The Blog of the International Computer Science Institute

Damian Borth is visiting ICSI’s Audio and Multimedia team on a postdoctoral fellowship within ICSI's German visiting agreement, which is funded through the FITweltweit program, sponsored by the BMBF and administered by the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Program.

He first visited California during a student exchange stay at UC Santa Barbara while working toward his degree in engineering, which he received in Germany in 2003. After working in Taiwan for a couple of years, he returned to Germany to study computer science.

Björn Fritsche is visiting FrameNet for six months on a fellowship through the DAAD FITworldwide program, which also funds our German visiting agreement. He is a PhD candidate at the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf.

Xiaoyong Wei, an associate professor at Sichuan University in China, has joined Audio and Multimedia for a year. Xiaoyong’s research works toward systems that can analyze visual information in videos and respond to search queries about their content. His group’s goal is to build reasoning systems that parallel the ways humans think about the world in order to take a query submitted by a user, understand it by matching it to a keyword that the video search system recognizes, and respond to the query with videos that match.

On October 22, Audio and Multimedia researchers presented a system that analyzes audio recordings and identifies their “scenes” – descriptions of where or in what circumstances they were recorded, such as a supermarket and a restaurant – at the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in New Paltz, New York.