Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

Child Exploitation and the FIFA World Cup: A review of risks and protective interventions

This review was commissioned by the Child Abuse Programme (CAP) of Oak Foundation, a large international philanthropic organisation. It forms part of CAP’s effort to win societal rejection of practices such as the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents around major sporting events (MSEs), and to embed prevention and protection from exploitation as a permanent concern for global sports-related bodies. This review is intended to inform action in countries that host MSEs and to provide some suggestions on how hosting countries can avoid past pitfalls and mistakes in relation to child exploitation, especially economic and sexual exploitation. Importantly, it also acts as a call to action by those responsible for commissioning and staging MSEs, such as FIFA and the IOC, to anticipate, prepare for and adopt risk mitigation strategies and interventions. Positive leadership from these culturally powerful bodies could prove decisive in shifting hearts, minds and actions in the direction of improved safety for children

Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia

The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives

Issues Affecting Women Programme's New Strategy and Strategic Learning and Evaluation System

The Issues Affecting Women Programme (IAWP) developed a new strategic plan over the course of 2011 with two pillars: building women's rights movements and combating violence against women. These pillars branch out into four core Programme Areas: movement building; intra-familial violence; trafficking & exploitation; and violence in situations of crisis. Our Programme strives for impact at the individual, community and systemic levels. As illustrated in Figure 1, we do so by applying a comprehensive social change model to our work through three levers of change: promoting a human rights-based framework; creating networks and building/strengthening movements, and striving to transform individuals and systems. In order to affect change, we will leverage a variety of instruments grantmaking, including advocacy, learning, donor "education" and engagement, networking, coalition building, and gender mainstreaming across the Oak Foundation. This includes collaborating with peer donors and funding sectors to inform philanthropic practice in particular gender mainstreaming and to mobilize increasing resources for women and girls. 2012 will be the first year of implementation of the new strategy. A critical aspect of the implementation plan will be a strategic learning and evaluation system which will allow us to track our progress and evolve our strategy based on what the Programme and our learning. This is especially critical as the strategy calls for an experimental approach, hoping to determine tactics and interventions that work. Further, as our Programme works very closely with a community of partners in a cluster-approach, it is vital that key partners understand and support our learning and impact goals and work in partnership with us to answer key learning questions.A cluster approach refers to either a geographic or thematic group of grants and partners whose work is inter-related and iterative. Thus, the learning and evaluation from one grant is relevant to the work of the other organisations that form the cluster

Fact or Fiction: What Do We Really Know About Human Trafficking?

Statistics form the core of many policies, funding decisions and program designs around human trafficking into forced labor and debt bondage. But are the statistics accurate? How can people decide whether statements such as the following ones are supported by evidence?This Issue Paper looks at several instances in which unreliable claims such as these have driven actions and policies. It evaluates some research, statements and statistics presented by the media, government officials, the UN and other international institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and experts. It goes behind the headlines and raises questions about the actual scope and nature of the problem of human trafficking, as well as the need for reliable evidence. While it may seem irrelevant to spend time "bean counting" when so many people are facing human rights abuses, it is necessary to know the nature and extent of the problem before designing effective laws and programs

From media crossing to media mining

This paper reviews how the concept of Media Crossing has contributed to the advancement of the application domain of information access and explores directions for a future research agenda. These will include themes that could help to broaden the scope and to incorporate the concept of medium-crossing in a more general approach that not only uses combinations of medium-specific processing, but that also exploits more abstract medium-independent representations, partly based on the foundational work on statistical language models for information retrieval. Three examples of successful applications of media crossing will be presented, with a focus on the aspects that could be considered a first step towards a generalized form of media mining