2009 CSL Undergraduate Summer Research Stipend Report
Aram Apyan | Evan Estola | Erik Harpstead | Jae Kwan Lee | Ryan McClure | Jesse Reinhardt | Peter Schemmel | Andrew Yates
 | Andrew Yates Wai Gen Yee CREATING AN EDUCATIONAL VIDEO ANNOTATION AND INDEXING SYSTEM |  |
Professor Yee's research is in mobile and distributed system performance; data warehousing, analysis, and mining; and information retrieval. Last year, in a project that grew out of some consulting work, he decided to develop a system that allows users who are watching a video to leave comments that can be searched by other users.
"I thought it could have application in the classroom," he said, for online and videotaped classes, as well as other fine-grained video searches from Hulu to London's surveillance video.
"Right now, systems like YouTube don't let you search the comments," only title, description, and keywords, he added.
Last winter, Andrew helped Professor Yee to collect and analyze more than one million YouTube comments to see if they were worth searching and would help improve searches—determining yes on both counts. He co-authored a paper about the work given at the 2009 ACM SIGIR conference workshop. This summer, he wrote a program for recording the video annotations and searching them. He also did a survey of related work and systems, and wrote documentation for the research and results. Yee plans to use this work as a basis for an IPRO.
A student from Orlando, FL, Andrew came to IIT in part because of the information retrieval research done here. He is an assistant in the Information Retrieval Lab. This summer, he often worked through the night—"It's easier to work at night!" he said—often multitasking, including working on this research and taking care of Linux servers for a company in England, a side job.
"It's nice to have such a mature undergraduate," said Yee. "We're lucky to have Andrew. At some point, the student is generating his own ideas and taking a lot of open-ended requests. That is what Andrew is doing now, and it makes my life so much easier."
Download the 2009 Undergraduate Summer Research Stipend report. (1 MB .pdf)
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