bbrel
burton bradstock research labs
past projects
current research and development
Television in Words
(TIWO)
Funded by: EPSRC
GR/R67194/01, £55,315, January 2002-2005.
Principal
Investigator: Dr Andrew Salway
Aim: To develop a computational understanding of
narrative in multimedia systems.
Application:
Technology to assist the production of audio description, and technology
to reuse audio description for video retrieval and browsing applications
for films.
Partners: Royal National Institute of the
Blind, the BBC, ITFC and Softel
Outputs: Five
publications to date. Novel technologies for browsing and analysing
films. Technology transfer is under discussion with BBC Access
Services, BBC Archive and Philips. Three PhD
dissertations.
Code Zebra
Funded by: various Canadian agencies and
international companies, 2002-2005.
Project Leader:
Sara Diamond (then Artistic Director, Banff New Media Institute; now
President Ontario College of Art and Design).
Aim:
Language visualisation to study and enhance collaboration in online chat
environments.
My role: I led workshops with
scientists, artists and engineers on corpus-based analysis of online
conversations and consulted on technologies for text classification,
neural networks and software development
strategies.
Output: Software for online chat with
enhanced language visualisation.
Analysing Image-Text
Relations
Collaboration with: Dr
Radan Martinec, University of the Arts, London
Aim: To
develop a semiotic theory of image-text relations that is grounded in
semiotic theory and that can be applied in the development of multimedia
computing systems for image retrieval, hypermedia browsing and multimedia
generation.
Output: Publication in Journal of
Visual Communication.
Information Extraction from
the Tate Gallery website
Collaboration
with: Rachel Bhandari, Tate Gallery
Aim: To
identify linguistic patterns in a 1,000,000 word corpus of painting
captions and artist biographies that could be exploited for automatic
image indexing.
Output:
Seminar at Tate Britain and a refereed international conference
paper.
Knowledge-based Annotation and
Browsing of Dance Videos
Collaboration
with: Department of Dance Studies, Uni. of
Surrey
Aim: to analyse the language used by experts
to describe and interpret dance sequences, and to extract information from
such texts in order to index digital dance video
.
Output: PhD dissertation, 'Video
Annotation: the role of collateral text.' A prototype dance video
annotation and browsing system.
Scene-of-Crime Information
System (SOCIS)
Funded by: EPSRC
GR/M89041/01, £326,316, 1999-2002
Principal
Investigators: Prof. Khurshid Ahmad (Uni. of Surrey) and Prof.
Yorick Wilks (Uni. of Sheffield)
Aim: To explore the
link between language and vision
computationally.
Application: Automatic generation of
representations of digital images from the spoken descriptions of experts,
leading to an image retrieval system for crime-scene
investigations.
My role: I contributed to the proposal
when I was a PhD student. In 2000 I was responsible for managing the
project RA and PhD students, chairing project round table meetings with UK
scene-of-crime officers and managers, and conducting data elicitation
exercises.
Safe Design with Information
Systems (Safe-DIS)
Funded by:
EPSRC / DTI GR/H95235, £220,000, 1994-7
Principal
Investigators: Prof. K. Ahmad (Uni. of Surrey) and Dr R. Price
(Wallingford Software)
Aim / Application: To enhance
the role of information systems in making safety-related information
available to design engineers in a timely and effective
manner.
My role: I worked as Research Assistant with
responsibility for project management (there was another RA and a PhD
student) and for organising meetings with an industry round table.
The project was awarded top marks for ‘Management and Use of
Resources’. My research focus was on a corpus-based study of the
‘language of safety’.