CHORUS NEWSLETTERS

The CHORUS deliverable D4.3 'Agenda viewgraph & minutes of Workshop 2' is available on the CHORUS website. It includes two workshops: The "National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval", in Geneva, and "The Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving" in Munich.

The CHORUS deliverable D4.4 'Report on the 2nd conference" in Andorra on April 4-5, 2008 has also been published on the Chorus website.

"In the evening of 2nd July 2008 and on 3rd July 2008, main stakeholders from industry, the academic sector as well as professional users were gathered again in order to continue their high-level debate on audio-visual (AV) search, including new services, use cases and technology. The meeting, hosted by the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, kicked off considerations of socio-economic and legal issues by tackling privacy enhancement technologies in the domain of AV and multimedia search."

Chorus organised the first workshop on peer to peer architectures for multimedia retrieval (1p2p4mm) took place in Vico Equense, Naples, Italy, on June 6 2008, co-located with the Infoscale 2008 conference (http://www.infoscale.org/) Most of the workshop time was devoted to discussions, focusing on two important issues: critical mass in terms of number of users and criteria for benefits of p2p over other techniques.
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The first FP7 Networked Media Concertation Meeting was collocated with the IEEE ISCE and took place on 17th April.
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The NAVS took place in Vilamoura (Algarve, Portugal) on April 16th, 2008. 11 active FP6 projects attended to this meeting (3 IP, 6 STREP, 1 NoE, 1 CA). In addition, 5 new FP7 projects (1 NoE, 1 CP, 1 SSA) have participated. 10 projects have been presented.
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"The fourth CHORUS Think-Tank (TT-4) was hosted by Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, on 9-10 April 2008. HP Research and Nokia newly joined in addition to AFP, Circom Regional, Exalead, FAST, Motorola, Philips, Siemens, Thomson and Yahoo!. The University of Amsterdam, CERTH in Greece, INRIA in France, SICS in Sweden, and IRT in Germany, represented the research and user communities. TT-4 talked again about the use-case typologies of audio-visual search and updated its list of new services and business opportunities. User-generated data and metadata was identified as an important capital value. As the notion of "prosumer" becomes significant, the end-users may also become active producers of metadata for their own productions as well as for those of others. TT-4 agreed in principle on the functional breakdown of search engines where queries are either initiated by a "user" or by the "system". The challenge is to transform the users' input (explicit or implicit) into "matchable" query-metadata."
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The Second CHORUS Conference and third Yahoo! Research Workshop on the Future of Web Search was held during April 4-5, 2008, in Granvalira, Andorra to discuss future directions in multi-medial information access and other specialised topics in the near future of retrieval. Attendance was at capacity, with 97 partici- pants from 11 countries and 3 continents.
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The JRC IPTS is organizing a CHORUS Workshop on the impact of search engines for the European Economy and Society. The purpose of the workshop is to identify techno-economic trends and social aspects of search and its future implications with regard to identify some recommendations for policy makers. The workshop will take place on September 29 and 30, 2008 in Seville (Spain).

The IPTS is seeking for contributions that may trigger the discussion on the future of either form an economic, regulatory or social point of view. They may address the following topics:

Interested parties are invited to sent the title and ½ page outline to Ramón Compañó (email: ramon.compano@ec.europa.eu)

TT-6 is planned in the beginning of October 2008, right after the Workshop on socio-economic and legal issues in Sevilla . With the debates at TT-6 we should be able to finalise the Deliverables D2.2. and D3.3.

The NEM Summit will be organised on October 13-15, 2008 in Saint-Malo (France), under the aegis of the European Commission's DG Information Society and Media with the support of the Region Bretagne and the Media & Networks cluster. The 2008 NEM Summit "Towards Future Media Internet" aims to be a major conference and exhibition devoted to the field of networked and electronic media and ICT at large. Paper submission was closed on June 2; it is still possible to apply for a booth in the exhibition area during the conference. More information can be found here

The ICT Event is organised by The European Commission's Directorate General Information Society and Media and hosted by the French Presidency of the European Union.
The ICT 2008 Exhibition intends to show concrete results of research in and around Europe related to information and communications technologies.
CHORUS has applied for a session on search, where world-renowned exprets from industry and academia will discuss innovation and disruptive technologies for multimedia content based search engines. The open discussion will focus on new services and challenges faced by industry and academia that need to be resolved to realize the next generation search engine. More precisely: what are novel functionality and new services offered by future search engines? What are the core components of such an engine? And where are the main technological gaps that need to be resolved?
More information can be found here