Development of brainstem-evoked responses in congenital auditory deprivation

To compare the development of the auditory system in hearing and completely acoustically deprived animals, naive congenitally deaf white cats (CDCs) and hearing controls (HCs) were investigated at different developmental stages from birth till adulthood. The CDCs had no hearing experience before the acute experiment. In both groups of animals, responses to cochlear implant stimulation were acutely assessed. Electrically evoked auditory brainstem responses (E-ABRs) were recorded with monopolar stimulation at different current levels. CDCs demonstrated extensive development of E-ABRs, from first signs of responses at postnatal (p.n.) day 3 through appearance of all waves of brainstem response at day 8 p.n. to mature responses around day 90 p.n.. Wave I of E-ABRs could not be distinguished from the artifact in majority of CDCs, whereas in HCs, it was clearly separated from the stimulus artifact. Waves II, III, and IV demonstrated higher thresholds in CDCs, whereas this difference was not found for wave V. Amplitudes of wave III were significantly higher in HCs, whereas wave V amplitudes were significantly higher in CDCs. No differences in latencies were observed between the animal groups. These data demonstrate significant postnatal subcortical development in absence of hearing, and also divergent effects of deafness on early waves II–IV and wave V of the E-ABR

The MoCA Workbench: Support for Creativity in Movie Content Analysis

Semantic access to the content of a video is highly desirable for multimedia content retrieval. Automatic extraction of semantics requires content analysis algorithms. Our MoCA (Movie Content Analysis) project provides an interactive workbench supporting the researcher in the development of new movie content analysis algorithms. The workbench offers data management facilities for large amounts of video/audio data and derived parameters. It also provides an easy-to-use interface for a free combination of basic operators into more sophisticated operators. We can combine results from video track and audio track analysis. The MoCA Workbench shields the researcher from technical details and provides advanced visualization capabilities, allowing attention to focus on the development of new algorithms. The paper presents the design and implementation of the MoCA Workbench and reports practical experience

Le besoin de rendre les donnees scientifiques publiquement accessible - preoccupations et solutions possibles

4 pages[EN] The paper argues the necessity to render scientific data available in the public domain in order to prevent loss of knowledge associated with institutional discontinuities and poor archiving and conversely to support higher level analyses of biodiversity and ecosystems, often beyond the original scope of data collection. The concerns of data custodians are discussed, e.g. loss of competitiveness, publication by others, copyright and public acceptability of interpretations. Among the solutions suggested to address these are e.g. delayed public access, aggregation of data; proper use agreement and read-only access. It concludes that such public access policy should be in place for all scientific data collected with public funding.[FR] Ce travail souligne la nécessité de rendre les données scientifiques publiques afin d’éviter la perte des connaissances suite à des discontinuités institutionnelles et des faiblesses d’archivage, mais aussi afin de permettre des analyses plus poussées sur la biodiversité et les écosystèmes, souvent au-delà de ce qui avait été l’objectif initial de l’échantillonnage. Les préoccupations des gardiens de données sont examinés, telles que la perte de compétitivité, le risque de publication par d’autres, le droit d’auteur et l’acceptabilité publique des interprétations. Parmi les solutions proposées en vue de les prendre en compte figurent le retard d’accès public, l’aggrégation des données, des accords appropriés d’utilisation et un accès limité à la lecture. La conclusion est qu’il serait souhaitable d’avoir des politiques en place sanctionnant de telles solutions pour toutes les données scientifiques collectées avec des fonds publics.We thank David Cross for useful comments on the manuscript and the suggestion to stress advantages of data sharing in a dedicated paragraph. This study was supported by the European Commission, DG Research, within the scope of an INCO Accompanying Measure (ICA4-CT-2002-50001, ECOFISH).Peer reviewe

Automatic Movie Abstracting

Presented is an algorithm for automatic production of a video abstract of a feature film, similar to a movietrailer. It selects clips from the original movie based on detection of special events like dialogs, shots, explosions and text occurrences, and on general action indicators applied to scenes. These clips are then assembled to form a video trailer using a model of editing. Additional clips, audio pieces, images and text, which are also retrieved from the original video for their content, are added to produce a multimedia abstract. The collection of multime dia objects is presented on an HTML-page

Many more to come? Migration from and within Africa

The report provides an analysis of the past of African migration; the present patterns of migration within and from Africa; the individual intentions to migrate; the macro drivers of migration within and from Africa; the potential impacts of demography and development on migration within and from Africa in a medium term perspective. The main conclusion of this analysis in response to the question in the title of this science for policy report ‘Many more to come?’ is that at the moment there are no signs of an imminent exodus but that in a medium term perspective both development and demographic factors are likely to determine an increase of migratory pressure from Africa. What is not known is if this migratory pressure will manifest itself mostly within Africa or whether it will 'spill over' in international migrations directed in particular towards Europe due to geographical proximity and existing economic and migration ties.JRC.E.6-Demography, Migration and Governanc

Scene Determination based on Video and Audio Features

Determination of scenes from a video is a challenging task. When asking humans for it, results will be inconsistent since the term scene is not precisely defined. It leaves it up to each human to set shared attributes which integrate shots to scenes. However, consistent results can be found for certain basic attributes like dialogs, same settings and continuing sounds. We have therefore developed a scene determination scheme which clusters shots based on detected dialogs, same settings and similar audio. Our experimental results show that automatic deter mination of these types of scenes can be performed reliably

Abstracting Digital Movies Automatically

Large video on demand databases consisting of thousands of digital movies are not easy to handle: the user must have an attractive means to retrieve his movie of choice. For analog video, movie trailers are produced to allow a quick preview and perhaps stimulate possible buyers. This paper presents techniques to automatically produce such movie abstracts of digtial videos. We define a video abstract to be a sequence of still or moving images presenting the content of a video in such a way that the resprective target groupis rapidly provided with concise information about the content while the essential message of the original is preserved. We therefore mainly distinguish video abstracts consisting of a collection of salient still images and video abstracts consisting of a collection of scenes (sequences of images) which are therefore a video themselves. Still-images abstracting systems have been reported often in the literature. We propose a moving-images abstracting system, called VAbstract, and explain its concept, algorithmic realization and advantages. The paper also describes a series of abstracting experiments in which we compared our automatically produced abstracts to manually produced trailers of TV series