Guest Speaker Dr. Joachim Köhler

On 3 September 2013, 10:30-11:30 in S2|02 A126, Dr. Joachim Köhler will give an invited talk.

Title: Rich and Linked Media in the eHumanities

Abstract

Classically, a strong focus of eHumanities research has been on resources that are available in

textual formats which are most commonly associated with electronic libraries. Due to the increased and increasing “mediatization” of different forms of culture and communication, it has become apparent that other types of media are of equally central importance for the humanities. Making them accessible for research is often much more laborious than for textual data and researchers can benefit even more from electronic support. From audio- visual media to digitized artefacts, storage and intelligent analysis technology has advanced up to a point where it can be a powerful research companion for the humanities disciplines. In the talk, I will emphasize this point based on examples from several recent projects involving audio-visual and interlinked media, reporting on collaborations between computer scientists, (psycho-)linguistics and neuropsychologists. Beyond individual projects, we will move on to a larger scope and highlight the benefits of the recently launched German digital library as a central hub for material and artefacts of central importance to the humanities in times of Big Data. Given that context, the talk draws a picture of how to make use of that data in eHumanities by applying technologies for integrated content enrichment. Further, I will give a short overview about the EU project Succeed which has the objective to provide digitization tools and services for the European digital library activities.

Short CV:

Dr. Joachim Köhler received his diploma and Dr.-Ing. degree in Communication Engineering from the RWTH Aachen and Munich University of Technology in 1992 and 2000, respectively. In 1993 he joined the Realization Group of ICSI in Berkeley where he investigated robust speech processing algorithms. From 1994 until 1999 he worked in the speech group of the research and development centre of the SIEMENS AG in Munich. The topic of his Ph.D. thesis is multilingual speech recognition and acoustic phone modelling. Since June 1999 he has been with Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin and head of the department NetMedia. His current research interests include pattern recognition and speech recognition, spoken document and multimedia retrieval and multimedia information systems. He has published over 50 papers in the area of speech and multimedia research and served as reviewer in several speech related conferences. In 2008/09 he acts as co-chair of the SIGIR workshop Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS). Currently he acts as co-ordinator of the European IST IP project LinkedTV.