ELAN development, keeping pace with communities' needs

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription

Piezoceramics-based Devices for Active Balancing of Flexible Shafts

This paper focuses on vibration control of flexible shafts by means of rotorfixed piezoelectric materials. The target is to realize compact solutions for the suppression of problematic resonant vibration at so-called flexural critical speeds. For analysis, parametric finite element models of flexible rotors with piezoceramic sheets and strain or displacement sensors are developed, where the number of degrees of freedom is kept low. Several mechanisms which can destabilize flexible rotors are quantisized, such as rotor material damping, dissipation of currents induced in rotor-fixed piezoceramics and active feedback control proportional to rotor strain rates. The effectiveness of low frequency feedback and feedforward control for the suppression of the unbalance response is demonstrated using analytic and experimental results. Emphasis is on the interaction between the dynamics of the rotor and that of the connected electronic circuits. The experimental setup which is used for validation is a flexible shaft equipped with piezoceramic sheets and strain sensors. A slipring assembly is used to simplify measurements with, and control of, the sensors and actuators on the shaft and to facilitate the development of compact drive electronics

The revised NEUROGES–ELAN system: An objective and reliable interdisciplinary analysis tool for nonverbal behavior and gesture

As visual media spread to all domains of public and scientific life, nonverbal behavior is taking its place as an important form of communication alongside the written and spoken word. An objective and reliable method of analysis for hand movement behavior and gesture is therefore currently required in various scientific disciplines, including psychology, medicine, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and computer science. However, no adequate common methodological standards have been developed thus far. Many behavioral gesture-coding systems lack objectivity and reliability, and automated methods that register specific movement parameters often fail to show validity with regard to psychological and social functions. To address these deficits, we have combined two methods, an elaborated behavioral coding system and an annotation tool for video and audio data. The NEUROGES–ELAN system is an effective and user-friendly research tool for the analysis of hand movement behavior, including gesture, self-touch, shifts, and actions. Since its first publication in 2009 in Behavior Research Methods, the tool has been used in interdisciplinary research projects to analyze a total of 467 individuals from different cultures, including subjects with mental disease and brain damage. Partly on the basis of new insights from these studies, the system has been revised methodologically and conceptually. The article presents the revised version of the system, including a detailed study of reliability. The improved reproducibility of the revised version makes NEUROGES–ELAN a suitable system for basic empirical research into the relation between hand movement behavior and gesture and cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes and for the development of automated movement behavior recognition methods

Dynamics of piezoceramics-based mass and force actuators for rotating machines

In the past decade, it has become more and more common to install active vibration control devices on rotating systems like grinding machines, tooling centers, industrial fans and drive shafts. In the present research, two innovative actuation concepts for such devices are evaluated. The first device is a force actuator based on piezoceramic fibers, which has a low power consumption and high dynamic range. The second device is a mass redistribution actuator based on two piezoelectric ultrasonic motors, which is smaller and faster than conventional electromagnetic devices. At the basis of the analysis are rotor dynamic finite element models including actuators, sensors and feedback controllers. In simulations and experiments with device one, feedback control and scheduled feedforward control are considered. It is shown experimentally that the unbalance response at a critical speed can be reduced by some 97%. In experiments with device two, the positioning speed is determined

Annotation by category - ELAN and ISO DCR

The Data Category Registry is one of the ISO initiatives towards the establishment of standards for Language Resource management, creation and coding. Successful application of the DCR depends on the availability of tools that can interact with it. This paper describes the first steps that have been taken to provide users of the multimedia annotation tool ELAN, with the means to create references from tiers and annotations to data categories defined in the ISO Data Category Registry. It first gives a brief description of the capabilities of ELAN and the structure of the documents it creates. After a concise overview of the goals and current state of the ISO DCR infrastructure, a description is given of how the preliminary connectivity with the DCR is implemented in ELA

Measuring by marking; the multimedia annotation tool ELAN

ELAN is a multimedia annotation tool developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It is applied in a variety of research areas. This paper presents a general overview of the tool and new developments as the calculation of inter-rater reliability, a commentary framework, semi-automatic segmentation and labeling and export to Theme