Microsoft Speech Makes Energy More Available
Scientific videos highlighting the most recent research and development from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) are now searchable through ScienceCinema using speech technologies provided by Microsoft.
The multimedia search tool was launched as part of a one-day workshop, “Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science,” jointly hosted by Microsoft and the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), held in Redmond, Wash.
Microsoft Research provides the audio indexing technology for ScienceCinema as part of the Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) project. MAVIS is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content. That technology allows users to quickly find video files produced by the DoE National Laboratories and other DoE research facilities. When users search for specific words and phrases, precise snippets of the video where the specific search term was spoken will appear along with a timeline. Users can then select a snippet or a segment along the timeline to begin playing the video at the exact point in the video where the words were spoken. The timeline is synced with transcripts of the targeted portion of video.
It is anticipated that scientific videos, animations, interactive visualizations, and other multimedia will become an increasingly prominent form of scientific communications. ScienceCinema was produced, in part, as a proof of concept to demonstrate the value of speech recognition in the complex vocabulary of science. While the launch of the video database will include an initial 1,000 hours of content, it will continue to grow as new DoE R&D-related videos are produced.
“Video, animation, visualization, and other forms of multimedia are now widely used to record, share, and collaborate in science," said Jeffrey Salmon, deputy director for resource management at the DoE Office of Science. "Because of the U.S. Department of Energy's central role in science, we are also at the center of technology for collecting and disseminating this new media. ScienceCinema’s pioneering search and retrieval capability provides the public with a way to quickly access and view our multimedia-based R&D information.”