+ Meet the READ project partners – Sofia Ares Oliveira

What’s your name?

Sofia Ares Oliveira.

Where do you work?

Digital Humanities Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Tell us a bit about your background…

I studied Electrical Engineering at EPFL and specialised in Information Technology, where I explored several signal processing topics, from acoustics to biomedical signals to images. I started working at the DHLab on cadaster map images and since then I have been working on the several thousands of historical documents from Venice that have been digitized and are waiting to be processed.

What is your role in the READ project?

At EPFL we are responsible for the Large Scale Demonstrator, the Venice Time Machine, which aims at building a multidimensional model of Venice and its evolution covering a period of more than 1000 years. I am mainly in charge of integrating and implementing computer vision and image processing tools for handwritten text documents and cadaster maps.

What is top of your to-do list at the moment?

Finalising the release of cython’s binding of the line segmentation tools on Transkribus, so that other READ partners can use it with python.

What do you like best about working on READ?

Working with people coming from different fields and countries, and the ‘product-oriented’ vision of the project, with direct feedback from users.

If you could do another job for just one day, what would it be?

Astronaut, a nice combination of scientist, engineer and explorer!

What can you see out of the window of your office? 

Thanks Sofia!