Consortium

JOANNEUM RESEARCH DIGITAL – Institute for Digital Technologies Steyrergasse 17 A-8010 Graz Austria http://www.joanneum.at

JOANNEUM RESEARCH is a non-profit organisation concentrating on applied research with a highly qualified staff of more than 400 people. Services include specifically geared research tasks for small- and medium-sized companies, complex interdisciplinary national and international assignments as well as tailored techno-economic consulting. They participate in setting up and organizing national competence centres as well as in numerous large international projects. The DIGITAL – Institute for Digital Technologies (http://www.joanneum.at/digital) specialises in web and internet technologies, image, video and acoustic signal processing together with remote sensing, communication and navigation technologies. These technologies are implemented in hardware and software development and application-oriented solutions using scientifically state of the art methods. The institute has participated in more than 80 EC and ESA funded projects since the Third Framework Programme.
JOANNEUM RESEARCH, a non-profit research centre, concentrating on applied R&D, with proven experience in setting up and running large international projects will coordinate TOSCA-MP. JOANNEUM RESEARCH leads WP4 on task modelling and benchmarking and will work on developing benchmarking methods for information extraction and search tools based on task models. JOANNEUM RESEARCH will contribute to research in video analysis and content modelling in WP2.

 

Deutsche Thomson OHG Karl-Wiechert-Allee 74 30625 Hannover Germany http://www.technicolor.com/

TECHNICOLOR S.A., with its approximately 20,000 employees worldwide, is one of the world’s leading technology enterprises in the media industry. Technicolor is focused on its content creator customer base, leveraging its outstanding market position, the strength of the Technicolor brand with film and television studios, its in-home delivery assets (set-top boxes and gateways) and its research and licensing capabilities. The main business areas comprise solutions for digital content/media as well as for audio/video networks in the professional and consumer domains.
DTO leads WP5, which researches and develops a distributed repository framework for media production environments. This is the main contribution of DTO to TOSCA-MP. In addition, DTO contributes to R&D in semantic linking and enrichment and visualisation of content sets and search results.

 

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung e.v. Hansastrasse 27c 80686 Muenchen Germany http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft undertakes applied research of direct utility to private and public enterprise and of wide benefit to society. Its services are solicited by customers and contractual partners in industry, the service sector and public administration. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft maintains roughly 80 research units, including 58 Fraunhofer Institutes, at over 40 different locations throughout Germany. The Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications – Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) is a leading research institute in the fields of Photonic Networks, Mobile Communications and Electronic Imaging for Multimedia. The Image Processing (IP) Department of this institute has a long experience in signal, image, and video processing. About 50 researchers in about 20 research projects are working in fields related to multimedia with applications ranging from very low bit rate video for mobile services up to high quality coding and processing of Digital Cinema, HDTV, 3DTV and Immersive Tele-Presence. HHI is especially renowned for its leading role in video coding standardisation within ISO/MPEG, ITU-T/VCEG and DVB, was strongly involved in the MPEG-7 standardisation, participates in an effort of the European Broadcasting Union (P/SCAIE) to define a new MPEG-7 broadcast profile incorporating quality related content based metadata, attended ITU-T/VQEG (Video Quality Experts Group) meetings. In addition, HHI was member of several European research projects of the COST, EUREKA, RACE, ACTS, ESPRIT and IST programmes and currently it is member of the FP6 projects M-PIPE, MediaNet, Worldscreen, VISNET, RUSHES and 3DTV. HHI has a leading role in Theseus, a German funded project, where it is heavily involved in activities targeting the development of new media asset management solutions and multimodal semantic search engines merging text, audio and video related metadata.
HHI leads WP2 dealing with automatic metadata extraction. The contribution of HHI is research and development in several tasks of the WP, including visual analysis, genre adaptive processing and semantic enrichment and linking. HHI also contributes to R&D in result presentation, in particular visualisation and gathering user feedback to improve metadata extraction.

 

European Broadcasting Union – Union Européenne de Radio-Télévision Ancienne route 17a 1218 Grand Saconnex (Geneve) Switzerland http://www.ebu.ch/

Founded in 1950, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) counts 75 active members, from 56 countries in and around Europe, plus 45 associate members around the world. The EBU Headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. The EBU is also represented in different countries through its offices in Beijing, Brussels, London, Madrid, Moscow, Singapore and Washington. The EBU represents its Members on European Union audiovisual policy matters of concern to the audiovisual sector. The EBU also works closely with the UN, UNESCO and the World Broadcasting Unions (WBU) on media policy.
The EBU is represented by the EBU Technical Department, a recognised body involved in numerous successful hybrid broadcasting-broadband standards and related publications. The EBU will lead WP7 on communication, dissemination and standardisation.

 

Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie NV Auguste reyerslaan 52 1043 Brussel Belgium http://www.vrt.be/

The Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT) (The Flemish Radio and Television Broadcast Organization) is an incorporated company of public right. As a part of the management contract, VRT has the mission to proactively investigate new technological opportunities. As such VRT has founded an independent technological research, development and innovation department called VRT research & innovation. The independent team of highly qualified researchers has a large expertise in many facets of media production and media management. One of the objectives of VRT research & innovation is to research techniques to improve the efficiency of the broadcast chain from content production to content distribution. It accomplishes this through strategic research, development of proof-of-concept applications and improving its expertise through national and international cooperation. The expertise of VRT research & innovation is exploited throughout the Flemish broadcast landscape such as VRT itself. The proximity of VRT also allows the testing of newly researched technologies in a real world setting.
The main R&D task of VRT is combining various time based metadata for multimodal indexing and search. VRT works on to the implementation of distributed repositories to host data sets for benchmarking, also contributing to their collection. VRT will also actively perform field trials.

 

Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik GmbH Floriansmuehlstrasse 60 80939 Muenchen Germany http://www.irt.de/

IRT is a specialised broadcast and multimedia technology institute. As a non-profit making company, IRT is dedicated to technical research and development for the benefit of the public. Founded in 1956, it is entirely and jointly owned by the Public Service Broadcasters of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (ARD, ZDF, DRadio, ORF and SRG/SSR). The institute finds innovative and real-world solutions which enhance the quality of radio, television and new media for the benefit of users. IRT sees its role as that of a technical advisor to broadcasters as well as a consulting body for industry. The institute collaborates with numerous clients in the broadcasting, media, communications engineering and IT sectors, yet also with various research organisations and institutions of higher education.
IRT leads WP6, which develops the SOA based infrastructure for TOSCA-MP and integrates the results from the other technical work packages. Together with the integration work, IRT handles the technical coordination of the project and quality assurance. In addition, IRT contributes to task modelling and data set collection.

 

RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana S.p.A. Viale mazzini 14 00195 Roma Italy http://www.rai.it/

RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana – the Italian Public Service Broadcaster and Italy’s largest radio-television broadcasting company, has played a major role in shaping the country’s life and customs over the last decades. RAI started broadcasting its radio programmes in 1924 and nowadays broadcasts over 32.000 hours of television programmes (of which 75% are produced in-house) and 52.000 hours of radio programmes per year. It has the right to broadcast radio and television programmes over the air, via cable or satellite, by wire, or by any other means. The present concession to RAI of public service radio and television broadcasting is based on the 1994 twenty-year convention between RAI and Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.
RAI will work on the definition of the usage scenarios of the project and lead the field trials to validate results against these scenarios. RAI also performs R&D in task modelling and contributes to data set collection.

 

FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER Via santa croce 77 38122 Trento Italy http://www.fbk.eu/

Fondazione Bruno Kessler was founded on March 1st 2007. It is a non-profit body with a public interest mission having private law status and inheriting the history of Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC was founded in 1962 by the Autonomous Province of Trento). Scientific excellence and innovation as well as technology transfer to companies and public services are Fondazione Bruno Kessler’s main objectives. In its areas of competence, FBK collaborates with the main actors in global research and works in accordance with European Union Programs. The total budget is currently about 35M Euro, and research activities are carried out in scientific and technological areas (FBK-irst) and in human sciences. A substantial portion of FBK-irst activities is in Information Technology, whose budget amounts to more than 10M Euro, about half of which are covered by industrial contracts and European and National contracts.
FBK will mainly be involved in automatic speech metadata extraction. In particular, FBK will contribute with multilingual speech technology for automatic transcription and translation. Research and development activity will be conducted to train transcription and translation systems, adapt the components of the automatic transcription systems to the application scenarios of TOSCA-MP, and develop a spoken language identification module.

 

playence Spain S.L. c/ Zurbano 73, Esc. Int., 6° 28010 Madrid Spain http://www.playence.com/

playence is a software vendor leading the next generation of multimedia (i.e. video, audio, text and images) annotation and search. Our products reduce the complexity required to extract contextualized knowledge from multimedia assets, enabling users to search into any type of content just like they currently do within textual assets.
Our Web-based solution has been designed to operate with very large volumes of structured (i.e. metadata, XML, financial records, etc.) and unstructured (i.e. rich media, pdf, doc, email, etc.) information, providing end-users with a friendlier way to find what they need. As a result, our customers are able to improve content consumption through higher quality of experience, realize the modularity, agility and scalability necessary to expand the business at will, and deliver best-of-breed application portfolios that improve resource allocation, lower total cost of ownership and evolve with current business needs.
Formed as a spin-off of the University of Innsbruck, playence won initial funding from the Center for Academic Spin-offs Tirol (CAST) for its innovative product. In 2010, the Austrian Wirtschaft Service (AWS) and later in 2011 the Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaf (FFG) also identified significant growth potential and decided to support our development by investing in the company.
playence’s concepts and technology have been researched and developed since 2000 and are secured by international patents and trademarks. Our solutions can be deployed across a number of industries such as eCommerce, Advertising, Legal, Finance, eGovernment, Healthcare, Biotechnology, Media or Telecom. playence offers its customers better information access while reducing operating expenditures. In addition to that it puts in place the means to readily and efficiently deploy and access content assets meeting the needs of extremely fast-paced ecosystems.

 

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Oude Markt 13 3000 Leuven Belgium http://www.kuleuven.be/kuleuven/

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) has a large experience in coordinating research projects, with a budget on research grant participation of close to 300 M€ per year. It fosters a strong porting of its developed technology to the industry with a number of active spin-off companies of more than 70. The Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval (LIIR) (http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~liir/) is in the Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The team is composed of one professor, 3 postdoctoral researchers and 9 PhD students. The core of the research regards problems of information retrieval, extraction, linking, summarization and search in a multimedia context. Fundamental problems with regard to text understanding, mining, indexing, and retrieval models are studied. The developed technologies are applied in the domains of news, business intelligence, bioinformatics, police and intelligence services, legal documents, electronic mail, user generated content, and the World Wide Web. LIIR encourages research on the interrelation between information retrieval and other disciplines, especially computational linguistics, machine learning, data mining, automated reasoning, and multimedia processing. LIIR collaborates in its research with national and international academic, governmental and industrial partners. The team has recently received several best paper awards at CICLING 2010 and ACM-ICAIL 2009. LIIR closely collaborates with the computer vision group of Luc Van Gool and Tinne Tuytelaars at K.U.Leuven.
K.U.Leuven performs R&D in speech metadata extraction and semantic linking, integrating speech and visual metadata extraction results. K.U.Leuven also contributes to R&D in networked search.