image processing

Government relationships can be complex and difficult to understand. The relationships between members of a legislature, bills, votes and lobbyists who promote various causes are important to understand in representative democracies, but difficult to retrieve using current methods. In this paper, we propose a 3D visualization system to explore such legislative relationships for users. We use real data from California state legislature obtained from the Digital Democracy project.

A first-of-its-kind platform, Digital Democracy1 offers a searchable archive of all statements made in US state legislative hearings in four American states (California, New York, Texas and Florida) covering one third of the US population. The purpose of the platform is to increase government transparency in state legislatures. It allows citizens to follow state lawmakers, lobbyists, and advocates as they debate, craft, and vote on policy proposals. State hearings in the U.S. are typically recorded on video and broadcast on cable TV stations, but they are not transcribed or indexed.

The Digital Democracy platform obtains data about the legislative committee hearings: the video archives, the information about the state legislature and so on. Figure 1 shows the design of the DD system. The main source of information for the DD platform is the Cal Channel video archive of legislative sessions, a service provided courtesy of cable TV companies that operate in California.

Comic books are a unique and increasingly popular form of entertainment combining visual and textual elements of communication. This work pertains to making comic books more accessible. Specifically, this paper explains how we detect elements such as speech bubbles present in Japanese comic book panels. Some applications of the work presented in this paper are automatic detection of text and its transformation into audio or into other languages. Automatic detection of elements can also allow reasoning and analysis at a deeper semantic level than what’s possible today.