Naren Datha

Digital heritage

The India Digital Heritage Project is a collaborative initiative between the industry and academia, with the aim of using novel techniques to efficiently capture and present various aspects of Indias diverse heritage, while at the same time advancing the state-of-the art in related research areas. As part of the Digital Heritage Project, we have built a prototype virtual tour of a South Indian temple that, for the first time, integrates technologies such as Photosynth and HDView, opening up new ways to interactively explore visually complex sites. These technologies are combined with audio, video and guided walkthroughs, to provide a compelling end user experience. The accompanying video highlights the key scenarios of our prototype.

An interactive multimedia framework for digital heritage narratives

The cultural heritage of a region is conveyed by both tangible physical artifacts and intangible aspects in the form of stories, dance styles, rituals, etc. Hitherto, the task of creating digital representations for each of these aspects has been addressed in isolation, i.e. using specific media most suited to the artifact such as video, audio, three-dimensional (3D) models, scanning, etc. The challenge of bringing together these separate elements to create a coherent story, however, has remained unaddressed until recently. In this paper we present a unified digital framework that enables the integration of disparate representations of heritage elements into a holistic entity. Our approach results in a compelling and engaging narration that affords a unified user experience. Our solution supports both active (user-controlled explorations) and passive (watching pre-orchestrated narrations) user interactions. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework through a qualitative user study based on two rich interactive narratives built using our framework: (1) history and folklore surrounding a temple in South India, and (2) a historical account of an educational institution also in South India.

WikiBABEL: A Wiki-style Platform for Creation of Parallel Data

In this demo, we present a wiki-style platform -- WikiBABEL -- that enables easy collaborative creation of multilingual content in many non-English Wikipedias, by leveraging the relatively larger and more stable content in the English Wikipedia. The platform provides an intuitive user interface that maintains the user focus on the multilingual Wikipedia content creation, by engaging search tools for easy discoverability of related English source material, and a set of linguistic and collaborative tools to make the content translation simple. We present two different usage scenarios and discuss our experience in testing them with real users. Such integrated content creation platform in Wikipedia may yield as a by-product, parallel corpora that are critical for research in statistical machine translation systems in many languages of the world.

Online learning versus blended learning: an exploratory study

Due to the recent emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs), students and teachers are gaining unprecedented access to high-quality educational content. However, many questions remain on how best to utilize that content in a classroom environment. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we compared two ways of using a recorded video lecture. In the online learning condition, students viewed the video on a personal computer, and also viewed a follow-up tutorial (a quiz review) on the computer. In the blended learning condition, students viewed the video as a group in a classroom, and received the follow-up tutorial from a live lecturer. We randomly assigned 102 students to these conditions, and assessed learning outcomes via a series of quizzes. While we saw significant learning gains after each session conducted, we did not observe any significant differences between the online and blended learning groups. We discuss these findings as well as areas for future work.