After a very full week, I think all of us were glad to have a day with a much lighter schedule. We departed the hotel early this morning for the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision located in Hilversum Media Park, about an hour trip from Amsterdam. The train ride was only around 30 minutes long, but it took us through some picturesque terrain and farmland as we made our way between cities. Hilversum Media Park is a fairly condensed area that houses the oldest Dutch television station, other media related entities and our destination, the Netherlands Sound and Vision Instituut. As we approached the massive building, I noticed that the entire outside of the building, windows included, were covered in multicolored glass that in the sun looked like stained glass windows.
We made our way inside and into a room where we would hear from three different speakers about the different things the Instituut was working on. The first speaker described his work centered around working with EDM artists to use publicly available music samples and photographs in their albums as a way to promote the archives and help educate EDM fans about Dutch media history. The second speaker discussed the process behind archiving digital media like videos, webpages and video games. The main criteria they use to decide if something will be archived is that it must relate to Dutch culture and be relatively popular or a trend. He also discussed some of the challenges, especially around video games, which unlike videos or web pages, have experiences and stories that are determined by the actions of the users. He also noted that it was hard because some of the emulator technology still needs to be developed before they can begin to archive the games.
The last speaker was the one that was particularly interesting to me as a computer science major. His work was centered around developing AI facial recognition technology to comb through media material and help to digitize transcripts from videos of things like presidential debates. Obviously, with any AI technology, he was able to provide several examples of times the facial recognition software was unable to provide an accurate match with high confidence. One of the other issues they were having with transcribing video to audio with the AI was that the AI does not have context, so it returns all possible answers to a single phrase. They were able to fix this by creating a version of the AI that would group together multiple sources on the same topic to create a context for the AI to build from to provide more accurate search results with higher confidence.
Personally, AI is the field I am most interested in pursuing a career in and this was the first time I have really gotten to see an example of a working AI. The field of computer science is so diverse and sometimes it can be challenging to actually see what a real life project or job would entail. I also appreciated how he discussed a lot of the challenges and how they know there are certain issues that are going to take multiple versions to solve. I know from experience that programming doesn’t magically happen. It has lots of bugs that can take a very long time to reason through and resolve. I spent nearly 30 hours a week in a computer science class developing an Android App to provide walking route on the University of Washington campus between buildings, so I can only imagine how much time the Netherlands Sound and Vision Institute puts into coding and maintaining their AI system.
After the presentations, we had the opportunity to tour the institute. The first tour we went on walks us through the process of digitizing old video on film reels and 16 mm and 35 mm film. The thing that was the most fascinating was the fact that old players and equipment that is not even manufactured anymore has to be used in the digitization process. We were also able to see the process to color correct the films and meet one of their digitization experts and watch him do some of his work. After touring the digitization department, we switched tour guides and headed down to one of the archives filled with old radios from the 1900's. The archive even contained German issued radios that had swastikas carved into the front of them in addition to old Dutch radios that the Germans had banned during the same time period. After that, we were taken up to the museum, which was definitely geared more towards children and was all in Dutch, but still a very cool space to roam around in.
As we returned to Amsterdam, we decided an Albert Heijn to go dinner and some snacks were the best option. We enjoyed our pasta, fruit and cookies in the lobby of the hotel while working on planning our trip to Brussels for the long weekend. With some great advice from Rose and a lot of research on our part, we found a hostel about 2 km outside the center of Brussels and near the train station. We were also pleasantly surprised to learn the Brussels also offers cards to purchase that allow you free access to 41 museums, discounts at other locations and free public transportation. I am excited for our long weekend and to explore a different European country to see how it is both similar and different from my experience in the Netherlands so far.