Grants

The goal of the project is to coordinate policy and best practice regarding the use of e-Infrastructures for digital cultural heritage in countries all around the Mediterranean. 

The project will establish and stimulate a network of common interest made up of experts and researchers in all the relevant fields, whose sustainability will be planned on a long term beyond the project duration. The network will share experience, promote standards and guidelines, seek harmonisation of best practice and policy and act as a conduit for knowledge transfer from countries with more experience of e-Infrastructures-enabled e-culture to those who are just beginning to investigate this area. 

The project will be rooted in the reality of research pilots and case studies which will act as exemplars and demonstrators of the issues and the processes which are relevant to establishing cultural initiatives on the e-Infrastructures platform. 

The results will inform a wide-reaching dissemination work-package, including two major public best practice deliverables, one international conference, three technical workshops and one policy workshop. 

The project builds on a wealth of experience in effective international coordination of digitisation, digital cultural heritage and e-Infrastructures-enabled culture. It takes full cognisance and advantage of e-Infrastructures and cultural projects which have gone before and will actively seek interaction and synergies with other projects in this area. The impact on international collaboration and on digital cultural heritage in the Mediterranean region will be substantial.

Funded under: FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2

The richness and value of the European performing arts heritage is unquestionable. Even though these collections are now being digitized and published online, they remain scattered, and coordination is lacking between digital libraries and the performing arts field; however, there is a high demand for access to this content. ECLAP fills this gap by creating a considerable, and hitherto missing, online archive for all the performing arts in Europe, and providing solutions and tools to help performing arts institutions to enter the digital Europe by building a network of important European performing arts institutions and archives and publishing content collections on Europeana, the European Digital Library. ECLAP is creating a best practice network, making use of advanced database and delivery tools for the production and dissemination of the rich multilingual European heritage. This will result in cultural enrichment and promotion of European culture, and in improvements in learning and research in the field of performing arts.

Funded under: CIP-ICT-PSP

With the support of FIAT/IFTA, the European Broadcasting Union and the EDL Foundation, the EUscreen Best Practice Network aims at achieving a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material. EUscreen builds a network of content providers, standardisation bodies, television research partners and specific user groups by providing multilingual and multicultural access to television heritage. EUscreen develops long-term solutions to rights issues and supports user-led demand and interest for services and content, including the development of use case scenarios for different contexts (research, learning, leisure and creative reuse). The project also provides contextual information for the available resources. EUscreen is a three-year project and started in October 2009. The consortium is comprised of 28 partners and 9 associate partners from 20 EU member states (plus Switzerland and Norway). EUscreen is the follow-up project of Video Active, an online platform with 10,000 items about the history of European television.

Funded under: eContentplus

EuropeanaConnect is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission within the area of Digital Libraries of the eContentplus Programme. Its overall objective is to deliver core components which are essential for the realisation of Europeana, the European Digital Library as a truly interoperable, multilingual and user-oriented service for all European citizens. EuropeanaConnect will also add the music dimension to Europeana by aggregating a critical mass of audio content. Europeana provides integrated access to digital resources from museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries of Europe. EuropeanaConnect started in May 2009 and will last for 30 months.

Funded under: eContentplus

ATHENA is developed as a project to specifically tackle the gap in existing content provision to the European Digital Library (Europeana). An analysis of the current situation shows that the target set for Europeana can best be met with targeted support for museums and audiovisual archives. This project is developed from the sound existing network of Governmental bodies began in 2001 with the MINERVA project, and continues with “Europeana: the European digital library network”. ATHENA has the objective to: 

• reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions coming from those sectors of cultural heritage not fully involved yet in Europeana; 

• coordinate standards and activities of museums across Europe; 

• identify digital content present in European museums; 

• contribute to the integration of the different sectors of cultural heritage, in cooperation with other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions into Europeana; 

• develop a plug-in to be integrated within Europeana, to facilitate the access to digital contents belonging to European museums. 

ATHENA will also produce a set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines, focusing on multilingualism and semantics, metadata and thesauri, data structures and IPR issues, to be used within museums for supporting internal digitisation activities and facilitating the integration of their digital content into Europeana. All these outputs will be based on standards and guidelines agreed by the partner countries for the harmonised access to the content, and will be easily applicable.  The final aim of ATHENA is to bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, evaluate and integrate standards and tools for facilitating the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana, so conveying to the user the original and multifaceted experience of all the European cultural heritage. ATHENA will work in close cooperation with existing projects (eg “Europeana: the European digital library network” and Michael, both present in ATHENA) and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects.

Funded under: eContentplus

WeKnowIt project targets to extract knowledge at different levels (such as trend detection in mass intelligence) to support specific tasks like decision making in emergencies or recommendations in its commercial application. It has its own social platform and network with its own users and content. Among its main goals is to change the way information is shared between masses of people, offering an integrated approach ready to cover a variety of human life aspects, both personal (e.g. entertainment and vacation time), as well as community related (e.g. handling of emergencies).

Funded under: FP7-ICT

According to recent studies, Risks Against Patient Safety (RAPS) represent one of the most important factors of dead in hospitals: during therapy, more then 8% of patients recovered in hospitals suffer for additional disease that in almost 50% of the cases produce either dead or significant additional health problems. RAPS occur in any stage of the patient care process. REMINE project idea originates from the common difficulty in conducting a analysis, early identification and effective prevention on RAP when there are significant mass of in homogeneous data sources, stored in multimedia databases, and a distributed environments with different care professionals contemporary involved.To contrast the RAPS trends and the malpractices diffusion, REMINE prosecutes a number of main objectives. a new technological platform, new care process organizational requirements. Main elements are: mining of multimedia data; modeling, prediction, detection of RAPS, RAPS management support system and info broker patient safety framework.Main outcomes of REMINE will be: time reduction in collecting data, time reduction in RAPS analysis, standardization of common language, evolution in the interaction model, reference framework, patient safety improvement, health care cost saving (within an estimated RAPS reduction between 6% to 9% of RAPS.

Funded under:FP7-ICT 

The aim of METABO is to set up a comprehensive platform, running both in clinical settings and in every-day life environments, for continuous and multi-parametric monitoring of the metabolic status in patients with, or at risk of, diabetes and associated metabolic disorders.The type of parameters that will be monitored, in addition to traditional clinical and biomedical parameters, will also include subcutaneous glucose concentration, dietary habits, physical activity and energy expenditure, effects of ongoing treatments, and autonomic reactions.The data produced by METABO will be integrated with the clinical data and the history of the patient and will be used in two major interrelated contexts of care:1. Setting up a dynamic model of the metabolic behavior of the individual to predict the influence and relative impact of specific treatments and of single parameters on glucose level.2. Building personalized care plans integrated in the current clinical processes linking the different actors in primary and secondary care and improving the active role of the Patient.

Funded under: FP7-ICT

The overall goal of this project is the interdisciplinary investigation of socially situated development from an integrated or “global” perspective, as a key paradigm towards achieving robots that interact with humans in their everyday environments in a rich, flexible, autonomous, and user-centred way. To achieve this general goal we set the following specific objectives:1)Identification of scenarios presenting key issues and typologies of problems in the investigation of global socially situated development of autonomous (biologically and robotic) agents, 2)Investigation of the roles of emotion, interaction, expression, and their interplays in bootstrapping and driving socially situated development, which includes implementation of robotic systems that improve existing work in each of those aspects, and their testing in the key identified scenarios, 3)Integration of (a) the above “capabilities” in at least 2 different robotic systems, and (b) feedback across the disciplines involved, 4)Identification of needs and key steps towards achieving standards in: (a) the design of scenarios and problem typologies, (b) evaluation metrics, (c) the design of robotic platforms and related technology that can be realistically integrated in people’s everyday life. FEELIX GROWING takes a highly interdisciplinary approach that combines theories, methods, and technology from developmental and comparative psychology, neuroimagery, ethology, and autonomous and developmental robotics, to investigate how socially situated development can be brought to robots that “grow up” and adapt to humans in everyday environments.

Funded under: FP6-IST

CALLAS will investigate key aspects of Multimodal Affective Interfaces in the specific area of Art and Entertainment applications. As an integrated project CALLAS will address the following high-level objectives: 1) To advance the state-of-the-art in Multimodal Affective Interfaces by i) developing new emotional models that will be able to take into account a comprehensive user experience in Digital Arts and Entertainment applications and ii) new modality-processing techniques to capture (and elicit) these new emotional categories, 2) To research, develop, and integrate advanced software components, tailored to the processing of individual modalities supporting the semantic recognition of emotions, making them available through a “living” repository, called the CALLAS “shelf”, 3) To develop a software methodology for the development and the engineering of Multimodal Interfaces that will make their development accessible to a larger community, i.e. the assembly of a Multimodal interface from individual components will not require anymore a deep understanding of theories of Multimodality. The effectiveness of the CALLAS approach in pursuing the aforementioned objectives will be validated by developing significant research prototypes (or Showcases) in three major fields of Digital Arts and Entertainment: Augmented Reality for Art, Entertainment, and Digital Theatre Interactive Installations for Public Spaces Next-Generation Interactive Television CALLAS also aims to ensure the sustainability and the replicability of the technology results. This will be addressed mainly by supporting Technology Transfer, in particular towards SMEs operating in the new media sector, whether these SME are involved in Digital Arts and Entertainment or are innovative technology spin-offs.

Funded under: FP6-IST