Two University researchers mentor young computer techies at the Google Summer of Code for a second year in a row
The international research network Red Hen Lab, which Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagan belong to, was one of the participating institutions in this global program
Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagan, researchers from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, participated in the Google Summer of Code program for the second year in a row. They were present as members of the international Red Hen Lab Consortium for the Study of Multimodal Communication, which brings together experts from more than 15 universities from different countries like the United States, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Norway.
The Google Summer of Code is a global program that awards scholarships to young computer techies around the world to collaborate with institutions, research groups and companies involved in developing code for freely available tools. The Google Summer of Code selects mentor institutions that present projects that the participants can collaborate on.
Specifically, Red Hen Lab develops code related to natural language processing, audio analysis, computer visualization and multimodal analysis. In 2016, experts from the network mentored five young people from countries like China and India.
Newscape, a vast library of television newsThe projects that Red Hen Lab promotes at the Google Summer of Code are related to their International NewsScape Library of Television News, which is a database with a huge corpus of spoken language that allows for the study of many multimodal aspects (gesture, prosody, images and sounds that accompany speech, television production effects, etc.) It is therefore an unprecedented tool that could revolutionize the study of speech and news coverage.
The library currently contains more than 250,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages and it incorporates an automatic search tool. For example, NewsScape allows one to compare the treatment of a subject on different channels and programs searching by keywords in their subtitles.
In terms of its role as a collection of Spanish-language news, it is currently the largest existing resource for the study of spoken Spanish with some 6,000 hours of television recordings and 40 million synchronized subtitles.