[Speaker]
Ichiro IDE
Nagoya University / National Institute of Informatics, Japan

[Title]
Towards automatic video story generation by news topic threading

[Abstract]
The talk will introduce a research project that aims to automatically 
compose a documentary-like video story (summary) by tracking down news
topics based on the semantic structure within a large-scale news video
archive.
Our group at NII, Tokyo has been archiving a daily Japanese news 
program for the last five years, which consists of approximately 900 
hours of video stream. Even with cutting-edge information retrieval 
techniques, the large amount of video stream makes it difficult for 
users to select the video that they are interested in from numerous 
results obtained from a video retrieval system. Our aim is to provide 
the users with a video story (summary) that explains the development 
of the current story of interest, just as a documentary video does. We 
have not yet worked much on video composition, but the talk will cover 
our work that generates plots that should support the composition, 
namely "topic threading".
The topic thread structure is a structure that links closely related 
news stories in chronological order in the form of an ordered graph.
At this moment, relations between news stories are defined as the 
similarity of keywords obtained from closed-caption texts.
Since the topic threading method links locally similar stories, the 
global structure may contain several topics as a result of gradual 
transition of the topics. We analyze such sub-structures (topic-
clusters) within the thread structure, in order to compose a better 
video story (summary).
The talk will target not only professionals in information retrieval,
multimedia contents generation and image/natural language processing
fields, but also students and non-professional researchers in related
fields.

[Biography]
Mar. 2000          : PhD, The University of Tokyo,
                     Graduate School of Engineering (Tokyo, Japan)
Apr. 2000-Mar. 2004: Assistant Professor,
                     National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan)
Apr. 2004-         : Associate Professor, Nagoya University, 
                     Graduate School of Information Science (Nagoya, Japan)
Dec. 2004-         : Visiting Associate Professor (concurrent),
                     National Instisute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan)
Feb. 2004-Mar. 2004: Invited Professor, IRISA (Rennes, France)
Mar. 2005-Apr. 2005: Invited Professor, IRISA (Rennes, France)