Two ICS researchers serve as mentors at the Google Summer of Code for the third consecutive year
Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagán are part of the Red Hen Lab, an international consortium that participates in the global program
FOTO: Manuel Castells
Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagán, researchers from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the third consecutive year. They participated as mentors from the international consortium Red Hen Lab for the Study of Multimodal Communication, which brings together experts from more than 15 universities from different countries such as the United States, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Norway.
Google Summer of Code is a global program that awards scholarships to young people around the world to collaborate with institutions, research groups and companies dedicated to developing code for free software tools. This year GSoC awarded 10 scholarships to international coders for Red Hen projects, seven more than the first year.
Red Hen Lab’s projects consist in developing automatic text processing (natural language processing), sound and image tools that can be incorporated into its NewsScape International Library of Television News.
In 2015, the focus of the GSoC-Red Hen Scholarships was audio analysis, while in 2016 the project focused on learning machines within the field of computer vision. In 2017, the project aimed to create a multimodal processing system to extract information about human communicative behavior from text, audio and video.
NewsScape is a large corpus of spoken language that allows for the study of a variety of multimodal aspects (i.e., gesture, prosody, images and sounds that accompany speech, effects of television production, etc.). As such, it is an unprecedented tool that could revolutionize the study of discourses and information coverage.
It currently contains some 340,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages on which automatic searches can be carried out. For example, NewsScape allows researchers to compare the treatment of a topic on different channels and programs by searching for keywords in their subtitles.
It is an unprecedented resource for the study of spoken Spanish, with about 6,000 hours of television and 40 million synchronized subtitles.