IRES Track I: US-Mexico Collaboration on Multimodal Detection of Objectionable Content in Online Videos in Spanish and English

A major form of entertainment for children comes from movies, video games, and online multi-media content. Content from these mass media communications sources has the potential to negatively affect behavior, especially of young viewers. The IRES team will design, implement, and evaluate new multi-modal technologies to detect the presence of content that has been linked to negative effects on viewers while training graduate and undergraduate student in research and professional skills in a multi-cultural, multilingual international environment.

The project leverages a long-standing collaboration between faculty at the University of Houston and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE) of Mexico. IRES students will be trained and mentored on multilingual methods of language processing, image/video analysis, and deep learning for multimodal data. The goal of this IRES project is to contribute to the growth of the U.S. national STEM workforce by training a cohort of future computer science professionals (referred to as “IRES Scholars”) to thrive in a multidisciplinary and multicultural environment and enabling them to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to pursue artificial intelligence research and development.

Through this project, IRES Scholars will be exposed to state-of-the-art research in computer vision, natural language processing, and deep learning. They will design, implement, and evaluate new algorithms and systems that will contribute to the crucial goal of providing safer online spaces for young viewers through clear and accurate descriptions of potentially problematic online content. The project employs evidence-based mentoring that will support program sustainability.

The objectives of this IRES project are to 1) advance the state-of-the-art in the research field of automated analysis of multimodal content in multilingual and multidomain settings; 2) prepare students with cross-disciplinary and multicultural research skills to join a diverse and global STEM/knowledge workforce; 3) increase enthusiasm, research skills, and professional skills of graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented population groups in STEM who otherwise might not have an international opportunity for professional development; and 4) immerse students in a community of native Spanish speakers to support engagement in an authentic cross-cultural and multilingual training experience.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.