Aalto University is a multidisciplinary research community where science and art meet technology and business. Aalto University is committed to identifying and solving grand societal challenges and building an innovative future.
Aalto University has six schools with nearly 20 000 students and 4 000 employees, 386 of whom are Professors. There is a wide variety of Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees awarded at Aalto University, as well as offering of doctoral programmes in all the fields of study.
The Department of Computer Science (CS) of Aalto University provides world-class research and education in modern computer science to foster future science, engineering and society. Research at the department addresses and solves challenging problems of high practical relevance with revolutionary applications.
The focus of the Signal Processing and Acoustics (SPA) Department’s research and teaching activity is on advanced computational methods for modelling, analysing, and solving complex signal processing tasks, particularly in speech recognition and natural language processing.
Mikko Kurimo
Prof. Mikko Kurimo is Associate Professor in Speech and Language Processing and the Head of the Speech Recognition research group at Aalto University. He is the coordinator of MeMAD.
Jorma Laaksonen
Dr. Jorma Laaksonen received his Dr. of Science is Teaching Researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University. He is the vice coordinator of MeMAD and leads the research on visual media analysis at Aalto University.
Mats Sjöberg (2018)
Dr. Mats Sjöberg was a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University. He worked in Jorma Laaksonen’s team on video content analysis in MeMAD project in 2018.
Peter Smit (2018)
Peter Smit was a PhD student at Aalto University. He worked in Mikko Kurimo’s team on automatic speech recognition in MeMAD project in 2018.
Stig-Arne Grönroos
Stig-Arne Grönroos is a PhD student at Aalto University. He works in Mikko Kurimo’s team on neural machine translation.
Zhicun Xu (2018)
Zhicun Xu was a Master student at Aalto University. He worked in Mikko Kurimo’s team on audio event classification.
Timo Brander
Timo Brander works at Aalto University and is the project manager of MeMAD.
The University of Helsinki is the oldest and largest institution of academic education in Finland, an international scientific community of 40,000 students and researchers, and 11 faculties. In international university rankings, the University of Helsinki typically ranks among the top 100. The University of Helsinki is a member of more than half of all national and Nordic centres of excellence in research. It is also the only Finnish university to have received an invitation to join the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which is an association of the leading research-intensive universities in Europe.
The Faculty of Arts hosts the Departments of Digital Humanities; Philosophy, History and Art Studies; Languages; Cultures; and Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies. The University’s high-quality multidisciplinary research in the humanities encompasses a wide spectrum of topics, languages and cultures – from African and Asian to classical and modern European. These are explored for the benefit of both the scientific community and the public. The research focuses particularly on cultural and linguistic diversity, interaction, language technology and corpora. At the faculty, the disciplines of Translation Studies and Language Technology collaborate in the MeMAD project, together with FIN-CLARIN, which is a national consortium of Finnish universities and research institutions and part of the international CLARIN research infrastructure.
Maija Hirvonen
Dr. Maija Hirvonen is researcher in Translation Studies at University of Helsinki and tenure track professor at Tampere University (as of 1.8.2019). She specialises in investigating human- and machine-made video description, especially in real-life settings.
Maarit Koponen
Dr. Maarit Koponen is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on quality evaluation of machine translation.
Umut Sulubacak
Umut Sulubacak is a doctoral student in Language Technology at the University of Helsinki. In MeMAD, he does research on exploiting cues from different modalities in text-based machine translation.
Jörg Tiedemann
Jörg Tiedemann is a Professor of Language Technology at the University of Helsinki and in MeMAD he leads the work package 4 on multimodal and multilingual machine translation.
Liisa Tiittula
Prof. Liisa Tiittula is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies and German Translation at the University of Helsinki. In MeMAD, she contributes to WP5 focusing on content description.
EURECOM is a private and non-profit research center and graduate school specialized in Digital Sciences located in the Sophia Antipolis Technopole in the South of France. EURECOM’s research activity focuses on three domains which have led to the creation of three research departments: Communication Systems, Digital Security and Data Science.
The Data Science Department at EURECOM has approximately 30 researchers with a research focus on large scale data management systems, statistical, machine and deep learning processes, information extraction and knowledge-based technologies. This expertise covers a complete processing chain, from raw data management in cloud-based architecture, knowledge modelling, data mining, up to semantic interpretation and interaction. We have also extensive expertise in research related to multimedia processing and retrieval, and focusing on the challenges of automatic indexing, multimodal analysis and semantic description for exploring large collections of media content using linked data and semantic web technologies.
Benoit Huet
Benoit Huet (read more) is assistant professor in the Data Science department in EURECOM. He contributes to both WP2 and WP3 with his research on multimedia understanding, summarisation and storytelling.
Bernard Merialdo (2018)
Bernard Merialdo is professor emeritus in the Data Science department in EURECOM. He contributes mostly to WP3 on multimedia analysis.
Raphaël Troncy
Dr. Raphael Troncy (see more) is assistant professor in the Data Science department in EURECOM and he is leading the WP3 with his research on knowledge representation, information extraction and recommender systems for audiovisual content.
The University of Surrey delivers high-quality teaching and a top-rated research base. Although originally founded as a science and engineering-focussed institution, SURREY now offers a broad range of subject areas, including human sciences, arts, business management and medicine. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (GB), 98% of SURREY’s research was considered to be ‘world leading, internationally excellent or internationally recognised.
SURREY is the number one chartered university for graduate employability in England. In recent years, SURREY has established itself as a top-ten university in major national league tables. SURREY has also been named both ‘University of the Year’ and ‘University of the Year for Student Experience’ in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2016.
The unit at the University of SURREY that is be involved in MeMAD is the Centre for Translation Studies (CTS). Founded in 1982, CTS is part of the School of English and Languages and is an internationally recognised centre for research, teaching and scholarship in Translation and Interpreting.
CTS’s mission is to contribute to the theoretical advancement of the discipline whilst achieving real-world applicability through the study of translation/interpreting as socio-technological practices, highlighting their economic and social value and their role as an enabling force for a globally connected world. CTS has 5 research-active full-time staff, approx. 15 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers as well as teaching staff. Our particular research strengths are in technologies for translation/ interpreting, translation/interpreting in the context of migration, and multimodal and audiovisual translation. Over the past 5 years, CTS has led and contributed to over 10 European and nationally funded projects in these areas.
Sabine Braun
Prof Sabine Braun is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. In MeMAD she leads WP5 (Comparing Human and Machine-Generated Multimodal Content Description and Translation).
Kim Starr
Dr. Kim Starr is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey. Her research interests are focused on intralingual audiovisual translation, accessible media and the intersection of language and psychology.
Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland’s national public service media company. Yle operates four national television channels as well as six radio channels and services of over 20 regional radio programmes. Yle’s online on-demand media service is Areena, established in 2007 It is the most popular and valued online brand in Finland, as well as a global pioneer service of its kind.
Yle has extensive media archives on audio, video and text content produced by the company dating back to the earliest days of broadcasting. The company is 99.9 percent state-owned and supervised by an Administrative Council appointed by Finnish Parliament. MeMAD project is a part of Yle Beta initiative which is an incubator for future media experiences.
Harri Kiiskinen (2018)
Harri Kiiskinen worked as part of the Yle team during 2018. His work focused on data management and Yle’s datasets.
Anssi Komulainen
Anssi Komulainen is the Chief Innovation Officer of Yle, The Finnish Broadcasting Company. As the founder of Yle Beta incubator for future media he is constantly on a quest for something new. The job is to make sure Yle has an up-to-date understanding of what kind of new opportunities do emerging technologies open for public service media. MeMAD is part of the Yle Beta project portfolio.
Inari Köngäs (2018)
Inari Köngäs worked as part of the Yle team during 2018. Her focus was on providing media production professional’s perspective to the project partners.
Lauri Saarikoski
Lauri Saarikoski is a development manager at the archives of Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In MeMAD he leads the work package taking care of data management and curates the discussion between media companies and research groups.
Kim Viljanen (2018-2020)
Kim Viljanen is a concept designer at Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In MeMAD he explored the opportunities of automatic metadata for online TV and radio services and beyond.
Kaisa Vitikainen (2019-2020)
Kaisa Vitikainen is a subtitler at Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, and a doctoral student in Translation Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the use of automatic speech recognition in subtitling. In MeMAD her focus is on evaluations, particularly where they relate to subtitling.
Sacha Lagrillière (2020)
Sacha Lagrillière is a producer at Yle, The Finnish Broadcasting Company. His primary responsibility is to analyze new production technologies and applying them to content creation. In MeMad he is responsible for testing prototypes regarding editing and archive retrieval processes.
Tiina Tuominen (2020)
Dr Tiina Tuominen has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Tampere. Her research is focused on subtitling, particularly the reception of subtitled programmes, the usability of subtitles and translations, and subtitling as a profession.
Limecraft helps producers and post-production facilities of all sizes to manage their Digital Production Workflows. Limecraft incorporated in 2010 as a spin-off of VRT (the Belgian public service broadcaster), and services some of the largest media brands all over the world.
Limecraft’s flagship product, Limecraft Flow, is a cloud-based a Media Asset Management platform for television and film producers. They use Limecraft services for storing, organising and exchanging content and essential production data. Because it runs in the cloud, it is a most convenient solution for supporting distributed workflows and co-production scenarios. Using Limecraft and its built in capability to automate tedious tasks like ingesting, logging and transcription, video professionals process significantly more content within their given budget constraints. Limecraft services are designed to cope with the most demanding workflows and comply with the highest possible security standards.
Dieter Van Rijsselbergen
Dieter Van Rijsselbergen is CTO at Limecraft. In MeMAD he manages the overall architecture, organises the hackathons and will eventually bring the magic to life.
Maarten Verwaest
Maarten Verwaest is CEO of Limecraft. In MeMAD, he leads the exploitation plans and the go-to-market at a later stage.
Lingsoft is the leading Language Technology and Language Management Service provider in Finland and in Northern Europe. The company makes available a wide variety of language technology solutions and language services, designed for the analysis, processing and utilization of written and spoken language.
Founded in 1986, Lingsoft is a reliable, experienced and innovative partner. Lingsoft provides the full linguistic analysis of the text, and based-on that, powerful spell-checking, proofreading, terminology management tools, speech to text solutions, machine translation and intelligent search solutions. Our technologies are used in millions of computers worldwide, as Lingsoft has provided proofing tools for MS Office for 21 languages. In fact, Lingsoft’s technologies have become a de-facto Gold standard for language analysis.
For over two decades, Lingsoft has participated actively in the research and development of Finnish speech recognition, and lately also Swedish. In addition to the general language domain, we customize our tools and solutions for different organizations and domains, such as healthcare, law and administration and publishing industry.
Sebastian Andersson
Dr. Sebastian Andersson is Solutions Manager at Lingsoft. He has a broad background in speech and language technology. He is primarily working on Swedish ASR in the MeMAD project.
Sami Keronen
Lic.Sc. Sami Keronen is a speech recognition specialist and developer at Lingsoft. Currently he is working on Swedish ASR and diarization in the MeMAD project.
Michael Stormbom
Michael Stormbom is a Key Account Manager at Lingsoft. He has broad experience in solutions and business development in the language technology industry. In MeMad, he contributes to exploitation and dissemination of the project results.
French National Institute of Audiovisual is in charge of French radio and television archives and a partner of broadcasters and producers. INA gathers, preserves, digitises, restores, and distributes French radio and television archives contents, representing more than 70 years of radio and 60 years of television programmes, and large collections: 16 million hours of radio and television, more than one million of photos. INA is in charge of the Legal Deposit for national TV and radio channels, and of French Internet media websites. INA’s Research Unit deals with issues regarding preservation, restoration, information extraction, indexing and search, image and sound recognition, data mining and linking, media structuring and metadata enrichment. Research & Development activities focus on both improving management and designing new usages for INA’s collections.
Jean Carrive
Dr. Jean Carrive is Deputy Head of Ina’s Research & Innovation Department. He works on multimedia content analysis and description, in relation with digital humanities. In MeMAD, he participates to corpus and use cases definition, as well as audio analysis tasks.
David Doukhan
Dr. David Doukhan is a research engineer working at Ina. His research interests include speech and audio technologies, machine learning, and digital humanities.
Lingsoft Language Services is the sister company of Lingsoft. Lingsoft Language Services provides language management services and solutions based on language technologies developed by Lingsoft. Services include translations, subtitling of TV programs and video content, audiovisual translation, transcription of medical dictations and interviews as well as tailored language solutions. The most important customer segments of Lingsoft Language Services are public administration and EU, healthcare sector and media.
Lingsoft Language Services will be bringing in their expertise in creating language management solutions based on language technology and implementing different language technologies into language service production processes.
Kirsi Aantaa (2018)
Kirsi Aantaa was a solution specialist at Lingsoft Language Services until November 2018. In MeMAD, she lead the setup and maintenance of webpage and social media and contributing to dissemination of the results.
Tiina Lindh-Knuutila
Dr. Tiina Lindh-Knuutila is a solution specialist at Lingsoft Language Services. She is the project manager for MeMAD at LLS.