Alumna Lise Stork defends her PhD on making sense of illustrated handwritten archives
On Thursday July 1, our alumna Lise Stork will defend her PhD thesis at Leiden University. It is about using AI to make sense of handwritten natural history archives.
PhD Defence:
Lise Stork
"Knowledge Extraction from Archives of Natural History Collections"
Thursday July 1, 13:45-14:30h
Promotores:
Prof. Aske Plaat & Prof. Fons J. Verbeek
Link to attend the defence online:
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/wetenschappers/livestream-promotie
After completing her Media Technology MSc studies, Lise joined the larger "NWO - Creative Industry" research project about making computers interpret handwritten notes and illustrations from the scientific exploration of the Indonesion Archipelago (1820-1850).
Documents and notes are written in hard-to-read historical handwriting and are weakly structured, precluding access to a wider public and experts. Computer-based recognition of connected-cursive script is in general beyond the scope of current technology. The project aims to develop a technological tool, that combines both image and textual recognition, and allows for the first time an integrated study of underexplored scientific heritage collections and archives in general.
A little more about Lise
Lise started her Media Technology MSc studies in September 2014. Two years later, in August 2016, she successfully defended her Master's thesis on "Assessing Systematic Distortions in Visuospatial Mental Representations with use of Non-Linear Dimensionality Reduction".
Before coming to Leiden University, she received a Bachelor of Arts from Utrecht University, in Communication & Information Sciences. Here already, she had a focus on language and linguistics.
Parts of Lise's PhD research led to her winning the national Young eScientist Award 2019. She was also active in the Girls in Science Days 2020.