Welcome to Potential Contributors

Hello and welcome to Red Hen Lab! We are thrilled to know that you are interested to contribute in Red Hen Lab. This is an exciting journey where you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects, collaborate with a diverse group of mentors and fellow contributors, and make a meaningful impact in the world of research and technology. Be sure to study this entire page thoroughly before looking at anything else. Students: Focus on the draft of your proposal, as outlined below.

About Red Hen Lab

Red Hen Lab is an international group of researchers whose mission is to advance the science of multimodal communication. These Red Hens work in many fields in the humanities, social sciences, computer science, cognitive science, and data science. They also share their resources and research findings with other communities. Red Hen Lab’s goal is to advance theory of multimodal communication and to develop computational, statistical, and technical tools to improve research possibilities. Red Hen Lab has no formal organization or staff. It is a cooperative, not a service. One of its primary resources is audiovisual data. At present, Red Hen Lab holds more than 530,000 hours of audiovisual recordings in more than 25 languages. These comprise more than 7.5 billion words in metadata files, including time-aligned close-captioned text. The recordings occupy more than 150 TB of storage. Automatic capture and processing increases this dataset by about 150 hours per day. This dataset is an official archive of both the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Library and the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Library. The Red Hen dataset is not publicly shared but is, under Section 108 of the United States Copyright Act, shared with researchers who have legitimate research needs, as explained here.

Red Hen’s purpose in acquiring data is not so much to hold specific data but instead to use data to create tools analyzing recordings of communicative performances or artifacts—speech, text, gesture, music, paintings, sculpture, architecture, suggestive landscape, graphs, diagrams, films, videos, human subjects research, virtual reality, and so on. Red Hen has created several tools for tagging, anonymizing, and wrangling data.

Who is Red Hen? Who can become a Red Hen?

Red Hen is a cooperative of engaged researchers who collaborate closely and contribute power and content to Red Hen and hence to each other and to future researchers. Red Hen lacks the resources and organization to serve scholars other than those who work in the cooperative. Red Hen's vast and growing archive is not designed to be a corpus, but some collaborators use it to help create corpora for specific purposes. Researchers who would like to work on yet newer ways of deriving corpora from the archive, on providing user-friendly interfaces for the archive, on improving the tagging of data, or on anything else that would benefit the distributed laboratory are warmly encouraged to write to the directors. See Access. See also the history of our Google Summer of Code ideas pages by clicking on the appropriate links in the navigation bar (three parallel horizontal lines, top left of this page). See also our Barnyard of Possible Specific Projects—our concrete to-do list. Join us and dig in!

Red Hen is not available to the public. Red Hen is not a service. Red Hen has no staff. The directors of Red Hen take input and advice from wherever they can get it to establish fundamental principles of the cooperative, but they do not control the specific labor of other Red Hens.  Red Hens are highly independent and able to progress on their own initiative.  The main reason for the existence of any project in Red Hen is that some impressive Red Hen is willing to take responsibility.  

Aside from established researchers, Red Hen also receives many expressions of interest from students worldwide, but any student who wishes to join Red Hen should consider first whether they are prepared to operate as a Red Hen. Despite our great interest in students, Red Hen unfortunately does not have the time to design with detailed specifications projects for students and then to tutor them in how to complete each of the steps. A student who wishes to join the Red Hen cooperative needs to write a detailed draft proposal for a tractable, worthy project. Presented with such a proposal, some major participant in Red Hen will review it and respond.  If to do your project, you need data that Red Hen has, let Red Hen know what you need.  If you need other data, propose how you would acquire it. If the student performs substantial impressive work, the major Red Hens are likely to be disposed to help the student over a difficult hump when it arises, but otherwise cannot monitor closely.  

Your Role

Volunteer

Nearly all contributors to Red Hen are volunteers.  

Student

Red Hen receives many expressions of interest from students worldwide, but any student who wishes to join Red Hen should consider first whether they are prepared to operate as a Red Hen. Despite our great interest in students, Red Hen unfortunately does not have the time to design with detailed specifications projects for students and then to tutor them in how to complete each of the steps. A student who wishes to join the Red Hen cooperative needs to make a detailed draft proposal for a tractable, worthy project. Presented with such a proposal, some major participant in Red Hen will review it and respond.  If to do your project, you need data that Red Hen has, let Red Hen know what you need.  If you need other data, propose how you would acquire it. If the student performs substantial impressive work, the major Red Hens are likely to be disposed to help the student over a difficult hump when it arises, but otherwise cannot monitor closely.  

Google Summer of Code Contributor (GSoC)

For Summer 2024, see the Red Hen Google Summer of Code Ideas Page for 2024. As a GSoC contributor at Red Hen Lab, you'll be an integral part of our team. You'll have the opportunity to work on exciting projects that align with your interests and skills. Your contributions will not only help advance our research but also provide you with valuable experience and exposure to the world of open-source development. GSoC opens for only for the summer. If you want to contribute during the other times, please be a Volunteer. You can go through the list of FAQs. Please go through the contributor guidelines for your reference. 

GSoC Mentor

As a mentor at Red Hen Lab for the Google Summer of Code program, you play a crucial role in guiding and supporting our talented and enthusiastic student contributors. Your expertise and experience will be instrumental in helping our students navigate the challenges of their projects, make informed decisions, and grow as developers and researchers. You will provide mentorship, feedback, and encouragement, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment where learning thrives. Your dedication to helping our students succeed will not only contribute to the success of their GSoC projects but also to the long-term growth and impact of our open-source initiatives. If you are interested in mentoring any project, please reach out to us redhenlab@gmail.com

Getting Started 

To help you get started, here are some important steps:

1. Explore Project Ideas

Browse our list of project ideas and find one that resonates with your interests and skills. You can also go through the work done by other contributors in GSoC and continue the work as a volunteer or as a part of upcoming GSoC program. 

You can also propose your own project idea if it aligns with our organization's goals. 

2. Engage with Mentors

Reach out to potential mentors for your chosen project. Introduce yourself, express your interest, and ask any questions you may have. Building a strong mentor-mentee relationship is key to a successful GSoC experience.

3. Write a proposal

Prepare a detailed project proposal that outlines your plan, timeline, and deliverables. Your proposal should demonstrate your understanding of the project and your approach to solving the challenges it presents. You can follow  this Latex Template for proposal.    

But if you are not familiar with Latex, here  is a text version.

Project Proposal for RedHenLab

Write Your Name Here 

Date

Summary of the Proposal

Write a brief summary of the proposal. The summary should not exceed 120 words. A single paragraph is best. The summary should include a few lines about the background information, the main research question or problem that you want to write about, and your methods. The proposal summary should not contain any references or citations. Your entire proposal cannot exceed 2000 words, so choose the words in this section carefully. The 1500 words you will write in the proposal document will exclude any words contained in the tables, figures, and references.

Background

In the background section, write briefly using as many paragraphs, lists, tables, figures as you can about the main problem. This background section will typically have three sections:

• What is known about the topic

• What is not known about the topic, and the challenges 

• What unknowns and challenges you will address 

Cite all relevant references. If you use any part from previous research, you must cite it properly. Proposals assembled by copypasta from papers and websites will be ignored.

Goal and Objectives

Describe the goal(s) of your project and how you will meet those goals. Typically, the way to write this is something like, "The goal of this research is to ...", and then continue with something like, "Goal 1 will be met by achieving the following objectives ...", and so on. The goal is a broad based statement, and the objectives are very specific, achievable tasks that will show how you will achieve the goal you set out.

Methods

In this section, discuss:

• The challenges you will tackle.

• The method you chose to tackle those problems, and why

• Additional resources (datasets, pre-implemented methods, etc.) you will use in this project.

• The result of your project. What is the deliverable?

• If you are submitting for GSoC, what is the future of your project after GSoC. What do you see as possibilities for future improvements? Would you be willing to mentor others in the future to continue work on your project?

Tentative Timeline

This is the fourth and final section of your proposal. You need to provide a tentative timeline, on what time frame you are planning to accomplish the goals you mentioned in Section . We recommend using this Gantt chart [1], something like this, with your objectives and milestones listed on the y-axis and the weeks of GSoC on the x-axis.

Once your proposal is ready, you can send it to redhenlab@gmail.com for organisation review and selection. If you use this Latex Template on Overleaf, then you can generate a PDF of your project proposal by selecting the PDF symbol on the top of its window. Save the PDF to your hard drive and then upload that one copy of PDF to Learn. Include complete citations and references. For example, we have cited here a secondary analysis of data from papers published for about 40 years on statistical inference. It was an interesting paper written by Stang et.al. [2] and published in 2016. A full citation of the paper is mentioned in the references section.

References

[1] HL Gantt. 1910. Work, wages and profit. Engineering Magazine. New York.

[2] Andreas Stang, Markus Deckert, Charles Poole, and Kenneth J Rothman. 2016. Statistical inference in abstracts of major medical and epidemiology journals 1975-2014: a systematic review. European journal of epidemiology, November.

Please note that if you want to write a proposal only In GSoC program, Google has the final right to select the proposal once it is approved by the organization.

Expectations

While participating in projects with Red Hen Lab, we expect you to:

• Be proactive and communicate regularly with your mentor and the community.

• Follow the coding standards and best practices of the project.

• Collaborate with other contributors in a respectful and inclusive manner.

• Deliver high-quality code and documentation.

• Attend meetings and checkpoints as scheduled with your mentor.

We are excited to have you on board at Red Hen Lab. This is an incredible opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute to innovative projects. Remember that we are here to support you throughout your journey, and we can't wait to see what we can achieve together.

If you have any questions or need assistance, don't hesitate to reach out to our community. 

Welcome to the Red Hen Lab family.