Section: Other Grants and Activities
European Initiatives
Integrated project “VITALAS” [2007-2009]
“Video & image indexing and retrieval in the large scale” (http://vitalas.ercim.org/ ) in the call6 of 6th Framework Programme. VITALAS is an innovative project designed to provide advanced solution for indexing, searching and accessing large scale digital audio-visual content through cross-modal content enrichment and personalised. The strength of this initiative relies on the capacity of the project to confront its technology to real use-cases, reflecting the joint concerns of two major European content providers. The project will develop new technological functionalities and services to access to large scale multimedia databases. The project is composed of 12 industrial and academic European partners (ERCIM, EADS, CWI, Fraunhofer, Robotiker, INA, Univ. of Sunderland, CERTH-ITI, Codeworks, Belga, IRT). AFP (Agence France Press) has recently joined the project. Nozha Boujemaa is the scientific coordinator of the project, Alexis Joly and Anne Verroust-Blondet are Workpackage leaders.
A presentation of VITALAS Project (The VITALAS project : Video and Image Indexing and Retrieval in the Large Scale) has been made at the International Symposium of the THESEUS Research Program - Kick-off talks, in Berlin, Germany, in June 2009.
The demo of the second version of VITALAS system has been made at CHORUS Final conference in Brussels, Belgium, in May 2009.
VITALAS participated to the TRECVID-2009 evaluation (High-Level Feature Extraction and Interactive search tasks, [17] )
Coordination Action “CHORUS” [2007-2009]
CHORUS is a coordination Action in the field of Audio-Visual Search Engines accepted in the call6 of the 6th Framework Programme (http://www.ist-chorus.org/ ). An important objective of the project consists of supporting the preparation of an analysis and a roadmap for the realisation of Audio-visual search engines in EU. Hence, CHORUS coordinates all the ongoing European and national efforts/projects on the topic of "multimedia search engine". The consortium represents established and well-reputed research institutions and consultancies with a broad range of intellectual and technological expertise in the area, both as regards concrete actions and policy development and track records of national, Union-wide, and international cooperation and activity (Thomson, Philips, JCP consult, IRT, France Telecom, Exalead, etc.). Nozha Boujemaa is the scientific co-ordinator of the project.
The EU coordination action CHORUS organised the international CHORUS conference (held May 26-28, 2009 in Brussels, Belgium) to present its final report, which identified cross-disciplinary challenges and recommendations in the domain of search engine technology. In addition to high representatives of the European Commission, the conference was attended by major industrial (e.g. Yahoo!, Thomson, Phillips, Exalead etc.) and academic stakeholder of the search engine community (including representatives from North America and Japan).
