripts only.

There are several optional tasks: classifying episodes using both speech-transcripts and metadata (or potentially including visual content), translation of content to generate feeds in English (or another language of your choice), selection of keyframes to represent individual episodes, and shot boundary and keframe extraction from the video source.

The development data (10 episodes / ca. 6 hours) and sample classes will be released at the end of March along with sample topic categories. The test data (40 episodes /ca. 24 hours) will be released at end of April with the test topic categories. The submission date for the task will be set towards the end of June. The CLEF 2008 Workshop will be held on 17-19 September 2008 in Aarhus, Denmark, in conjunction with the 12th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2008). More information about Vid2RSS2008 is available at: http://ilps.science.uva.nl/Vid2RSS/. Participants in VideoCLEF are required to register with CLEF. Registration for CLEF 2008 is now open, full information about CLEF can be found at: http://www.clef-campaign.org/.

Listening to ''For Energy Infinite'', by Mazarin (Play Count: 17)

Due to mail server problems yesterday, mail that was sent to me recently has been irrecoverably lost. If you're waiting for a reply, please try again. See this page for some background.

Listening to ''Please Let Me Sleep'', by The Durutti Column (Play Count: 22)

We have a number of vacancies within the ILPS group; 2 positions related to the search and mining cultural heritage (CH) information, and an assistant professorship in applied language technology. Information about the CH positions can be obtained from Dr Martha Larson; more information is available here. Information about the assistant professorship can be obtained from me; the ad will be available soon.

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Gilad Mishne's PhD thesis Applied Text Analytics for Blogs is available now. Gilad's defense is planned for April 27, 2007, at 10:00 in the Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgwal 231, Amsterdam



Listening to ''It's Wonderful'', by The Durutti Column (Play Count: 20)

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson's PhD thesis Focused Information Access using XML Element Retrieval is available now. Börkur's defense is planned for December 14.



Listening to ''Belgian Friends'', by The Durutti Column (Play Count: 4)

Valentin Jijkoun (or Zhizhkun)'s PhD thesis Graph Transformations for Natural Language Processing is available now. His defense is planned for November 28.



Listening to ''Symphony No. 5, in C sharp minor, V. Rondo-Finale'', by Riccardo Chailly; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Play Count: 11)