Being part of the Idiap research institute booth, Klewel was present at the ICT European Research Forum in Lyon (France) on November 24-26.
Idiap invited two of its spin off (Klewel and KeyLemon) to join its booth. Klewel’s poster on the booth:
About this ICT forum. I enjoyed being part of this event. It was nice to see in one main building (huge Congress center) all what is going on around Information Technology research in Europe. I have the impression that Europe is investing a lot in research around IT and telecommunications. So it was dedicated only to research. That is why it was not as huge as the CeBIT in Hannover (Germany). I have not taken the time to attend the conferences. I preferred privileging the direct contact with other researchers. From Switzerland, apart from Idiap I took the opportunity to chat with the researchers from the CSEM in Yverdon who are doing great work on hardware electronic design.
Following the NEM summit in Saint-Malo, the responsible of the Media & networks Cluster in France had a stand there. They are doing a great job in terms of communication although I have still not found the videos from the NEM summit and the last news on their website dates from August 2008. To stay in France, I heard about two European research projects in the field of audiovisual indexing: one is Pharos (not very well ranked in Google) and VITALAS . Both of them are ambitious and surprisingly very close to each other: it is all about automatic annotations, scalable cross-media retrieval and indexing. The first one involves prestigious partners such as France Telecom, Fast (acquired by Microsoft), EPFL, Open University while the second one involves INRIA (Nozha Boujemaa) and INA among many others.
Again in France, I discovered a Content Cluster called imaginove where they bring together three topics: “Cinema & audiovisual”, “Animation & Interactivity” and “Video game”. Around distance learning, I met some people from Lyon invloved in the Spiral pedagogical project. It sounds very close to Moodle. Another interesting project around virtual learning: www.eightydays.eu .
Around very high definition videos:
- ED-CINE project: Enhanced Digital Cinema. This is another very ambitious project and I think they are on the right track, going towards very high definition in order to distribute and display movies on walls.
Around Mobile technology:
- W3C: I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Philipp Hoschka from the World Wide Web Consortium who invented SMIL. They are now working on Mobile Web 2.0 . An interesting W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking is coming up in January in Barcelona, Spain. Mobile devices are definitely the new medias to browse the Internet and the usage statistics from developing countries are impressive.
- MOBILE 3DTV: It is about Mobile 3DTV content delivery optimization over DVB-H system. The demonstration on the TV screen surprised me: it is working. The movies are made with two cameras simulating our vision with two eyes.
- Portable Interactivity: “makes mobile Rich Media a reality – interactive and personalized, intuitive and direct!”. The system would be based on MPEG-7 and SVG. I hope they will succeed. The current way of manually copying and then synchronizing a video between iTunes and an iPhone is just not the right way to get a video on your mobile.
- Although this event was public Research oriented, I could see a booth from Alcated-Lucent promoting its “Unlimited Mobile TV Solution”. So TV is not dead!
I won’t be able to write about everything I saw but there were many other interesting things such as the research on grid computing and projects involving Europe and developing countries in South America and Africa.
