IetsNieuws: Are you a great newscaster?

Are you as good a newscaster as the legendary Philip Bloemendal?
Are you as good a newscaster as the legendary Philip Bloemendal?

In the context of the Observe project and Lukas Hulsbergen’s thesis, we developed the interactive game/web toy “IetsNieuws“. In the game participants are asked to do voiceovers for Sound and Vision’s OpenImages videos. One player takes on the role of a newscaster, while the other player remixes news footage. Based on this players’ performance, he/she is presented an achievement screen.

Because of the limited game explanation, players created their own style of play leading to “emergent gameplay. An experiment was done to examine whether players experience the relationship between each other when playing the game in the presence of an audience as competitive or cooperative. The results of the observations during the experiment and feedback through a questionnaire show that the subjects saw the other player as a team player and not as an opponent.

Play the game at http://tinyurl.com/ietsnieuwsgame

For more information, read Lukas’ Thesis Iets Nieuws – Lukas Hulsbergen (in Dutch) or have a look at the code on github. Watch players play the game in the experimental setting https://youtu.be/64xi63d9iCc

 

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Clarin video showcases Dutch Ships and Sailors project

The CLARIN framework commissioned the production of dissemmination videos showcasing the outcomes of the individual CLARIN projects. One of these projects was the Dutch Ships and Sailors project, a collaboration between VU Computer Science, VU humanities and the Huygens Institute for National History. In this project, we developed a heterogeneous linked data cloud connecting many different maritime databases. This data cloud allows for new types of integrated browsing and new historical research questions. In the video, we (Victor de Boer together with historians Jur Leinenga and Rik Hoekstra) explain how the data cloud was formed and how it can be used by maritime historians.

CLARIN Dutch Ships & Sailors from CLARIN-NL (Dutch, with Dutch or English subtitles)  See also other DSS-related posts on this website.

 

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I am an Associate Professor (UHD) at the User-Centric Data Science group at the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) I am also a co-director of the Cultural AI Lab. In my research, I combine (Semantic) Web technologies with Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction to tackle research challenges in various domains. These include Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development (ICT4D). I am currently involved in the following research projects:

  • HEDGE-IoT: IoT data conversion and enrichment; user-centric and explainable machine learning
  • HAICu: Perspective-aware AI to make digital heritage collections more accessible.
  • InTaVia: making linked cultural heritage and biographical data usable for end-users
  • Pressing Matter: developing data models to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives.
  • Interconnect: machine learning on IoT and smart energy knowledge graphs 
  • Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect
  • CARPA: responsible production using crowdsourcing in Africa

For other and older research projects, see the “research” tab.

Paper about automatic labeling in IJDL

mompeltOur paper  “Evaluating Unsupervised Thesaurus-based Labeling of Audiovisual Content in an Archive Production Environment” was accepted for publication in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL). This paper, co-authored with Roeland Ordelman and Josefien Schuurman reports on a series of information extraction experiments carried out at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV). Specifically, in the paper we report on a two-stage evaluation of unsupervised labeling of audiovisual content using subtitles. We look at how such an approach can provide acceptable results given requirements with respect to archival quality, authority and service levels to external users.

tess_alg

For this, we developed a text extraction pipeline (TESS), pictured here which extracts key terms and matches them to the NISV thesaurus, the GTAA. This journal paper is an extended version of the paper previously accepted at the TPDL conference and here provide an analysis of the term extraction after being taken into production, where we focus on performance variation with respect to term types and television programs. Having implemented the procedure in our production work-flow allows us to gradually develop the system further and to also assess the effect of the transformation from manual to automatic annotation from an end-user perspective.

The paper will appear on the Journal site shortly. A final draft version of the paper can be found here: deboer_ijdl2016evaluating_draft [PDF].

 

 

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One-off lecture Social Web

Around 40 students joined this year’s “bachelor’s for a day” for the VU IMM programme this year. As in previous years, I give a 45 minute lecture and construct a hands-on session around “The Social Web”. Each year I do a non-scientific survey of Social Web use among the -mostly- 17 year old attendees. This year’s outcome:

  • Everybody still uses Facebook (even though for the last couple of years, there are some murmurs about abandoning it
  • Everybody uses Whatsapp. No surprise there
  • More than half of the students use Snapchat.
  • About 1/4 of students use LinkedIn.
  • About 1/8 of students actively uses Twitter (one post in the last 3 months)
  • Most students have heard of Hyves, but noone ever used it
  • Almost noone has heard of Second Life 🙂
  • Noone heard of Schoolbank.nl

You can find my slides below. The handson session can be found here

 

 

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