ACM Multimedia SSCS 2010 Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

The Fourth Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech took place on 29 October 2010 at ACM Multimedia. Papers were presented about techniques for speech retrieval, speaker role recognition, spoken term detection and concept detection. Invited speakers addressed challenges for the future of spoken content retrieval, including interview data, multimedia archives and the Spoken Web. The demonstrations were a highlight of the workshop. These were first introduced in a boaster session and then presented to workshop participants in an interactive session. Here's the Wordle Word cloud made from the title and the abstracts of all the papers presented!

Currently, we are getting ready for an upcoming special issue on searching speech in ACM Transactions on Information Systems.

Looking for a Scientific Programmer

I'm starting a cool new project on speech-based access to images, but I am in need of a programmer. I'm trying to find the right person -- ideally I would like someone who also had an interest in the process of design and evaluation of the system. The person probably just finished their masters and is trying to get an idea of an area for a PhD, or just generally thinks that one year of experience in the Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab at Delft University of Technology would be enriching. Unfortunately, trying to get someone like this just led to me loosing my dream candidate to a PhD program in Groningen. Yikes! The project's starting on 1 September 2010.

The formal qualifications are listed below. Thanks in advance if you help me find a match between my needs and a candidate.

Profile for scientific programmer in the Delft Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab at the TU-Delft
Contact: Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl

• Experience developing web applications using a web development stack, (one of LAMP, Java/Tomcat, ASP.NET/C#)
• Experience with designing HTTP-based server APIs
• Alternatively or in addition: Experience with html/Javascript/AJAX/Flash/Silverlight
• Alternatively or in addition: Interest or experience with Android
• Experience with speech recognition, dialog systems, audio spatialization a benefit
• Experience with programming in a research environment a plus
• Proficiency in English, both spoken and written

The person needs to be an EU citizen, but if I find a great candidate who is not, I am willing to attempt to "battle the system" to get him/her.

P.S. This post represents an experiment in making use of my social network. If was were more up-to-date I suppose I'd be using Linked-In or Facebook, but neither are come naturally to me, somehow.

Time to play

What's the difference between a single image and a video? Well, video is a timed medium, otherwise called a time-continuous or time-synchronized medium. It's impossible to take in at a glance, and in order to appreciate it, or derive any benefit from it at all, you have to devote time to watching it.

Watching would be more efficient if we didn't need to watch from end to end, but rather had some sort of a road map for the video: an intelligent players that would give us signposts, provide us with an indication of where the video could be most interesting.

I was invited to give a position statement at a session on search at ICTDelta 2010, a larger IT event in the Netherlands. I took the position that we need to have intelligent multimedia players that give us clues as to where the video is the most interesting as my position. The position statement was in Dutch, but I made an English version in the form of a YouTube video.

Well, behind every joke there's some truth

The winner of the ACM MultiMedia Grand Challenge at ACM MultiMedia 2009 was "Joke-O-Mat: Browsing Sitcoms Punchline by Punchline." This application uses speaker diarization and laughter detection to annotate sitcoms and present them to the viewer in an interface that allows presents jokes ranked by laugh reaction, grouped by character and associated with context. Joke-O-Mat underlines the importance of the speech track for multimedia access.



What to do when multimedia doesn't contain a laugh track? In VideoCLEF 2009 we ran a narrative peak detection task. The goal was to detect points in videos where viewers perceive heightened dramatic tension. Today, CLEF working notes, tomorrow our own Peak-O-Mat?