Frederic Kaplan

• Professor Digital Humanities
• Managing Director at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

Traditional 3D scene understanding techniques are generally predicated on hand-annotated label sets, but in recent years a new class of open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding techniques has emerged. Despite the success of this paradigm on small scenes, existing approaches cannot scale efficiently to city-scale 3D datasets. In this paper, we present...

Extracting and recognizing texts from historical maps presents significant challenges due to complex layouts, varied typographic conventions, and the entanglement of multiple sequences. In this paper, we present a modular neural framework for linking and ordering text segments together. This task goes beyond simple word recognition; it enables to r...

The advancement of computational tools for cartometric analysis has opened new avenues for the identification and understanding of stemmatic relationships between historical maps through the analysis of their planimetric distortions. The 19th-century Western cartographic depiction of Jerusalem serves as an ideal case study in this context. The chal...

Our research introduces a novel framework for generating detailed 3D building models (LOD4) that integrates both exterior and interior data. This approach addresses a significant gap in current methods that focus primarily on either the interior or exterior of buildings. By leveraging structure-from-motion (SfM) models, planar primitives, and image...

Neural radiance fields have emerged as a dominant paradigm for creating complex 3D environments incorporating synthetic novel views. However, 3D object removal applications utilizing neural radiance fields have lagged behind in effectiveness, particularly when open set queries are necessary for determining the relevant objects. One such application...

Cartography, as a strategic technology, is a historical marker. Maps are tightly connected to the cultural construction of the environment. The increasing availability of digital collections of historical map images provides an unprecedented opportunity to study large map corpora. Corpus linguistics has led to significant advances in understanding...

The generation of 3D models depicting cities in the past holds great potential for documentation and educational purposes. However, it is often hindered by incomplete historical data and the specialized expertise required. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for historical city reconstruction. By integrating procedural modeling tech...

Cet article conceptualise l’idée qu’il existe une « matière noire » composée des structurations latentes identifiées par le regard machinique sur de grandes collections photographiques patrimoniales. Les campagnes photographiques de l’histoire de l’art, au xx e siècle, avaient pour ambition implicite de transformer toutes les œuvres d’art en docume...

Conducting “manual” transcriptions and analyses is unsustainable for most historical oral archives because they require a remarkable amount of funds and time. The FONTI 4.0 project aims at exploring the suitability of automatic transcription and information extraction technologies for making historical oral sources available. In this work, we condu...

Conducting “manual” transcriptions and analyses is unsustainable for most historical oral archives because they require a remarkable amount of funds and time. The FONTI 4.0 project aims at exploring the suitability of automatic transcription and information extraction technologies for making historical oral sources available. In this work, we condu...

Research in automatic map processing is largely focused on homogeneous corpora or even individual maps, leading to inflexible models. Based on two new corpora, the first one centered on maps of Paris and the second one gathering maps of cities from all over the world, we present a method for computing the figurative diversity of cartographic collec...

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic administration introduced a new standardised description system to give an objective account of the form and functions of the city of Venice. The cadastre, deployed on a European scale, was offering for the first time an articulated and precise view of the structure of the city and its activities...

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categor...

The plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is widely considered to be responsible for the most devastating and deadly pandemics in human history. Starting with the infamous Black Death, plague outbreaks are estimated to have killed around 100 million people over multiple centuries, with local mortality rates as high...

The 4D Mirror World is considered to be the next planetary-scale information platform. This commentary gives an overview of the history of the converging trends that have progressively shaped this concept. It retraces how large-scale photographic surveys served to build the first 3D models of buildings, cities, and territories, how these models got...

The plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is widely considered to be responsible for the most devastating and deadly pandemics in human history. Starting with the infamous Black Death, plague outbreaks are estimated to have killed around 100 million people over multiple centuries, with local mortality rates as high...

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categor...

We present the Scholar Index: a platform to index the literature and primary sources of the arts and humanities through citations. These resources are becoming increasingly digital, thanks in part to digitization campaigns and a shift towards digital publishing. Nevertheless, the coverage of commercial citation indexes is still poor and mostly limi...

Purpose An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus , gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of dig...

What would the world look like if we could access documents from the past as easily as present day‘s data? Could we use it to derive better forecasts for the future? Can historical 4D simulations improve our knowledge about European history? Which innovative business models will promote tourism, transport and planning? The Time Machine consortium c...

The advent of large-scale citation indexes has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information in several domains of research. The humanities have largely remained outside of this shift, despite their increasing reliance on digital means for information seeking. Given that publications in the humanities have a longer than average life-span...

We consider the task of reference mining: the detection, extraction and classification of references within the full text of scholarly publications. Reference mining brings forward specific challenges, such as the need to capture the morphology of highly abbreviated words and the dependence among the elements of a reference, both following codified...

In recent years there have been multiple successful attempts tackling document processing problems separately by designing task specific hand-tuned strategies. We argue that the diversity of historical document processing tasks prohibits to solve them one at a time and shows a need for designing generic approaches in order to handle the variability...

Scholarly affinities are one of the most fundamental hidden dynamics that drive scientific development. Some affinities are actual, and consequently can be measured through classical academic metrics such as co-authoring. Other affinities are potential, and therefore do not leave visible traces in information systems; for instance, some peers may s...

Tomado de Kunz Westerhoff, Dominique & Atallah, Marc (2011). El hombre-máquina y sus avatares. Entre ciencia, filosofía y literatura, siglos XVII-XXI. París: Vrin. Segunda Parte: Perspectivas contemporáneas. Ciencias robóticas y ciencias humanas (pp. 235-240). Traducción del francés al español por Luis Alfonso Palau Castaño, Medellín, 17 de marzo...

Big Data is not a new phenomenon. History is punctuated by regimes of data acceleration, characterized by feelings of information overload accompanied by periods of social transformation and the invention of new technologies. During these moments, private organizations, administrative powers, and sometimes isolated individuals have produced importa...

This article describes a simple unsupervised system for automatic extraction and classification of named entities in French novels. The solution presented combines a set of different standalone classifiers within a meta-recognition system. The system is tested on 35 classic French novels, representing 5 million words and 3,700 names of people and p...

This paper presents a methodology to analyze linguistic changes in a given textual corpus allowing to overcome two common problems related to corpus linguistics studies. One of these issues is the monotonic increase of the corpus size with time, and the other one is the presence of noise in the textual data. In addition, our method allows to better...

This paper examines how far state-of-the-art machine vision algorithms can be used to retrieve common visual patterns shared by series of paintings. The research of such visual patterns, central to Art History Research, is challenging because of the diversity of similarity criteria that could relevantly demonstrate genealogical links. We design a m...

In recent years, many cultural institutions have engaged in large-scale newspaper digitization projects and large amounts of historical texts are being acquired (via transcription or OCRization). Beyond document preservation, the next step consists in providing an enhanced access to the content of these digital resources. In this regard , the proce...

This paper aims to describe and explain the processes behind the creation of a digital library composed of two Swiss newspapers, namely Gazette de Lausanne (1798-1998) and Journal de Genève (1826-1998), covering an almost two-century period. We developed a general purpose application giving access to this cultural heritage asset; a large variety of...

The advent of large-scale citation services has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information for several domains of research. The Humanities have largely remained outside of this shift despite their increasing reliance on digital means for information seeking. Given that publications in the Humanities probably have a longer than average...

Led by an interdisciplinary consortium, the Garzoni project undertakes the study of apprenticeship, work and society in early modern Venice by focusing on a specific archival source, namely the Accordi dei Garzoni from the Venetian State Archives. The project revolves around two main phases with, in the first instance, the design and the developmen...

Dans cet article nous présentons la démarche et les premiers résultats d’une recherche participative menée conjointement par le laboratoire d’humanités digitales de l’EPFL (DHLAB) et l’écrivain suisse Daniel de Roulet. Dans cette étude, nous explorons les façons dont la lecture numérique est susceptible d’influencer la façon d’écrire et de réorgani...

English. We present preliminary results from the Linked Books project, which aims at analysing citations from the histo-riography on Venice. A preliminary goal is to extract and parse citations from any location in the text, especially footnotes, both to primary and secondary sources. We detail a pipeline for these tasks based on a set of classifie...

http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/suppl_1

We present x-ray imaging results for diverse iron- based-ink antique writings - single-page manuscripts, stacks and scrolls - from the 16th century on. The objective is to elaborate new digitization techniques by x-ray tomography for the ”Venice Time Machine” (VTM) project in collaboration with the ”Archivio di Stato”. The technique can potentially...

The Venice Time Machine is an international scientific programme launched by the EPFL and the University Ca'Foscari of Venice with the generous support of the Fondation Lombard Odier. It aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open...

This article is an attempt to represent Big Data research in digital humanities as a structured research field. A division in three concentric areas of study is presented. Challenges in the first circle – focusing on the processing and interpretations of large cultural datasets – can be organized linearly following the data processing pipeline. Cha...

‘Venice Time Machine’ is an international program whose objective is transforming the ‘Archivio di Stato’ – 80 km of archival records documenting every aspect of 1000 years of Venetian history – into an open-access digital information bank. Our study is part of this project: We are exploring new, faster, and safer ways to digitalize manuscripts, wi...

Handwritten characters in administrative antique documents from three centuries have been detected using different synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques. Heavy elements in ancient inks, present even for everyday administrative manuscripts as shown by X-ray fluorescence spectra, produce attenuation contrast. In most cases the image quality is good en...

Au début du mois de décembre dernier, quiconque demandait à Google Traduction l’équivalent italien de l’expression « Cette fille est jolie » obtenait une proposition étrange : Questa ragazza è abbastanza, littéralement « Cette fille est assez ». La beauté s’était lost in translation — perdue en cours de traduction. Comment un des traducteurs automa...

CLiC-it 2015 is held in Trento on December 3-4 2015, hosted and locally organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), one the most important Italian research centers for what concerns CL. The organization of the conference is the result of a fruitful conjoint effort of different research groups (Università di Torino, Università di Roma Tor Vergata a...

Early modern printed gazettes relied on a system of news exchange and text reuse largely based on handwritten sources. The reconstruction of this information exchange system is possible by detecting reused texts. We present a method to individuate text borrowings within noisy OCRed texts from printed gazettes based on string kernels and local text...

Cet article étudie le concept de centralité dans les réseaux de personnages apparaissant dans Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Notre objectif est ainsi de caractériser certains aspects des rôles des personnages du récit sur la base de leurs cooccurrences dans le texte. We sketch a theoretical framework for literary network analysis, bringi...

The study of ancient documents is too often confined to specimens of high artistic value or to official writings. Yet, a wealth of information is often stored in administrative records such as ship records, notary papers, work contract, tax declaration, commercial transactions or demographic accounts. One of the best examples is the Venice Time Mac...

Google's highly successful business model is based on selling words that appear in search queries. Organizing several million auctions per minute, the company has created the first global linguistic market and demonstrated that linguistic capitalism is a lucrative business domain, one in which billions of dollars can be realized per year. Google's...

We detected handwritten characters in ancient documents from several centuries with different synchrotron x-ray imaging techniques. The results were correlated to those of x-ray fluorescence analysis. In most cases, heavy elements produced high image quality suitable for tomography reconstruction leading to virtual page-by-page “reading”. When abso...

Studying natural reading and its underlying attention processes requires devices that are able to provide precise measurements of gaze without rendering the reading activity unnatural. In this paper we propose an eye tracking system that can be used to conduct analyses of reading behavior in low constrained experimental settings. The system is desi...

We present an eye tracking study to investigate how natural reading behavior and reading comprehension are influenced by in-context annotations. In a lab experiment, three groups of participants were asked to read a text and answer comprehension questions: a control group without taking annotations, a second group reading and taking annotations, an...

L'utilisation de plus en plus prégnante des nouvelles technologies dans les musées et bibliothèques (tablettes tactiles, audioguides, écrans interactifs, etc.) diviserait les publics entre ceux qui recherchent la compréhension et ceux pour qui prime l'émotion. Comment alors concilier expérience collective partagée et dispositifs techniques ? Commen...

Les relations houleuses qu’histoire et informatique entretiennent ne sont pas nouvelles et la révolution des sciences historiques annoncée depuis plusieurs décennies continue de se faire attendre. Dans ce chapitre, nous aimerions néanmoins tenter de montrer qu’une évolution inédite est aujourd’hui à l’oeuvre dans les sciences historiques et que cet...

Over the last two years, Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs) have been unexpectedly successful in convincing large number of students to pursue online courses in a variety of domains. Contrary to the "learn anytime anywhere" moto, this new generation of courses are based on regular assignments that must be completed and corrected on a fixed schedul...

La evolución de los conceptos de cuerpo y de procesos de animación en el campo de la robótica lleva hoy a definir el concepto de un núcleo, conjunto de algoritmos estables, independiente de los espacios corporales en los que se aplican. Se vuelve posible, entonces, estudiar la manera por la cual algunas inscripciones corporales consideradas como va...

Little is known about the usage, adoption process and long-term effects of domestic service robots in people’s homes. We investigated the usage, acceptance and process of adoption of a vacuum cleaning robot in nine households by means of a six month ethnographic study. Our major goals were to explore how the robot was used and integrated into daily...

intrinsic motivation is a crucial mechanism for open-ended cognitive development since it is the driver of spontaneous exploration and curiosity. yet, it has so far only been conceptualized in ad hoc manners in the epigenetic robotics community. after reviewing different approaches to intrinsic motivation in psychology, this paper presents a uni?ed...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor

Open-ended exploration and learning in the real world is a major challenge of developmental robotics. Three properties of real-world sensorimotor spaces provide important conceptual and technical challenges: unlearnability, high dimensionality, and unboundedness. In this chapter, we argue that exploration in such spaces needs to be constrained and...

We propose an analysis of the social network composed of the characters appearing in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographic Les Confessions, with existence of edges based on co-occurrences. This work consists of twelve volumes, that span over fifty years of his life. Having a unique author allows us to consider the book as a coherent work, unlike s...

Paper interfaces merge the advantages of the digital and physical world. They can be created using normal paper augmented by a camera+projector system. They are particularly promising for applications in education, because paper is already fully integrated in the classroom, and computers can augment them with a dynamic display. However, people most...

We present a longitudinal study on the participation regulation effects in the presence of a speech aware interactive table. This study focuses on training meetings of groups of top level managers, whose compositions do not change, in a corporate organization. We show that an effect of balancing participation develops over time. We also report othe...

Paper interfaces offer tremendous possibilities for geometry education in primary schools. Existing computer interfaces designed to learn geometry do not consider the integration of conventional school tools, which form the part of the curriculum. Moreover, most of computer tools are designed specifically for individual learning, some propose group...

Web searches are often needed in collocated meetings. Many research projects have been conducted for supporting collaborative search in information-seeking meetings, where searches are executed both intentionally and intensively. However, for most common meetings, Web searches may happen randomly with low-intensity. They neither serve as main tasks...

What encourages people to refer to a robot as if it was a living being? Is it because of the robot's humanoid or animal-like shape, its movements or rather the kind of interaction it enables? We aim to investigate robots' characteristics that lead people to anthropomorphize it by comparing different kinds of robotic devices and contrasting it to an...

Une bibliothèque est toujours un volume organisé en deux sous-espaces : une partie publique (front-end) avec laquelle les usages peuvent interagir, une partie cachée (back-end) utilisée pour la logistique et le stockage. À la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, c’est un système robotisé qui fait la jonction entre les espaces immenses et sous-terrains...

The study presented in this paper examined people's perception of domestic service robots by means of an ethnographic study. We investigated initial reactions of nine households who lived with a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot over a two week period. To explore people's attitude and how it changed over time, we used a recurring questionnaire that was f...

At the beginning of robotics research, robots were seen as physical platforms on which different behavioral programs could be run, similar to the hardware and software parts of a computer. However, recent advances in developmental robotics have allowed us to consider a reversed paradigm in which a single software, called a kernel, is capable of exp...

Designing computer systems for educational purpose is a difficult task. While many of them have been developed in the past, their use in classrooms is still scarce. We make the hypothesis that this is because those systems take into account the needs of individuals and groups, but ignore the requirements inherent in their use in a classroom. In thi...

Version poche sous le même titre. CNRS Editions, collection " Biblis ", 2013, ISBN 978-2-271-07675-5.

The printed textbook remains the primary medium for studying in educational systems. Learners use personal annotation strategies while reading. These practices play an important role in supporting working memory, enhancing recall and influencing attentional processes. To be able to study these cognitive mechanisms we have designed and built a light...

Head-mounted eye-trackers are powerful research tools to study attention processes in various contexts. Most existing commercial solutions are still very expensive, limiting the current use of this technology. We present a hardware design to build, at low cost, a camera-based head-mounted eye tracker using two cameras and one infrared LED. A Playst...

This article first describes a method for extracting and classifying handwritten annotations on printed documents using a simple camera integrated in a lamp. The ambition of such a research is to offer a seamless integration of notes taken on printed paper in our daily interactions with digital documents. Existing studies propose a classification o...

We describe an interactive table designed for supporting face-to-face collaborative learning. The table, Reflect, addresses the issue of unbalanced participation during group discussions. By displaying on its surface, a shared visualization of member participation, Reflect, is meant to encourage participants to avoid the extremes of over and underp...

Paper is not dead. Despite the progress of e-ink screens, smartphones and tablet interfaces, printed paper stays a convenient, versatile and familiar support for reading and writing. Books, magazines and other printed materials can now be connected to the digital world, enriched with additional content and even transformed into interactive interfac...

The future of the classroom is an issue that essentially concerns many of us as students, parents, taxpayers, policymakers, teachers, design professionals, or researchers. A glance at the history of pedagogical practice reveals, however, that despite rapid developments in the outside world, classrooms have evolved very little over the years. While...

We examine an approach in technology-enhanced learning that avoids deviation from existing pedagogical practices as these are often reluctant to change. This is accomplished by designing technology to augment learning activities that are already in common practice. We implemented two ambient awareness tools, Lantern and Reflect, in line with this a...

This article describes a method for extracting and classifying handwritten annotations on printed documents using a simple camera integrated in a lamp or a mobile phone. The ambition of such a research is to offer a seamless integration of notes taken on printed paper in our daily interactions with digital documents. Existing studies propose a clas...

We describe Paper Code Explorer, a paper based interface for code exploration. This augmented reality system is designed to offer active exploration tools for programmers confronted with the problem of getting familiar with a large codebase. We first present an initial qualitative study that proved to be useful for informing the design of this syst...

In this paper we present a tool to annotate paper documents with vocal comments. This tool does not require specially processed documents, and allows natural and simple interactions: sticking a note to add a comment, and place an object on it to listen to the record. A pilot experiment in which teachers used this tool to annotate reports revealed t...

Intrinsic motivation is a central mechanism that guides spontaneous exploration and learning in humans. It fosters incremental and progressive sensorimotor and cognitive development by pushing exploration of activities of intermediate complexity given the current state of capabilities. This chapter presents and studies two computational intrinsic m...

The historical evolution of human machine interfaces shows a continuous tendency towards more physical interactions with computers. Nevertheless, the mouse and keyboard paradigm is still the dominant one and it is not yet clear whether there is among recent innovative interaction techniques any real challenger to this supremacy. To discuss the futu...

The orchestration process consists of managing classroom interactions at multiple levels: individual activities, teamwork and class-wide sessions. We study the process of orchestration in recitation sections, i.e. when students work on their assignments individually or in small groups with the presence of teaching assistants who give help on demand...

ABSTRACT Although many,augmented,tabletop systems have shown the potential and usability of finger-based interactions and paper-based interfaces, they have mainly dealt with each of them separately. In this paper, we introduce a novel me- thod aimed to improve human,natural interactions on aug- mented tabletop systems, which enables multiple users...