The Blog of the International Computer Science Institute

At the ICSI Research Review, Gerald Friedland spoke about the challenges of performing empirical research on the astronomically large data set that is consumer-produced video. Here is Dr. Friedland's abstract:

Consumer-produced videos are the fastest-growing type of content on the Internet. YouTube claims that 72 hours of video are uploaded to its Web site alone every minute. Because the videos capture parts of the world, they are potentially useful for qualitative and quantitative empirical research on a larger scale than has ever been possible before. A major prerequisite to making social media videos usable for "field studies" is efficient and unbiased (e.g., keyword-independent) retrieval. More importantly, retrieval needs to go beyond simply finding objects to detecting more abstract concepts, such as “taking care of a car” or “winning a game that is not a card game.” Research on such a large corpus requires the creation of methods that exploit as many cues as possible from different modalities. ICSI has begun using novel acoustic methods to complement computer vision approaches. This talk summarizes ICSI’s research and progress in this area.

Eric Friedman gave a presentation on brain networks research at the ICSI Research Review. Professor Friedman is a scientist in the Algorithms Group and collaborates with researchers at UC San Francisco on brain network research. Together they are developing tools to analyze brain networks and improve understanding and diagnosis of neurological disorders. Here is the abstract of his talk:

Analyses of connectomes (brain networks) have become an important tool in the understanding and diagnosis of a variety of brain disorders. This talk provides an overview of research in this area, describing the construction of connectomes from MRI scans, their analysis using modern network theory (tools developed for the study of social and computer networks), and their applications to several disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injuries, and agenesis of the corpus callosum, a birth defect. This talk also covers some of the challenges and new directions in this area.

At ICSI's Research Review on October 12, Richard Karp, the director of the new Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and head of the Algorithms Group at ICSI, gave a talk about the planned affiliation between Simons Institute and ICSI.

Researchers have developed a method to identify rooms through audio recordings which were captured in them. Nils Peters, a DAAD-funded postdoctoral fellow, and Speech Group researchers Gerald Friedland and Howard Lei used audio recordings from seven different rooms – a bedroom, library, studio, two churches, great hall, and classroom – to develop an acoustic profile for each. These profiles were based on audio features that are frequently used by speech systems to automatically recognize words.