Title: The ALERT System: Advanced Broadcast Speech Recognition Technology for Selective Dissemination of Multimedia Information

Abstract: This paper presents a brief description of the ALERT system, which is under development by a consortium working on a research project sponsored by the European Commission. The ALERT system uses advanced speech recognition technology and video processing techniques in order to process large broadcast speech archives and multimedia information resources for the purpose of extracting specific information from such databases and inform selected customers about its contents. It is one of the most ambitious projects currently carried out in the Human Language Technologies (HLT) area (see also http://alert.uni-duisburg.de ). The paper describes the objectives of the overall system, its basic system architecture and the scientific approach taken in order to realize the specified demonstrators.

Curriculum: Gerhard Rigoll obtained the Dipl.-Ing. degree from Stuttgart University in 1982. He joined the Fraunhofer-Institute in Stuttgart as a researcher in the department of advanced information and communication technologies and received the Dr.-Ing. degree in 1986 in the area of automatic speech recognition. From 1986 to 1988 he worked as postdoctoral fellow at IBM T.J. Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights/USA on the IBM Tangora speech recognition system. He received the Dr.-Ing. habil. degree in 1991 from Stuttgart University with a thesis in speech synthesis. From 1991 to 1993 he worked as guest researcher in the framework of the EC Scientific Training Programme in Japan for the NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Tokyo, in the area of neural networks and hybrid speech recognition systems. In 1993 he was appointed to full professor of computer science at Gerhard-Mercator-University in Duisburg, Germany. Dr. Rigoll is a Senior Member of the IEEE and is the author and co-author of more than 150 refereed papers in the field of pattern recognition, covering a large variety of application areas in human computer interaction and multimedia information processing, such as speech recognition, handwriting recognition, gesture recognition, face identification, video-indexing, image database retrieval and object tracking. He is active as reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, on Neural Networks, on Multimedia, and on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence as well as for several other international journals and has served as session chairman and member of the programme committee for numerous international conferences. He has been involved in various research projects in the above mentioned areas and has been active for the last years as project reviewer and proposal evaluator in a variety of national and international projects, sponsored by the EC, the German National Science Foundation and the German Ministry for Research and Education.

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