At the 9th International Summer School on AI and Big Data, Dr. Peter Uhrig (TU Dresden) will talk about Big Data and AI for Multimodal Communication Research. The keynote will take place on Monday, 03.07.2023 from 3:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.

Keynote: Big Data and AI for Multimodal Communication Research

Much of linguistic research has long focused on words and sentences alone, ignoring co-speech gesture and facial expressions. This was to some extent caused by the availability of large corpora of written text, which is comparably easy to collect and process. With the advances we have seen in data processing and machine learning over the past decade, the use of large audiovisual datasets has come into reach.

This presentation will report on the full lifecycle of large audiovisual datasets, spanning collection, cleaning, processing, access infrastructure, and analysis. We will see how NLP, audio processing and Computer Vision technology support the research process or enable us to work on entirely new research questions. The datasets used are taken from American TV and from Russian international media on YouTube.

In the second part of the presentation, we will discuss the gap between the research in Computer Science and related disciplines and its applications to research carried out in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Peter Uhrig

Dr. Peter Uhrig leads the Dresden-based junior research group Big Data and AI for Multimodal Communication Research at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig. A linguist by training, he obtained his PhD and his Habilitation from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. After a brief stint at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, he joined TU Dresden in 2023.

Peter Uhrig’s linguistic interests include the study of word combinations, cognitive linguistics and grammatical structures. His current work focuses on the application of Big Data and AI methods to research questions in the humanities and social sciences, with a strong focus on linguistic research related to spoken language and co-speech gesture.

Read more about the 9th International Summer School