TIB’s new AV Portal went online a month ago. Margret Plank, our Head of the Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials (KNM), answered three questions in the TIB-Newsletter 3/2014. Ms. Plank, can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your assignment at TIB? I studied Applied Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Hildesheim, specialising in information retrieval and usability. After graduating, I was responsible for a variety of eLearning projects at the University of Hildesheim as a research assistant. I came to TIB in July 2007. I first worked as an information literacy expert and became Head of the Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials in 2010. I first came into contact with multimedia retrieval as a student. In this context, I was particularly fascinated by automatic image recognition processes – i.e. technologies enabling large data volumes to be found using just image information such as colours, contours and textures. I recall that, back then, research was faced with the great challenge of automatically differentiating between images of the Love Parade in Berlin and images of carnival celebrations in Cologne: two completely different concepts that humans can differentiate between at a glance – but that machines were unable to resolvable, unless Berlin’s Victory Column or Cologne Cathedral happened to be in the picture. KNM was established in 2010. In a nutshell: what are you working on there at the moment? The Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials – KNM for short – has been in existence for four
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