Intelligent Content in FP7
3rd ICT call
31st January 2008
Paris
Albert GAUTHIER
DG Information Society and Media
Unit E2 – Content & Knowledge

Foreword
• Content is important
– It underpins the Knowledge Society, is the crude oil of our
economy
– It’s an expression of our culture, identity, diversity
• Content is big, and growing
– Europe’s creative & cultural sector accounted for 650 billion
euro in 2003
– Media & entertainment industries worldwide expected to
grow 6.6% per year in the coming years
– Global games market expected to grow to $46 billion by
2010
– A billion songs a day flow over the Internet
2

Foreword
• Content is changing, rapidly
– Social media, Web 2.0; file sharing, many-to-many, long tail …
– Analysts predict that in a few years 70% of the Web content will be
produced by users
More digital bits …
3

FP7 & Cooperation Prg.
“ICT for content, creativity and personal
development: novel forms of interactive, non-linear and self-
adaptive content; creativity and enriched user experience; cross-
media content customisation and delivery; combining all-digital
content production and management with emerging semantic
technologies; user oriented use, access to and creation of content.”
“Knowledge systems: methods and techniques to acquire
and interpret, represent and personalise, navigate and retrieve,
share and deliver knowledge recognizing the semantic relationships
in information for use by humans and machines.”
4

ICT Challenge 4
Digital Libraries and Content
“Make content and knowledge abundant,
accessible, interactive and usable over time by
humans and machines alike.”
– content must be made available and its long term
usability, accessibility and preservation must be
ensured
– effective technologies need to be developed for
intelligent content creation and management and
for supporting the capture of knowledge and its
sharing and reuse
5

Complementary tracks
• Digital Libraries
– cultural, scientific, scholarly content
– typically public-interest services
– networking, accessibility, sustainability …
acquisition (digitisation, rights)
curation, preservation
• Intelligent Content
– media & organisational content
– mostly private players
– commercial (creative industries) or competitive
(enterprises) value
from creation through to consumption 6

Intelligent Content .1
• 3 axes:
– boost creativity, enhance experience (« better »)
– master content (richer & « easier »)
– dig out « hidden » information (find & correlate)
• 3 forms of content:
– (social) media content
– enterprise information
– scientific data (e.g. biomedicine)
everything is multimedia & networked
– text, image, video, audio, 3D …
7

Intelligent Content .2
Make digital resources that embody creativity and
semantics (”intelligence”) easier and more cost
effective to produce, organize, search, personalise,
distribute and use across the value chain.
media professionals, enterprise designers, talented
amateurs
more expressive, communicative & participative forms of
content; enhanced productivity; greater ease of (re)use
organisations, communities
more effective acquisition, processing & distribution of
digital content and machine-tractable knowledge; sharing
in collaborative environments
8

Overall approach .1
• research for a purpose, problem
& objective driven
• centred around users, data & flows
– a compelling use case is as important
as the underlying research
• meaningful demonstrator(s), field
validation & assessment
• active promotion & dissemination of
results beyond scientific circles
9

Overall approach .2
• address clearly established, widely
recognised problems
better quality of output
save time
cut cost
• application requirements
– driving innovative ICT developments
• use of ICT in the application context
– prerequisites, incentives, repercussions
10

Applications
• key themes:
– creativity, user experience & control
– content & knowledge management
– information access & search
– collaboration & communities
– data integration
– system & process interoperability
11

IST Call 1
• inputs:
– 148 proposals
– 1210 participants from 50 countries
– 473 Meuro requested, 51 Meuro available
• outputs (1:10):
– 15 proposals retained for negotiation
– 128 participants from 21 countries
55% academia & research centres
45% business & public sector
12

Response
• popular themes:
content creation & processing, media (film, TV,
advertising …) & other appls (eg surveillance)
knowledge management in a range of business
& public-interest domains
personalisation & summarisation
Recurring features: video & 3D; automated extraction,
annotation & indexing; social approaches …
• gaps:
creative authoring (eg online games, virtual
worlds, industrial design …)
immersive rendering, multimodal consumption
13

Successful proposals
• post-production tools for the film & games
industry
• semantic coding of 3D objects, sharing of 3D
models
• semantic wikis as a knowledge management
tool
• enterprise knowledge aids integrating social
software & semantics
• distributed, approximate & incomplete
reasoning
• …
14

ICT Call 3
3rd Call, same budget (50 M), same WP
• closing date: 8 April, 2008
• evaluation & selection: till mid-June
• negotiation: from mid-July onward
guidance for proposers
• analysis of Call 1 submissions
• synopses of successful proposals
• Call 3 specific guides
• handling of inquiries until mid-March
• series of infodays (next in Luxemburg 12-13 December
2007)
15

Scope & focus
• WP defines the scope of the call
« relevance »
• Call guidance notes specify gaps &
requirements after Call 1
« opportunity »
• so read carefully both documents before
delineating your proposal
especially since we expect many
submissions!
16

Some details …
(a) Advanced Authoring
• explore new forms of content, provide enhanced
experience
• support creative process & experimentation
• more interactive, expressive & perceptual content
borrowing from:
– game technology, virtual environments
– computer animation, visualisation, simulation
– non-linear narratives, interactive storytelling …
• generate metadata as new content is created/captured;
find reference & inspirational material, remix, share ...
• … for professional or personal use
17

Some details …
(b) Collaborative Workflows
• from analogue through digital files to feature-rich
objects:
– data interoperability across systems
– metadata based flows
– storage & management of large-scale resources
– handling of novel & legacy, local & remote content
– packaging & repurposing, adaptation to target groups
– segmentation, summarisation, efficient coding &
transmission …
• focus on flexible & robust solutions likely to
be adopted by the multimedia industry
18

Some details …
(c) Personalised Distribution & Presentation
• progress towards more (re)active, adaptive … content
• in particular, atomic objects acting as a container of
essence, metadata & ambient intelligence
– enabling dynamic user, context & device adaptation
– with in-built privacy preserving logging/feedback datamining
• where relevant, immersive rendering & multimodal
interaction
– exploiting new & upcoming appliances
– borrowing from games, virtual worlds, etc
• emphasis on mobile environments & location
based services
19

Some details …
(d) Community building & Take-up
• aim is to link research to its broader context
• emphasis on
Technology assessment, benchmarking
– as a precondition for S&T progress & technology
transfer – investigate requirements, coordinate
ongoing efforts, fill gaps (tasks/media), delineate
future strategies & infrastructures
Interactive Media design
– as a means to foster ICT-enabled Creativity by
bringing closer together technologists & creatives
• normally implemented as NoE or CA
20

Some details …
(e) Semantic Foundations
• beyond current knowledge models & formalisms
approximate reasoning & induction
temporal, probabilistic & modal modelling
• focus on temporal & dimensional reasoning
• reference implementations incl. web integration of
heterogeneous data sources
multimedia resources
(real-time) data streams
showing the practical value & power of semantics
21

Some details …
(f) Knowledge Systems
• architectures, systems & technologies for information bound
organisations & communities
very large, fast growing volumes
multi-source, multi-format, (un/semi-) structured info
• core tasks:
• extract “meaning” (deep structure, semantic clues)
from information, social interaction & work patterns
• make it computer tractable … and use it!
• focus on
• decision support (industry, business, science, health,
environment …)
• collaboration (enterprises, communities) 22

What we don’t do
In Call 3 we do not intend to support research into:
• basic research with no identifiable by-products within 10
years
• developments addressing immediate commercial concerns
eg content protection & monetisation
• issues covered by other Challenges eg media networking,
peer to peer, wireless …
• topics well covered by ongoing & upcoming projects
(see our website)
individual proposals can however address one or
the other of the above issues and integrate
existing & emerging technologies
23

Time schedule
• 50 Meuro in total of which:
– 45 Meuro for IP & STR projects
– 5 Meuro for NoEs & CSAs
• due to close 8 April, 2008
• evaluation/selection until mid-June
• negotiations from mid-July on
• contract awarding in December
• projects due to start Q1 2009
highly selective & demanding process 24

Use of instruments
• IPs impact
– up to 4 years, 5-9 Meuro (EU funding)
• NoEs integration
– up to 3 years, up to 3.5 Meuro
• STRs “research” S&T innovation
– up to 3 years, 2-4 Meuro
• STRs “demonstration” uptake
– up to 2 years, 1-3 Meuro
• CSAs (coordination & support actions)
– up to 3 years, up to 1.5 Meuro
25

Partnerships
• keep consortium manageable
• compact consortia (8.5 on average in Call 1):
IPs 7-12 partners
STRs 4-8 partners
NoEs 3-4 “core” partners
• select competent, committed & reliable partners;
geography not an issue!
• industry, SME, academia … participation as dictated
by project needs
• “launching user” organisations to provide a
demanding problem & application/validation
context 26

Further info
INFSO.E2 – Content & Knowledge
cordis.europa.eu/ist/kct/fp7_call_3.htm
mailto: infso-e2@ec.europa.eu
Thank you!
27