Intertain Experimental Research

The Waisda? (which translates to What’s that?) video labeling game was launched in May 2009. It invites users to tag what they see and hear and receive points for a tag if it matches a tag that their opponent has entered. Waisda? is the world’s first operational video labelling game. The underlying assumption is that tags are most probably valid if there’s mutual agreement. Waisda? managed to attract a large audience since its launch on the 19th of May 2009 the game was consulted by 9.198 unique visitors, gathered 340.551 tags describing 604 items, and the tags were added by a total of 2.296 players.

The first pilot of the game in 2009 was running with videos from the series Boer Zoekt Vrouw. The current pilot will run with Man Bijt Hond. You can be involved in various activities:

• setting up the game at the Intertain Lab computers
• working with the current code to set up the old and the new interface with the same videos
• creating bots to play automatically the game
• working on user motivation strategies to play the game longer and more often
• working on gaming strategies to increase the quality of the collected tags
• developing ideas for improving the gaming interface
• developing the post-gaming interface, where users can score additional points to improve their tags
• working on the analysis of the collected tags and their mapping to different vocabularies
• working on maintaining the community of taggers and players
• any other interesting idea you have in mind in the context of this project

Check out our current demo: http://waisda.nl/ (the more people log in at the same time, the more fun it is)

Duration: depending on which topic is chosen, average work is about 2-4 months
Contact: Lora Aroyo l.m.aroyo@vu.nl or Michiel Hildebrand michielh@few.vu.nl

The tactical repertoires of activist groups are broadening and the Internet offers an instant platform for debate over firm – activist group relationships. We will use data available on the Internet to study the way activist group networks try to target companies on issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the
web. We focus on activist networks around SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations.

The project aims at thee related activities:

• Data collection and data modeling to compile hyperlink networks, generating semantic maps and tracing implicit frames.
• Developing Methods for the analysis of activist groups’ tactics (a tactics database) and the networks they form. In doing so we want to combine hyperlink networks and semantic map analyses but also aim to get beyond these methods.
• Data analysis and interpretation to visualize large amount of data to end users for personal and group analysis

We are especially interested in involving students with interests in some of those (should not be all at the same time:

• social network analysis
• information visualization
• building APIs
• user interfaces
• hacking
• crawling data from various social network sites
• any other interesting idea you come up with in this context

Contact: Lora Aroyo l.m.aroyo@vu.nl

Amsterdams Museum (AM, former Amsterdam History Museum) is leading a project called Places of Interest, which should serve as an online Michelin Guide for interesting cultural, historic and touristic places to visit, discover and visit around Amsterdam. The project is developing an online platform where places (locations) of cultural and historical significance are central. We will link objects from different cultural heritage collections, e.g. Amsterdam Archive, National Monuments, Beeld & Geluid (Sound & Vision), etc. to actual physical locations in Amsterdam. An important part of the project is to provide the information in multiple languages and adaptable to various tourists needs.

Current aim is to develop:

• a mobile guide with a route planner with cultural and historical information – a location-based application for smartphones
• a multi-touch table application as a board game to explore cultural sites in Amsterdam
• a mobile tablet application combining aspects of the game and the mobile guide

You could work on any of the above tasks, including:

• developing innovative tour generation strategies for the mobile guide
• developing interactive tour guide or gaming interfaces for different platforms, e.g. mobile, tablet, touch table, interactive screens, PCs
• working on APIs for the data access, search and presentation
• any other interesting idea you come up with in this context

Duration: depending on which topic is chosen, average work is about 2-4 months
Contact: Lora Aroyo l.m.aroyo@vu.nl or Victor de Boer v.de.boer@vu.nl

Related project: AGORA

• Check out these videos for Amsterdam DNA: http://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/tours
• Check out the blog of the project: blog.plaatsenvanbetekenis.nl
• Watch a video, which illustrates some of the inspiration for this project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FgmZZanSc

The Agora project is a collaboration between the History and Computer Science departments at the VU, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Dutch national audiovisual archive Beeld en Geluid. The aim of Agora is to develop a social platform in which museum objects can be placed into an explicit (art)historic context & to allow users to create their own personal narratives in this digitally mediated public history. We model historical events, so that they can be used for linking objects from different museum and archive collections, e.g.

• show me all the artefacts related to the second world war;
• show me how they are related, etc.

In this project you could work on:

• development of innovative interactive search & browsing interfaces
• development of a social platform for exploring history narratives and matching objects with people
• development of games or quizes using the data generated in the project
• improving named entity and event extraction with background knowledge
• development of historic event thesaurus/ontology
• development on crawlers of historic events around the Web
• any other interesting idea you come up with in this context

Related projects: Places of Interest.

Expected effort: depending on which topic is chosen, the average work is about 2-4 months
Contact: Lora Aroyo l.m.aroyo@vu.nl or Marieke van Erp marieke@cs.vu.nl

• Check out our demos: http://agora.cs.vu.nl/demo/
• Watch this inspiration video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoDPC9YU5lM

We appreciate students with general ‘hacker’ attitude, experimental & exploration spirit, as well as curiosity & pragmatic development attitude.

The work that needs to be done is design, programming and experimentation with a new toolkit, let’s call it the COMBINE [1], that will do selective crawling for sense making tasks. That is a special kind of information retrieval task where you don’t know what you’re looking for. Something has happened and you have no clue to what happened, but step by step, aided by the system that in the background selectively gathers more and more knowledge, you make a sketch of the situation and find out what it was that you wanted to know.

In a sense, it is not Question Answering, but Answer Questioning, because it helps you to come up with the right questions. As opposed to relevance feedback it does not change the query to better suit your information need, but it (also) changes your information need to lead you to the most salient information.

We will try out the COMBINE to make sense of disruptive events, like environmental and natural disasters, riots, and armed conflicts like maritime piracy. Given very minimal descriptions we will try to guide the user to the complete storyline of what happened.

Tasks include, but are not limited to:

• Working on an interactive information retrieval user interface.
• Working on a context sensitive instance matching engine that can match events, actors, places, etc.
• Working on improving named entity and time extraction with context information.
• Working on a selective distributed crawler suite that makes use of existing search engine APIs to seed the crawler.

contact: Willem Robert van Hage W.R.van.Hage@vu.nl