The MICC partecipated to the 2011 Technoday in Paris (France) presenting a demo about multi-target tracking with a PTZ camera developed in the joint lab with Thales Italy. The demo has been awarded as VIP (Very ImPortant).

The ninth TechnoDay event has provided an opportunity to view more than 90 demonstrations showcasing innovative and proactive capabilities in optronics, telecommunicationsand information systems for defence and security applications.

Innovation – which lies at the heart of Thales’s strategy – is placed squarely within the defence-security continuum for the very first time at TechnoDay 2011. The demonstrations clearly have illustrated potential synergies, despite the initiative only being in its infancy.

Having moved the event to a new, larger location, the Cité de l’Eau, has given the opportunity to highlight an even greater range of innovations, grouped around four key topics:

• Resilient networks and information systems
• Radio communications
• Protection & detection
• Battlegroup C4I

This ninth TechnoDay event has also provided an insight into how the focus has been mantained on innovation in new technologies in a more difficult business environment.

TechnoDay offered a unique, not-to-be-missed opportunity to discover latest technological advances and meet technical teams.

Technoday 2011

Technoday 2011 - MICC staff

Technoday 2011 - the location

Yesterday we attended the WebTech Conference at the Holiday Inn Assago in Milan with a short talk on AIR applications on multi-touch surfaces, a talk on how to develop AIR applications that allow multi-touch and multi-user interaction on wide screen surfaces. We presented the implementation of technical solutions and the main development frameworks, as well as some application examples including the work done within the project MediaPick developed by Daniele Pezzatini and designed by Matteo Mancini at MICC.

Daniele Pezzatini presents "AIR applications on multi-touch surfaces" at the WebTech Conference

During the event we had the opportunity to follow some interesting sessions: Luca Mezzalira (mart3 | the Flash Platform Company) who explained how to develop applications with the Flash Platform integrating devices running on Android, Piergiorgio Niero (Kaseya) with a short trip on the new Flash graphics API and coding best practices;and, finally, Gabriele Lana (Clean Code) and Massimiliano Dessì (Pro-netics) who talked about documentary and nosql databases.

The paper “Tag Suggestion and Localization in User-generated Videos based on Social Knowledge” authored by Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Marco Meoni, Giuseppe Serra has won the best paper award at the the second ACM SIGMM Workshop on Social Media (WSM2010), in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010.

Example of tag suggestion and localization

The Workshop, organized by Steven C.H. Hoi, Jiebo Luo, Roelof van Zwol, Susanne Boll-Westermann and Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris, focused on various aspects of social media. In particular, workshop papers had to elaborate related theory, methodology, algorithms and issues associated to social media content creation, manipulation, content analysis, storage, search, learning and mining.

ScientifiCareers is a project dedicated to job opportunities for young researchers in the field of Multimedia.

The platform aims to promote the connection between the world of research and the industry, and to stimulate the exchange of expertise between different research teams.

ScientifiCareers. Job opportunities for young researcher in Multimedia

ScientifiCareers is a free platform where professionals, industries and academic institutions can post their job requests in order to get in contact with young and talented researchers all over the world. Continue reading →

Alberto Del Bimbo, MICC Director and General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2010, interviewed by the staff of Ustation, the University Media Network, describes the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010, organized by MICC for this year, and focuses on various aspects of multimedia and innovation and on the relationships between industry and academia.

Universication by Ustation

Listen to the interview:

The International Conference of ACM Multimedia 2010 will be held in Florence from October 25 to 29. Palazzo dei Congressi will host this important scientific event promoted by the International Association for Computing Machinery.

ACM Multimedia is considered the most selective conference in the ICT sector and annually brings together scientists and researchers all around the world to discuss and present the most significant research results and innovative applications and solutions.

Among the many side events the Interactive Art Exhibit, a public exhibition of works by contemporary artists engaged in the use of new technologies and of multimedia solutions for the conservation and management of cultural heritage, will be held in the beautiful location of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence.

The tools for media management, processing, annotation and retrieval developed by MICC within the IM3I project (http://www.im3i.eu) have been successfully tested by a team of NAVA (http://www.nava.hu) archivists during the last project meeting in Budapest.

IM3I user evaluation session by NAVA team in Budapest

These tools allow to manage multimedia collections and make them searchable on the web, and are based on a service-oriented architecture, to ease deployment and integration in existing systems.

You can see pictures of the meeting on MICC Flickr account!

Alberto Del Bimbo, MICC Director, will give the keynote speech About 3D of objects, trajectories, and faces… at NEM Networked & Electronic Media Summit organised by the NEM Initiative under the aegis of the European Commission in Hesperia Tower, Barcelona, Spain, on 13-15 October 2010, showing some of the achievements of MICC research on recovering 3D local poses and orientations of objects from a single view, tracking of multiple targets in 3D space from a pan-tilt-zoom camera, and structural face recognition of 3D face scans.

The Hesperia Tower will host the 2010 NEM Summit

About 3D of objects, trajectories, and faces…
Objects exist in a physical, three-dimensional world. Extracting 3D object shapes and appearance from 2D imaged views from active cameras, 3D shape acquisition from scanners, 3D processing to obtain information at both physical and semantic level, are some of the challenges to improve the quality of many applications of computers to real world problems. Prof. Del Bimbo will present and discuss our recent research on the extraction of 3D information on real world objects and scenes and recognition of human identity from the geometry of the 3D anatomical structure of faces.

Alberto Del Bimbo, Media Integration and Communication Center Director

Alberto del Bimbo, MICC Director, will present MICC research activities and results at the Information Day of the Italian National Centers of Excellence on 28 September 2010, at Palazzina dell’Auditorium, Accademia dei Lincei, in Rome, Italy.

The objective of the Conference “The ministerial Centres of Excellence established at the University between 2001 and 2003” is to summarize the activity of the Italian Centres of Excellence founded between 2001 and 2003 and issued by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research

Villa Farnesina, Accademia dei Lincei

The meeting, sponsored by the patronage of the President of the Republic and the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research will be held in Rome on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 and will have as its ultimate aim to highlight the synergies existing between the individual centers distributed nationwide through a vast network of national and international collaborations.

Alberto Del Bimbo

The location chosen is no coincidence Villa Farnesina, the seat of the Accademia dei Lincei. The Academy, founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi, is the oldest scientific academy in the world and counts among its first members Galileo Galilei.

Program:

• Registration: 9:00 to 9:30
• Greetings Accademia dei Lincei and the authorities: 9:30 to 10:15
• Keynote: 10:15 to 10:30 (Prof. J. Meldolesi)
• Scientific and technical perspectives of the National Plan for Research (Speakers: Prof. R. Cingolani, Prof. G. De Nicolao and others interventions coordinated by Prof. A. Pinchera): 10:30 to 11:30
• Discussion on the results of a decade of Centres of Excellence (Coordinator: Prof. G. Scotti): 11:30 to 13:00
  Break: 13:00 to 14:00
• Guided tours of the Villa Farnesina: 14:00 to 14:30
• Opening of the poster session with activities of each Center of Excellence (Coordinator: Prof. MD Di Benedetto): 14:30 to 17:00
• Closing speeches: 17:00 to 17:30

The first EUscreen Open Workshop on metadata schemes and content selection policies was held in Mykonos, Greece, on June 23 and 24 and recorded the presence of more than 60 participants. During the two days were scheduled presentations on the development of European projects including the European Film Gateway (EFG), WeKnowIT, NoTube, PrestoPRIME and on the activities of major research groups such as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the European Data Model Working Group (EDM Group).

EUscreen Open Workshop on metadata schemes and content selection policies

Marco Bertini, assistant professor at the Media Integration and Communication Center of the University of Florence has reported on the activities of two European projects, Vidivideo and IM3I, that involve our center.

The Vidivideo project aims to develop and integrate components for machine learning, audio event detection and video processing in an audio visual search engine that exploits informations from several sources: automatic and manual annotations of keywords and metadata, audio and visual data, speech and explicit knowledge.

IM3I aims to develop new methods of research and creative visualizations of large amounts of multimedia informations. IM3I provide service-oriented architecture allowing different views on multimedia data and a better interaction and sharing of multimedia content.

Marco has presented a method, used in both projects, to add metadata to multimedia material through automatic annotation of occurrences of concepts.

Within the Vidivideo project classifiers were trained on 1000 concepts and were able to extract metadata from audio and video material. This type of metadata extraction allows a user to search and visualize sequences of video frames exactly where a particular concept was detected. This technique offers high performance, but has some problems of scalability.

The IM3I project is trying to reduce the execution time using a very limited set of concepts and creating less fine-grained metadata. Marco, in his presentation ,shows the current debate existing among archivists in metadata extraction, notably time versus quality.