STIMULATE Projects at Columbia

Background

STIMULATE is a program led by the National Science Foundation. Its name is an acronym for "Speech, Text, Image and Multimedia Advanced Technology Effort". Columbia University has won two grants under this program.

GRANT 1: An Environment for Illustrated Briefing and Follow-up Search Over Live Multimedia Information

(Alfred Aho, Shih-Fu Chang and Kathleen McKeown)
Researchers seek to provide up-to-the-minute briefings on topics of interest, linking the user into a collection of related multimedia documents. On the basis of a user profile or query, the system will sort multimedia information to match the user's interests, retrieving video, images and text. The system will automatically generate a briefing on information extracted from the documents and determined to be of interest to the user.

Report for 1997 NSF meeting.

GRANT 2: Generating Coherent Summaries of On-Line Documents: Combining Statistical and Symbolic Techniques

(Kathleen McKeown and Judith Klavans)
This project will allow computers to analyze the text from a set of related documents across many subject areas and summarize the documents. Within the summary, similarities and differences between documents will be highlighted, indicating what each document is about. The research will be part of a digital library project emphasizing aids for reducing information overload.

Report for 1997 NSF meeting.
Project Description.

Related Materials

The NSF announcement for STIMULATE.