Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

European Initiatives

Quaero

Participants : Laurent Amsaleg, Mathieu Ben, Vincent Claveau, Patrick Gros, Camille Guinaudeau, Ewa Kijak, Stacy Payne, Pascale Sébillot, Fabienne Moreau, Julien Fayolle, Ali Reza Ebadat.

Duration: 5 years, starting in May 2008. Prime: Thomson.

Quaero is a large research and applicative program in the field of multimedia description (ranging from text to speech and video) and search engines. It groups 5 application projects, a joint Core Technology Cluster developing and providing advanced technologies to the application projects, and a Corpus project in charge of providing the necessary data to develop and evaluate the technologies. The large scope of QUAERO's ambitious objectives allows it to take full advantage of Texmex's many areas of research, through its tasks on: Indexing Multimedia Objects, Term Acquisition and Recognition, Semantic Annotation, Video Segmentation, and Multi-modal Video Structuring.

In 2009, TexMex 's participation in QUAERO increased steadily over the course of the year. Starting with the 3 people already hired on the contract (Camille Guinaudeau, PhD student, and Stacy Payne and Mathieu Ben, engineers), they were joined by 3 interns who did annotation work on the video segmentation corpus over the summer, followed by the arrival of 2 PhD students in Sept-Oct (Julien Fayolle, Ali Reza Ebadat). Finally, in December an engineer, initially foreseen for VistaS team but reassigned to TexMex , started working on one of the tasks.