SpinVox (again)

SpinVox's voicemail/speech-to-text service becomes increasingly important for my mobile communications. Today I noticed that although they had screwed up the names (a person name and a company name) on the message, they actually had just spelled them phonetically. The person who was calling was a stranger so I had no way to know the correct name. However, I took a few educated guesses about the possibly correct spellings based on the assumption that the resulting spelling was a phonetic representation of the input string. And I was right! Within seconds of googling, I found both the person's name and this person's affiliated company name.
A suggestion for SpinVox: Maybe run Soundex on your interface and pick the most frequently correct spelling for the names the engine recognizes. I think that would considerably improve performance.

Automated Information Extraction in Media Production

2nd International Workshop on Automated Information Extraction in Media Production (AIEMPro09)

Special Session at WIAMIS 2009

London, 6-8 May 2009

After the successful exordium at DEXA 2008, the second edition of AIEMPro will have the form of a special session at WIAMIS 2009 (The International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services)

Tentative deadlines:

Paper submission: 11 January 2009
Notification of reviews: 1 February 2009 Final camera ready (this is a STRICT DEADLINE): 13th February 2009

Areas of Interest (not limited to):

· Efficient and real-time audiovisual indexing in acquisition
· Automated repurposing of archived material on new media channels
· Automated news production
· Efficient indexing and retrieval of multimedia streams
· Automatic speech recognition and personality identification
· Collaborative systems for media production
· Information Retrieval systems from Multimedia Archives
· Automated material copyright infraction detection and material fingerprinting
· Content summarisation (e.g., sports highlights)
· Audiovisual genre and editorial format detection and characterisation
· Cross-media indexing and integration
· Content segmentation tools (e.g., shot and scene segmentation)
· Evaluation methods for multimedia analysis tools

Prospective authors must submit their work following the WIAMIS formatting instructions (http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/submissions.php) and send the paper in PDF format DIRECTLY to the organisers by e-mail.

Organisers:
Alberto Messina (RAI CRIT) a.messina@rai.it
Jean-Pierre Evain (European Broadcasting Union) evain@ebu.ch
Robbie De Sutter (VRT medialab) robbie.desutter@vrt.be

SpinVox

I signed up to try SpinVox's voicemail-to-text service on my mobile phone. They quickly set that up and I was impressed that it's a complimentary demo. Performance seemed to be lacking in proper name entity recognition whereas not so much in catching exotic accents. I had a Danish friend leave a voicemail for me with the details of our following day's meeting. SpinVox caught everything my Danish friend said but for her (Danish) name, my (Greek) name, and the name of the place (unfortunately for SpinVox we were meeting at a local Starbucks, so no excuses for not catching that! /wahaha.......... /hmm).
To SpinVox's credit, the call was placed in the middle of the street, a lot of noise in the background and the caller had an accent.
However, in actual conditions (if I really depended on that converted to text voicemail for my meeting) their performance was poor and the text I got useless as unfortunately the proper names SpinVox missed were critical information. For instance, I wouldn't know who was calling since they screwed up their name, and I wouldn't know where she wanted to meet because SpinVox didn't catch the place name. So in that respect, although an admirable effort, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Maybe users could build their own local dictionaries of names based on their -say- address books. They could upload to the SpinVox's server a dictionary of names pronounced with the particular user's accent to help augment SpinVox's central server's dictionary of names and accents. Still, a lot of real-time speech comes with a high unpredictability factor as various callers are expected to call the particular user. Only an adaptive speech recognition system could actually learn from ad hoc input in order to improve itself. Imagine for instance if every time I had a new caller, SpinVox could learn to memorize and subsequently recognize their accent and linguistic model; so, if your boss has an American accent and usually talks about project XYZ and meeting you at Room 234B in Building ABC, SpinVox could learn to expect this type of "talk" (and accent) when he next calls you. That would of course improve speech recognition accuracy and it would involve the successful marriage of a memory (lexicon/vocabulary + accents) with an adaptive learning algorithm.

Stargazer

Party time in the sky! It started on Nov 24th with a Venus, Jupiter and crescent Moon Conjunction and continues tonight Dec 13th with a Venus, Jupiter and Full Moon conjunction.
Astrologically speaking, this triple conjunction of the planet of Love and Money (Venus), of abundance and generosity of spirit (Jupiter) and the Moon (emotions, feelings, psychological make-up) is in general an auspicious aspect. However, it doesn't tell the entire story. The Dec 12th Full Moon in Gemini forms a rather threatening square with Mars in Sagittarius and together form a second square with the opposition of Saturn in Virgo and Uranus in Pisces. Two oppositions squaring each other form a "Grand Cross". Anger (Mars), accidents (Uranus), health (Gemini) and money (Saturn) generate issues boiling under pressure. Take care, everybody!

Riots in Greece

What's up with that?
People outside Greece wonder whether the horrendous ("accidental") police shooting of a teenager can really cause such fuss. If anyone knows Greeks and their (recent) history, one knows that Greeks just don't tolerate fools. At the same time, Greeks don't tolerate anarchy and, yes, a part of this has been taken advantage by the anarchists groups in Exarheia (Athens). But if you know Athens like I do, what's new!
The police shooting in Greece brings to mind a similar police shooting in London a few years ago. Again, an accident by the police. Again, no apologies given initially as the Brazilian guy was thought to be one of the terrorists the police was going after. But because he was not a UK citizen, the matter could not close as easily (or "accidentally") as it opened. There were protests and international intervention and inquiries. One must wonder how the UK government would have handled it if the police had accidentally killed a UK citizen...

CFP CoNLL-2009

The Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009) will be held in Boulder, CO, USA on June 4 and 5, 2009.

And because I love good ol' Greek music...

Here's a treat...

And a personal attempt at translating the lyrics in English:

If you are a small cranky rock
in a desert
if you are a lonely cyclamen
on the top of a mountain
if you are a forgotten star
in the sky
how do you want me to know?

If you are night-time rain
falling in the ocean
if you are boat smoke
in the sea
if you are an old drawing
on a church wall
how do you want me to know?

If you are a thorn
in my heart
Me loving you so
How do you want me to know?

(Greek lyrics by Kostas Karidis, music by Spanos and singing by Karalis)

Temple Bar

Temple Bar is the reason people from all over the world visit Dublin.
Besides the innumerable pubs, bars and clubs, Temple Bar is simply gorgeous. Check my pictures and you will see what I mean :).

Here's a typical corner in the Old Town (aka Temple Bar). Watch the gorgeous wall colors:


In this picture you can actually see the canal at the far end of the cobblestone street:


I just love it how almost all Temple Bar streets end at the face of beautiful old buildings:

Saint Patrick's Cathedral

Although I posted pictures of the buildings in the vicinity of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, I realized I didn't post a photo of the Cathedral itself. I promise to post a good one soon. /blush

and one more...

One of the Christchurch Square buildings: