Partners

Project coordinator, The University of Art and Design Helsinki (UIAH) (in Finnish: Taideteollinen korkeakoulu - TAIK), gives education and pursues research in the fields of design, audio-visual communication, interactive media design and production, art education and the arts. TAIK is the largest art and design school in Scandinavia. The Media Lab is one of the 5 faculties of the university and has grown to become the leading department of its kind in Finland focusing on design and production for the New Media. Arki is a research group within the Media Lab faculty. Arki aims to understand the process of digitalization in society, and the emerging and possible role of digital design in that process. Arki focuses on everyday life and the interests of people, and aims to develop design for more humane technology and more useful applications, to unleash the creative and constructive powers of ordinary people in the information society.

TAIK, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) and Delft University of Technology (TUD) provide the technological expertise for the Project. HIIT is a joint research institute of the two leading research universities in Helsinki, the University of Helsinki (UH) and the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) (in Finnish: Teknillinen korkeakoulu - TKK). HIIT was founded in 1999. HIIT conducts world-class strategic research in information technology and related multi-disciplinary topics, especially in areas where Finnish ICT industry has a significant global role. HIIT works in close co-operation with Finnish universities, research institutes, and industry, aiming to improve the contents, visibility, and impact of Finnish ICT to benefit the competitiveness and progress of the Finnish information society.

Delft University of Technology (TUD) is the oldest university of technology in The Netherlands, and performs research, and offers a wide range of bachelor's and master's programmes, in the technical sciences, such as mechanical engineering, civil engineering, physics, and computer science. Among others, it has strong research groups in Parallel and Distributed Systems (PDS), and in Computer Graphics and CAD/CAM. PDS Group of TUD focuses on five subjects: In the area of grid computing, investigating the structure and performance of grid schedulers. In the more theoretical field of collective agent-based systems, they study agent cooperation, multi-agent planning, and plan revision. In the context of embedded systems, they study the efficient mapping of real-time applications to multiprocessors. In P2P systems they research the possibilities of TV distribution and video recording over such systems. Important research issues in the area of P2P systems are analyzing deployed peer-to-peer systems, improving P2P efficiency, and exploring novel P2P applications.

The expertise of social processing and knowledge of working with content communities is offered to the Project by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). BME is one of the oldest centers of technology education in the world. Over the years BME has produced a stellar cast of engineers and scientists, including three Nobel Prize winners. The convergence of telecommunication, media, and IT sectors require the joint application of engineering, informatics, as well as social and economic science skills and methods. Budapest University of Technology and Economy and Magyar Telekom founded Media Research and Education Centre (MOKK) in 2002 within its Department of Sociology and Communication for the close examination of the phenomena of the new, convergent media.

KnowledgeLand (KL) is an independent Dutch think-tank based in Amsterdam. Founded in 1999, its mission is to help establish the Netherlands as one of the key regions in the international knowledge economy, in a way that creates both economic and social value. KL (staff of 15 people) brings together a network of government, private sector, knowledge institutions and civil society. With this network KL develops public innovation strategies, takes action through projects and experiments and supports learning networks. KL has extensive knowledge in building and consolidating society based Internet communities and will, within the P2P-FUSION concentrate on
the WP 5 Content Communities.

Audiovisual archives, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the John von Neumann Digital Library and Multimedia Centre’s NAVA, provide content that can be used in pilot productions and experiments. They also offer archival services with support for users of content communities.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is one of the largest audiovisual archives in Europe, with a collection comprising of over 700.000 hours of material, 9.000 hours of which are already available in digital formats. The Institute does all it can to search out special recordings, films or photos and see to their careful restoration and conservation. The first recordings originate from the end of the 19th century. Sound and Vision also functions as the archive of the national broadcasting corporations. Continuously, radio and television programmes that have been broadcast come into the archive. In 2005, Sound and Vision launched the iMMix information system, a state of the art Digital Asset Management System, that also incorporates Digital Rights Management and Customer Relations Management functionality. IMMix can also link to the news services such as AP and Reuters, as well as many other real-time sources. This provides our users (journalists, general public) with a one-stop-shop for their research.

The primary mission of the John von Neumann Digital Library and Multimedia Centre (Neumann House) is to participate in the digitization of Hungarian cultural heritage, coordinate all related activities and manage the network services built on these digitization projects. The Neumann House has three highly related divisions: Digital Library, National Digital Data Archive and National Audiovisual Archive (NAVA). Latter constitutes the legal deposit archive of the Hungarian national broadcasters, collects and digitally stores, catalogues the programs of the national terrestrial televisions and radios, produced in Hungary. NAVA provides on-line access to its collection within the framework regulated by law especially for educational and research purposes, so NAVA documents will be available at libraries and public collections providing public service. There are almost 2000 documents, 2000 hours of video processed by the time, and the IT infrastructure can serve about 1000 simultaneous metadata queries, 100 independent browser quality, and 10 independent broadcast quality media streams.