Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagán, researchers of the project 'Public discourse' of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, have participated for the second consecutive year in the Google Summer of Code. They were present as members of the international consortium network Hen Lab for the Study of Multimodal Communication, which brings together experts from more than 15 universities from different countries such as USA, Spain, Germany, Brazil or Norway.

            Google Summer of Code is a global program that awards grants to young computer scientists from around the world to collaborate with institutions, groups at research and companies dedicated to developing code for open source tools. The mentoring institutions selected by Google present several projects from work that young computer scientists can join.

            Specifically, network Hen Lab develops code related to natural language processing, audio analysis, computer vision and multimodal analysis. In 2016, five young people from countries such as China or India have been mentored by experts from network.

Newscape, the great Library Services of television news.

The network Hen Lab projects in this Google program apply to its Library Services International NewsScape of Television News. This database is a gigantic corpus of spoken language, allowing the study of all multimodal aspects (gesture, prosody, images and sounds accompanying speech, television production effects, etc.). It is therefore an unprecedented tool that could revolutionize the study of speech and news coverage.

            It currently contains more than 250,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages that can be searched automatically. NewsScape allows, for example, to compare the treatment of a topic on different channels and programs by searching for words core topic in their subtitles.

            With respect to the Spanish news collection, it currently constitutes the largest existing resource for the study of spoken Spanish, with some 6,000 hours of television and some 40 million synchronized subtitles.