DR. MARTHA LARSON
We are thrilled that Dr. Martha Larson, Professor and Chair: Multimedia Information Technology at Radboud University, is joining us for the opening keynote. Dr. Larson’s work represents the exciting innovations that are happening today that merge the work of automation development and media. The possibilities that are on the horizon of using artificial intelligence and automation to assist in our description and access are phenomenal. Dr. Larson will present her keynote lecture on Friday October 4th at 09:30 in Theatre 1.
Martha Larson is Professor Professor of Multimedia Information Technology at the Radboud University Nijmegen and works in the Multimedia Computing Group at TU Delft. Her research focuses on search engines and systems for retrieval and recommendation that provide users with intelligent access to multimedia content. Her expertise lies in speech and language technologies and how meaning is expressed and interpreted by humans. Much of her research has concentrated on methods for automatically structuring audio and for indexing audio using speech recognition techniques. Recently, her work has focused increasingly on multimedia in social networks and on human computation, including crowdsourcing. Martha started working in the area of speech recognition and multimedia retrieval in 2000 and her formative experiences included time spent as a visiting researcher at the Technical Informatics department at the University of Duisburg and as an intern at IBM Watson Research Center. Before joining Delft University of Technology, she researched and lectured in the area of audio-visual retrieval at Fraunhofer IAIS and at the University of Amsterdam. She has participated as both researcher and research coordinator in a number of projects including the EU-projects CrowdRec, CUbRIK, PetaMedia, MultiMatch, and SHARE and is co-chair of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Multimedia. Her most influential early work was focused on developing vocabulary-independent speech-based access for large radio archives within an industry project during her time at Fraunhofer. Martha holds an MA and PhD in theoretical linguistics from Cornell University and a BS in Mathematics (concentration in Electrical Engineering) from the University of Wisconsin.
KEYNOTE ABSTRACT:
WHAT THE ARCHIVE CAN DO FOR AI…AND WHAT AI CAN DO FOR THE ARCHIVE
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the ability to automate tedious tasks in workflows needed for the creation, maintenance, and disclosure of audiovisual archives. Martha’s talk will argue that we should work to improve the knowledge flow from the archive to the groups who design and develop AI-based solutions. She will discuss examples of projects that have been carried out as collaborations between archivists and AI researchers over the past two decades. A common thread throughout these projects has been that AI research depends on the archive to succeed. Without a thorough understanding of what archivists need to support their work, AI research and development lack direction as well as ways of measuring how well they are solving underlying problems. The way forward is to expand the opportunity to collaborate with archivists to a wider range of researchers working on AI systems. The examples covered in this talk suggest that on its own, without the archive, AI overlooks certain types of data and certain tasks, and also misses out on important opportunities to create algorithms that provide direct support for archivists.