TalkMiner - 0 views
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John Pearce on 10 Sep 10Lecture webcasts are readily available on the Internet. These include class lectures, research seminars and product demonstrations. Webcasts routinely combine presentation slides with either a synchronized audio stream (i.e., podcast) or an audio/video stream. Conventional web search engines retrieve this content if you include "webcast" or "lecture" among your search terms, or search a website that specifically organizes lecture content. But users, particularly students, want to find the place in a lecture when an instructor covers a specific topic. Answering these queries requires a search engine that can search within the webcast to identify important keywords. TalkMiner aggregates and indexes lecture videos available across the internet. The system processes RSS feeds from a variety of sites to collect lecture videos. The system automatically processes the video to generate metadata describing each talk including the video frames that contain slides, their time offsets, and the text recovered from those frames by optical character recognition. TalkMiner does not maintain a copy of the original videos. When a user plays a lecture, the video is played from the original website on which the lecture video is hosted. As a result, storage requirements for TalkMiner are modest.