Semantic Media Project Meeting - October, 2012

*CALL FOR PARTICIPATION*
Semantic Media Project Meeting
Barbican Arts Centre, London, UK on 2 October, 2012


The Semantic Media Project

The Semantic Media project addresses the challenge of time-based 
navigation in large collections of media documents. The project focuses 
on investigating new ways to empower users to find relevant content and 
exploring how industry and universities can work together in this field. 
In particular, one of the project's central ideas is that (highly 
sophisticated) annotation should occur within the production process, so 
that not only consumers benefit from the introduction of new search, 
browsing, and recommendation technologies but also the producers of 
content (composers, musicians, script-writers, directors, actors). 
Furthermore, annotating content as early as possible allows for 
integrating knowledge of the production process, which leads not only to 
simplified and hence more robust automatic procedures but also to more 
detailed metadata and richer user interfaces. Managing and exposing this 
metadata using modern semantic web and linked data technology allows for 
uniting various sources of information which enables users to more 
effectively identify relevant content and thus helps to widen the 
consumer's increasingly narrow bands of media experience. The project's 
scope is the whole life-cycle of content with the goal of empowering 
human producers and consumers to effectively reuse, re-purpose, and 
personalize material, whether for entertainment, news, documentaries, 
education, interviews, health-care, science or security.

The Project Meeting and Funding of Mini-Projects

A major goal of the Semantic Media project is to establish an open 
network uniting industrial and academic research efforts related to the 
development of novel tools and standards for organizing and navigating 
in digital media. To this end, the project meetings bring industrialists 
together with theoretical and applied researchers, to foster 
relationships, and encourage working together to find solutions to 
science and technology problems that are relevant to digital media; see 
our website for a list of initial project partners.

To support interesting collaboration opportunities between universities 
and industry partners, the semantic media project will fund several 
mini-projects resulting from project meetings and sandpits, which might 
lead for example to paid internships or placements of highly educated 
(PhD-)students or postdocs.

Programme

Detailed and up-to-date information on the programme (including a list 
of invited speakers) is available on our website 
http://semanticmedia.org.uk/?q=semantic_media_meeting_oct2012. 
Participants are encouraged to give poster presentations or demos 
summarizing their background, previous work, company's focus, or even 
early ideas for collaborations. If you intend to give a presentation 
please let us know using http://semanticmedia.org.uk/?q=contact or 
sebastian.ewert@eecs.qmul.ac.uk as the available space is limited.

Confirmed keynote speakers so far are Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg (often 
referred to as the inventor of the MP3 standard; now director of the 
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany), Prof. 
David De Roure (Director Oxford e-Research Centre, University of 
Oxford), as well as Yves Raimond and David Rogers (BBC R&D).

Venue

The Barbican Centre is the largest performing arts centre in Europe. 
Located in the City of London, England, the Centre hosts classical and 
contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and 
art exhibitions.

Website and Registration

For more information, visit our website http://semanticmedia.org.uk. 
Please note that while attendance is free of charge, we kindly ask you, 
for organizational purposes, to register as early as possible if you 
intend to come.

-- 
Dr. Sebastian Ewert
PD Research Assistant
Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
sebastian.ewert@eecs.qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 207 882 8287