IMPACT Final conference

24-25 October the final conference of the IMPACT project took place at the British Library in London.  The whole conference was blogged and photographed with presentations uploaded to Slideshare. These are also embedded within the IMPACT project blog at impactocr.wordpress.com

This post contains direct links to all blog posts made at the Final Conference.  Please do feel free to add comments or thoughts below the posts.

Monday 24 October 2011

BLOCK 1: OPERATIONAL CONTEXT

• Welcome and Opening of the Conference by Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh (IMPACT Project Director, KB National library of the Netherlands)
• Strategic Digital Overview by Richard Boulderstone (Director, e-Strategy and Information Systems, The British Library)
• Digitisation challenges & IMPACT achievements so far by Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh (KB)
• Case study: Scanning parameters by Apostolos Antonacopoulos (USAL)
• Applied IMPACT:  Does the new FineReader Engine and Dutch lexicon increase OCR accuracy and production efficiency? A case study by KB and CCS by Claus Gravenhorst (CCS)

BLOCK 2: FRAMEWORK AND EVALUATION

• Experiences in mass digitisation: examining OCR quality by Paul Fogel (University of California, California Digital Library)
• The IMPACT Interoperability Framework . Workflows for OCR and beyond by Clemens Neudecker (KB)
• IMPACT Evaluation tools, ground truth and datasets by Stefan Pletschacher (University of Salford)

BLOCK 3: TOOLS FOR IMPROVED TEXT RECOGNITION

• ABBYY FineReader: IMPACT improvements by Michael Fuchs (ABBYY Europe)
• IBM Adaptive OCR engine and CONCERT Cooperative Correction by Asaf Tzadok (IBM Haifa Research Lab)
• Crowdsourcing in the Digitalkoot project by Majlis Bremer-Laamanen  (National library of Finland)
• The Functional Extension Parser: A Document Understanding Platform by Günter Mühlberger (University of Innsbruck) <this presentation was dropped from the schedule due to late running and was given during the Research Parallel Sessions on 2nd day>
• Postcorrection in IMPACT by Ulrich Reffle (CIS group, University of Munich)

Tuesday 25 October 2011

• Keynote: OCR and the transformation of the Humanities by Gregory Crane (Professor & Chair, Department of Classics, Tufts University)

BLOCK 4: LANGUAGE TOOLS AND RESOURCES

• Overview of language work in IMPACT by Katrien Depuydt (INL)
• Evaluation of lexicon supported OCR and Information Retrieval by Jesse de Does (INL)
• CLARIN and IMPACT: Crossing Paths by Steven Krauwer (CLARIN coordinator, University of Utrecht)

BLOCK 5: IMPACT CENTRE OF COMPETENCE

• The EC Digital Agenda and official launch of the IMPACT Centre of Competence by Khalil Rouhana (European Commission – Director for digital content and cognitive systems in DG Information Society and Media)
• Introduction to the IMPACT Centre of Competence by Aly Conteh (BL) and Hildelies Balk-Pennington de Jongh (KB)

PARALLEL SESSIONS

• Research Session: Presentation and discussion of state of the art research tools for document analysis and OCR, hosted by Apostolos Antonacopoulos (University of Salford).
• Language Session: Presentation and demonstration of the IMPACT language tools & resources in further detail, hosted by Katrien Depuydt (INL)
• Digitisation Tips Session: Meet the expert: questions & answers on digitisation issues, hosted by Aly Conteh (The British Library)