Dutch speech recognition in multimedia information retrieval

As data storage capacities grow to nearly unlimited sizes thanks to ever ongoing hardware and software improvements, an increasing amount of information is being stored in multimedia and spoken-word collections. Assuming that the intention of data storage is to use (portions of) it some later time, these collections must also be searchable in one way or another

Local orbital angular momentum revealed by spiral phase plate imaging in transmission electron microscopy

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light and matter waves is a parameter that is getting increasingly more attention over the past couple of years. Beams with a well defined OAM, the so-called vortex beams, are applied already in e.g. telecommunication, astrophysics, nanomanipulation and chiral measurements in optics and electron microscopy. Also the OAM of a wave induced by the interaction with a sample, shows great potential of interest. In all these experiments it is crucial to measure the exact (local) OAM content of the wave, whether it is an incoming vortex beam or an exit wave after interacting with a sample. In this work we investigate the use of spiral phase plates as an alternative to the programmable phase plates used in optics to measure OAM. We derive analytically how these can be used to study the local OAM components of any wave function. By means of numerical simulations we illustrate how the OAM of a pure vortex beam can be measured. We also look at a sum of misaligned vortex beams and show how using SPPs the position and the OAM of each individual beam can be detected. Finally we look at the OAM induced by a magnetic dipole on a free electron wave and show how the SPP can be used to localize the magnetic poles and measure their "magnetic charge". Although our findings can be applied to study the OAM of any wave function, they are of particular interest for electron microscopy where versatile programmable phase plates do not yet exist.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Distributed Access to Oral History collections: Fitting Access Technology to the needs of Collection Owners and Researchers

In contrast with the large amounts of potential interesting research material in digital multimedia repositories, the opportunities to unveil the gems therein are still very limited. The Oral History project ‘Verteld Verleden’ (Dutch literal translation of Oral History) that is currently running in The Netherlands, focuses on improving access to spoken testimonies in collections, spread over many Dutch cultural heritage institutions, by deploying modern technology both concerning infrastructure and access. Key objective in the project is mapping the various specific requirements of collection owners and researchers regarding both publishing and access by means of current state-of-the-technology. In order to demonstrate the potential, Verteld Verleden develops an Oral History portal that provides access to distributed collections. At the same time, practical step-by-step plans are provided to get to work with modern access technologies. In this way, a solid starting point for sustained access to Oral History collections can be established

What Distinguishes EMAS Participants? An Exploration of Company Characteristics

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating the business and financial characteristics, stakeholder pressure and public policies distinguishing companies that have implemented the European Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) and those that have not using a unique firm-level dataset of European publicly quoted companies. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First of all, the decision to implement EMAS has not been widely analysed. Secondly, we focus on European firms which allows us to assess if and to what extent European firms behave like their US or Japanese counterparts. We find that the EMAS participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio, the share of non-current liabilities and the average labour cost. Also, two measures of company size are positively associated with EMAS participation: both the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average. The profit margin on the other hand exerts a negative influence according to our results. We further show that public policy can heavily influence the EMAS participation decision: companies whose headquarters is located in a member state that actively encourages EMAS have a higher probability of participation.EMAS, European Companies, Public Policy

Filtering the Unknown: Speech Activity Detection in Heterogeneous Video Collections

In this paper we discuss the speech activity detection system that we used for detecting speech regions in the Dutch TRECVID video collection. The system is designed to filter non-speech like music or sound effects out of the signal without the use of predefined non-speech models. Because the system trains its models on-line, it is robust for handling out-of-domain data. The speech activity error rate on an out-of-domain test set, recordings of English conference meetings, was 4.4%. The overall error rate on twelve randomly selected five minute TRECVID fragments was 11.5%