Joint DELOS MUSCLE Summer School

For the first time, the DELOS and MUSCLE Networks of Excellence organised a joint summer school. The event was held in San Vincenzo, Italy from 12 to 17 June 2006 and the topic covered was Multimedia Digital Libraries.

About one hundred European universities and research centres have been involved over the last few years in initiatives addressing multimedia data analysis, computer vision and object recognition, multimedia management in large audio and video collections.

Currently, two Networks of Excellence, MUSCLE and DELOS, are addressing these subjects. The networks are partially funded by the European Commission within the sixth EU Framework Programme, and coordinated by ERCIM.

In the scope of their respective dissemination and training activities, MUSCLE and DELOS organized a joint summer school in June in San Vincenzo, Italy, with the support of CNR Pisa, INRIA, CWI and the University of Modena.

Invited lecturer James Wang from Pennsylvania State University.

Summer school participants.

The summer school presented software tools and research strategies to enable users to move away from labor-intensive case-by-case modelling of individual applications, and allow them to take full advantage of generic adaptive and self-learning solutions that need minimal supervision in the field of new generations of digital libraries.

Technologies for multimedia digital libraries span over many disciplines: information systems, knowledge representation, computer vision, audio and image processing, compression and storage, machine learning and information retrieval, multimedia data mining, cross-media analysis, user interfaces and interoperability.
Highly qualified lecturers and international researchers have been invited to address theoretical approaches and practical solutions. Among the invited researchers were:

• James Wang - Pennsylvania State University
• Fernando Pereira - Instituto Superior Tècnico Lisboa
• Nicu Sebe - University of Amsterdam
• Milind Naphade - IBM T J Watson Research Center
• Alex Hauptmann - Carnegie Mellon University
• Padraig Cunningham - Trinity College Dublin
• Jia Li - Pennsylvania State University
• Alan Smeaton - Dublin City University.

This summer school highlighted leading research achievements and improved general knowledge in these fields. It also defined a common vision of future research orientations in multimedia datamining, and provided a significant opportunity to exchange experiences, share views and address common problems. Hopefully, this initiative will stimulate the emergence of new research collaborations.

Links:
Presentations: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/imedia/DelosMuscleSummerSchool2006/
MUSCLE: http://www.muscle-noe.org/
DELOS: http://www.delos.info/

Please contact:
Remi Ronchaud, ERCIM office
E-mail: remi.ronchaudercim.org