This blog is about a research project that is very dear to us at Klewel. After 12 years of intensive collaborative research across Swiss institutions in the area of Interactive Multimodal Information Management, the IM2 NCCR ended in December 2013. This probably not mean much to the people not working directly in this field, so let me give a little background on them. IM2’s goal was to focus on new multimodal technologies to support human interaction, in the context of smart meeting rooms and remote meeting assistants.
In this context, IM2 aimed to enhance the value of multimodal meeting recordings and to make human interaction more effective in real time. These goals were achieved by developing new tools for computer supported cooperative work and by designing new ways to search and browse meetings as part of an integrated multimodal group communication, captured from a wide range of devices. Several technology prototypes, able to record meetings and to automatically generate searchable multimedia meeting archives are now available and some of the resulting technologies are being exploited by IM2 spin-offs or have been adopted by companies working in the multiple fields of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), including e.g. video-conferencing and meeting facilitation.
Now that we know how useful and important is all this research that were conducted during the 12 years of existence of this research project, I am glad to say that NCCR will be survived by AIM2, the association that will keep IM2 alive. However, 12 years of extensive research deserves a final event, summarizing the developments and achievements. This was organized as an open 2-days workshop, targeting a general audience (scientists, industry representatives, scientific policy makers, and media representatives).
This workshop was an opportunity to discuss some of the achievements of IM2, current state-of-the-art in the field, as well as scientific and structural impacts of such long-term collaborative project.
So how did this help Klewel come to life? Please check out Dr. Sandy Ingram talk about the beginnings at Klewel by clicking on the image below:
Also, among the other presenters was Dr. David Imseng, postdoctoral researcher at Idiap Research Institute, who talked about the importance of multilingual speech recognition. Did you know that there are over 7000 languages in the world? Even though it may seem like the case, but not everybody speaks English, so this technology is becoming more and more useful in our globalized world. Check out Dr. Imseng’s findings by clicking on the image below:
Klewel solutions provides an extremely useful tool for events like this. The recordings of conferences, workshops and symposiums can educate us on these rather interesting topics. Our Triskel station archives the contents in a way that is easy to retrieve, watch and search later.
