As a technology innovation advisor I focus on new approaches and technologies that help to improve access to large, heterogeneous, multimedia data sets in audiovisual archives such as the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. To investigate the applicability of technology in practice and stimulate the uptake of technology , I coordinate the 'NISV innovation labs' that are organized around specific themes such as data science, open data, benchmarking AI or conversational search. In these labs, a team of developers, data engineers and data scientists work together with scholars, computer scientists from Dutch universities and professionals interested in data exploration at scale, to test new tech with 'real users' in a 'real world environment' with 'real data'. Within the labs infrastructure, I also coordinate the CLARIAH Media Suite, that originally started off as a lab but has grown to a nice showcase of audiovisual data access & storytelling using heritage data and artificial intelligence.

The CLARIAH programme develops a national digital research infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities that provides access to research & heritage data archives and tools for scholarly research such as annotation, searching, linking, large-scale data analysis using AI, machine learning and NLP, and sharing of data sets. The CTO is technical coordinator of the CLARIAH infrastructure and chairs the technical committee with representatives of the CLARIAH development teams and the interest groups (IGs) that advice on specific technical topics such as data/tool interoperability, linked open data, annotation standards, and DevOps integration.

At the Human Media Interaction group of the computer science department my work focuses on (interaction) technology for accessing and exploring large scale data in digital libraries, audiovisual data in particular. I'm interested in both the user interaction itself (e.g., using spoken conversational search systems or alternative user interfaces) and a data-science perspective focusing on enabling 'story telling with data' by exploiting various AI and NLP techniques.

The Stichting Open Spraaktechnologie (Foundation for Open Speech Technology) aims to make available Dutch speech technology developed at Dutch universities and research institutes to the Dutch research community and non-profit organisations. To foster collaborations, it connects researchers and industries interested in the application of speech technology (e.g., transcription, conversational agents, health applications, speech analysis) to speech technology researchers in our academic network.

Innovation Consultancy and Strategy in AV Archiving & Access Media, Cultural Heritage, Digital HumanitiesAutomatic Metadata Extraction TechnologyMultimedia Search, Recommendation and Linking Spoken Conversational Search

Audiovisual Content Exploitation - Technology & Strategies