MIT Develops A Foundation For Text-Based Video Search
MIT is celebrating its 150th anniversary today by launching a site to showcase its landmark achievements called MIT150. One of the projects featured on the site is titled Infinite History, the result of several years’ work in collecting interviews from distinguished individuals whose work has shaped and been shaped by the institution. Their interviews are accompanied by an interactive media player that incorporates text transcripts of the talks, hyperlinked to allow the viewer to jump directly to the appropriate portion of the video when any of the words are clicked.
We’ve seen hyperlinked text transcripts show up in places like TED.com, but with Infinite History, we’re now seeing this concept develop into a working searchable database. As demonstrated in the screenshot below, visitors are able to search the archives for keywords, which are then returned to the user by interview, with clickable cues that display where the searched term appears in each talk:
MIT alum C. J. Johnson studied the challenges of speech recognition during his graduate work, going on to create a firm called 3Play Media, which served as the foundation for Infinite History. Johnson explains below:
3Play uses commercial speech-recognition technology to produce an initial draft of a video file and then farms the corrections out to subcontractors — generally recruited online — who work remotely. What makes the process cost effective is the technology we began developing at MIT, a Web application that allows contractors to quickly recognize and correct errors.
| TOPICS: | Arts & Culture, Design & Architecture, Education, Media & Publishing, Science, Web & Technology |
| TAGS: | 3Play Media, CJ Johnson, Infinte History, MIT, MIT150, search, speech recognition, video |
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Kyle Studstill is a regular contributor to PSFK.com. Kyle works as a consultant working at the New York office of PSFK. His background is in analysis, from the analysis of cultural and technological change, to analysis of consumer and human insight, to military intelligence analysis with the US Intelligence and Security Command. Kyle loves the future, much like O'Brien from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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