The aceMedia consortium

The aceMedia consortium represents all participants in the knowledge assisted content value chain. Each partner brings a unique skill which is described below. A key strength of the aceMedia consortium is the unification of these partners in joining together to achieve the merged project objectives in knowledge technologies and multimedia processing, and additionally, the balance between academic and industrial partners, who are equally represented, leads to a highly skilled team. Forging of forward and backward links in the value chain will come from the collaboration of subsets of partners within each workpackage, and the involvement of partners in more than one workpackage.

Starting from the content part of the value chain, Belgavox and Alinari, both SMEs, represent the content providers. These partners will provide content relating to a range of themes, with both still images (Alinari) and audio-visual (Belgavox) material made available for use within the aceMedia project. In addition, Alinari and Belgavox contribute to the research aims of the project in specification and building of domain ontologies for the selected aceMedia applications. They also bring important contributions from a commercial perspective, and especially from a user perspective, since content providers are one of the three user groups targeted by aceMedia.

Moving on to the user step in the value chain, Fraunhofer FIT has an extensive track record in studying user requirements for content usage, evaluation, and trust issues. This will be combined with Motorola's proven expertise in human factors for mobile communication users, and Universidad Autonóma de Madrid's (UAM) expertise on human computer interaction, and linguistic processing, to provide a critical mass of human factors resources, enabling the user centred challenges of the aceMedia approach to be addressed. In particular, the collaboration between these experts will enable significant advances to be achieved in personalisation and user interface development.

Another strength of the aceMedia consortium is the emphasis given by all partners to the different ways in which knowledge can be extracted and applied to add value to all elements of the content value chain. Since knowledge is the main focus of the aceMedia project, two world leaders in the field, ITI and University of Koblenz are collaborating to link the research fields of multimedia content analysis and retrieval, knowledge discovery for semantic web applications, and ontology languages for the semantic World Wide Web. These two research partners will be assisted by industrial partners Philips, France Telecom and Alinari who bring extensive practical experience, in order to understand how to apply knowledge technologies in the context of real-world applications.

For research issues concerning content, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and Motorola Ltd have collectively much experience in the area of coding of content. Support will be provided by Dublin City University (DCU), who are a key research group in the area of knowledge-assisted content analysis, UAM who are experts in visual communications for cross-media adaptation, and INRIA with contributions to content analysis and segmentation. Again the mix of industrial and academic partners within the content processing research tasks of aceMedia allows world-class technology research to be balanced by industrial pragmatism.

In value added services, Telefonica TID and France Telecom are the key partners. Telefónica TID concentrates on a large range of communication services in the context of content, and therefore is perfectly suited to the task of leading the aceMedia efforts in applications development and system integration. TID will be co-ordinating with all partners to ensure that their technical contributions are specified and implemented correctly such that the aceMedia research prototypes are available in good time for the user evaluations. Service support is also provided by France Telecom, whose research team has extensive knowledge of speech interpretation and adding knowledge to speech.

A further strength of the aceMedia consortium is in the careful choice of industrial partners, such that both mobile communication and home networking environments are provided for aceMedia applications. This reflects the growing societal demands of consumers, who expect to be able to access content in any environment on any terminal. The system issues for ACEs will be the key focus for the industrial partners Philips, and Motorola. Motorola is a major manufacturer of platforms, devices, and services for mobile and wireless applications, and Philips Research has extensive knowledge in home networking and using the results of content analysis to enhance the user experience of the consumer. Combining these two domains of expertise brings a particularly beneficial collaboration which could be exploited via joint venture opportunities after the end of the 4 year research period.