France Telecom R&D

France Telecom R&D, the Research and Development Directory for France Telecom, currently employs 4200 people including 3400 engineers, scientists and technicians and 150 scientists or doctoral candidates from other organizations. Its annual budget amounts to 457.3 Meuros.
The activities of France Telecom R&D are distributed among 10 R&D units focused on France Telecom's major strategic targets and critical technical areas. With headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France Telecom R&D is composed of nine sites in France (Issy-les-Moulineaux, Lannion, Rennes, Grenoble, Caen, Bagneux, Belfort, Sophia-Antipolis and La Turbie) and one laboratory established in California.
 In the field of human interactions (Human Interaction Division), the multiplication of telecommunications services should result in a radical simplification of their utilization, rather than leading the user into a world where technology would be all-powerful. Exploratory research and studies are conducted upstream in all areas connected with human interaction, i.e. images, movement, sound and voice. Communication habits and modes are analyzed to determine basic trends and their evolution.
The services of the future are envisioned and invented by working with customers in creativity workshops. Then, those services are tested with groups of users in order to ensure relevance and quality. The following aspects are systematically considered : human interaction, ergonomics, quality and user-friendliness in the access to and the utilization of those services. Customers can thereby feel at home with France Telecom’s services.

Groupe des Ecoles des Telecommunications

(École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications ) is one of the top graduate level institutes in Europe in the area of information and telecommunication technology. The faculty of about 150 covers most scientific, technical and social fields relevant to the evolution of telecommunication at large. 1000 students (among them 200 doctoral students) are involved in various curricula. GET, which stands for Groupe des Ecoles des Télécommunications, is the common administrative umbrella for ENST and a set of similar institutes.
At ENST, the COMELEC Department, the MPEG team works on MPEG-4 authoring, BIFS and MP4 specification validation, new application design, conformance and application of MPEG-4 to teaching (self-learning and virtual classroom). Many fruitful collaborations are in progress with other major MPEG actors like TILAB, FT R&D, Sony or Optibase.

INRIA

INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) is a French public-sector scientific and technological institute operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry. INRIA's missions are "to undertake basic and applied research, to design experimental systems, to ensure technology and knowledge transfer, to organize international scientific exchanges, to carry out scientific assessments, and to contribute to standardization".
The research carried out at INRIA brings together experts from the fields of computer science and applied mathematics covering the following areas: Networks and Systems; Software Engineering and Symbolic Computing; Man-Machine Interaction; Image Processing, Data Management, Knowledge Systems; Simulation and Optimization of Complex Systems.
INRIA gathers in its premises around 3000 persons: 900 INRIA permanent employees (400 researchers, 500 engineers and technicians), 750 post-docs, engineers and visitors, 700 doctoral candidates, 450 Researchers and professors from other organizations and 200 "Expert engineers" (on research contracts). Its budget is roughly 120 Meuro (2003) , 25% of which comes from research and development contracts, royalties and sales. Industrial relations are strategic for INRIA: The research team that will be contributing to DANAE is the TEMICS project. It is a group of about 25 people with activities in the areas of image modelling, analysis, coding, communication and watermarking.

Imperial College London

As the main expertise of the research group at Imperial College is in the field of Agent Technology and it’s application their main role in this project will be in the design of the socially intelligent personalization agents and it’s implementation in terms of a prototype.
Providing as a technology base an agent platform which is FIPA compliant. They will be involved in all facets of this part of the workplan, including exploration of issues relating to the specification of the architecture, high- and low-level design of the prototype system, as well as it’s implementation using suitable methodologies and tools.
The research group led by Professor Mamdani has considerable research experience contributing in both depth and breadth in designing, developing and deploying Multi-Agent systems.

IMEC

IMEC vzw was founded in 1984 by the Flemish Government and is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium. Currently, it is Europe's leading independent research centre for the development and licensing of microelectronics and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). IMEC vzw is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence, which is illustrated by the large number of scientific papers that are yearly published, the numerous patent applications that have been submitted, and the several spin-off companies that were set up. It has an annual budget of more than 130 million EURO and employs more than 1200 people.
IMEC-DESICS (about 100 researchers) is since long active in the field of advanced multimedia applications through cooperation with system (design) companies in national and European projects, through its own strategic partnership programmes, known as Industrial Affiliation Programmes and through active participation in standardisation bodies such as MPEG-4, JPEG2000, MPEG-21 and others. Since the very beginning, IMEC-DESICS and IMEC-Ghent University-Multimedia Lab are actively participating to the MPEG-21 initiative. IMEC-DESICS has taken the lead in deriving MPEG-21 system requirements and is a key player in the definition of a global MPEG-21 QoS approach (e.g., in the context of MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation). IMEC-DESICS also has a long history of technical contributions with respect to MPEG-4 SNHC/AFX (among others the definition of 3D-implementation complexity management and contributions to the definition of Visual Texture Coding) and MPEG's Implementation Studies Group. IMEC-Ghent University-Multimedia Lab counts about 10 researchers; it is a part of the Department of Electronics and Information System at Ghent University, which counts about 150 research and 15 full-time professors. Although Multimedia Lab was set up only a couple of years ago, a large number of articles have already been published by this group in the field of multimedia systems and applications. Moreover, Multimedia Lab is very active within MPEG standardization, via the submission of technical contributions; by chairing several ad-hoc groups; and through the editorship of several specifications (MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language; MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing; MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing - Technologies under Consideration; and MPEG-21 Reference Software)

MUSEON

The Museon in The Hague is a multi-disciplinary museum with a clear educational mission. The museum, that dates from dates from 1904, has collections in the field of physical science and technology, natural history, history, archaeology and ethnology. The museum started as a private institute, but was taken over by the municipality of The Hague 1920. Since January 1997 the museum is privatised again and registered as a foundation. The institution has a long tradition in the field of ICT. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s it participated in the RACE projects EMN and RAMA. In the 5th Framework project it participated to the OpenHeritage and Regnet projects; currently it is still involved in the Memoria project. On a national level it was the leading partner in two projects aiming at the development of innovative educational applications. On a more informal basis the museum participated to an experimental project in which it was investigated how pda’s could be used as an additional source of information in a museum environment. In most of these projects the Museon was the leading museum, not only responsible for the provision of contents but also for capturing user requirements and the evaluation of the results.

Rheinisch Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen - RWTH

The Institute of Communications Engineering of RWTH Aachen University employs 12 researchers and numerous students organized in three different research groups (in order of importance)
* Video Compression
* Video, Audio and Image Identification and Indexing
* Theory of Communications Engineering
The group on Video Compression has been actively contributing to MPEG and ITU-T standardization over the last years, including MPEG-4 Video and Advanced Video Coding, and has been one main initiator of the MPEG Exploration on Interframe Wavelet Coding.

Siemens AG

Ranged by sales and number of employees, Siemens AG is one of the largest companies in the worldwide electrical and electronic industry. With the manufacturing and sales organization in 122 countries, Siemens receives more than one half of its business from outside Germany. Electronic products account for well over half of Siemens' total sales. Application oriented research is the basis for the development of new and improved products and systems.
Continued development in our nearly 300 fields of activities largely depends on the progress achieved in 30 core technologies, in which we are concentrating our resources. Often closely related, these technologies remain the most important source of innovation for the coming decade. Our R&D outlay is focused on product and systems development, with software accounting for more than one third of the total expenditure.
The importance of software as stand-alone product, as development tool and as an essential part of products and systems is becoming more and more important. The core technologies are mainly developed at our corporate Division Corporate Technology carrying out projects on research and basic development for material, products and system technologies in strategically relevant areas.

T-Systems Nova

T-Systems Nova - a company with a staff of about 5300 specialists - is a 100% subsidiary of T-Systems International GmbH, which is one of the main global players on the worldwide IT/Telco market and part of the Deutsche Telekom group. The group participating to the ISIS project is with Berkom a R&D profit center of TSystems Nova that develops innovative, customer oriented solutions. The main emphasis is on the design, development, testing and introduction of new products, applications and services in the area of telematics. T-Systems Nova Berkom pursue a future-oriented, application-focused and technology-based approach.
The work is interdisciplinary, comprehensive and globally oriented. As a service provider, T-Systems Nova Berkom support the entire Deutsche Telekom group in preparing, testing and introducing of new products and services. T-Systems Nova Berkom is also an important source of ideas for Deutsche Telekom's research and development. All the activities are planned in accordance with market and economic criteria and are always oriented to the special requirements of Deutsche Telekom customers.
The specialists participating in the DANAE project have long been active in the fields of video and audio compression as well as audio/video conferencing, digital TV and interactive 3D graphics. The group is actively participating in various standardization bodies and consortia including ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG- 4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21), ITU-T SG 16 and 3GPP.

Universite de Geneve

MIRALab is a research group based in the University of Geneva and was founded in 1989 by Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. It is made up of 30 researchers, 5 Senior Researchers and some 20 MSc Students in the field of Virtual Humans and Virtual Worlds. A key objective of the laboratory is to assemble researchers from many different disciplines (computer science, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, networking, multimedia, architecture and design, etc.) and to forge links between them in a broad effort to understand the human functionality and to simulate it in a realistic way. An important policy is to work toward research goals in the context pf productions accessible to the general public; not just demonstrations but interactive shows where the audience is entertained while being brought up-to-date on technical innovations, and can judge and react to what they see and hear.
     MIRALab is frequently invited to present its live interactive high-tech shows: to cite just a few occasions: Telecom’95, Interactive Telecom’97, The Alhambra in Geneva, The Annual Institute of Creativity in Zermatt and the worlds largest international technical fair CEBIT, in Hannover. MIRALab has been working in the field of Virtual Humans (or Avatars) for the past 12 years and the laboratory was one of the first research laboratories to pioneer the modelling and animation of Avatars and has been at forefront of the technology ever since. Collaboration with many international companies has been provided through the participation of MIRALab in many different and various projects, and the laboratory currently is involved in the following EU projects: SONG (IST-2000-10036) and Interface (IST-2000-10192).

University Klagenfurt

The Department of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University Klagenfurt (UNIKLU), Austria, comprising three research groups each led by a professor, has its research focus in the area of Comprehensive Adaptation in Distributed Multimedia Systems. In the course of several national projects and international collaborations, many facets of dynamic multimedia content stream adaptation, as also arising in this project proposal, are addressed.
A summary of the research activities and expertise at ITEC can be given as follows:
* Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) in the MPEG-21 standard, specifically work on the generic Bitstream Description (gBSD) concept
* Multimedia databases using semantic metadata expressed in MPEG-7 and mapped to object-relational database technology
* Creation of semantic multimedia metadata for efficient and semantically high-level search
* Adaptive, quality-aware video proxy gateway and proxy caching (QBIX)
* Adaptive Multimedia Server (AMS), based on a mobile agent based infrastructure
* Video transcoding of MPEG-4 video streams
* Adaptive Multimedia Streaming Protocol (AMSP) for efficient scalable video transmission
* Adaptive QoS routing based on the ANTS active network protocols
* Video applications with a large number of concurrent videos in different quality (“calm video” project) ITEC is a contributing partner of the MPEG-21 standardization process, in the course of which formats and procedures for adaptation in distributed audio/visual applications are standardized. One of the ITEC members is an editor of the emerging ISO/IEC standard 21000-7 (MPEG-21 Part 7, Digital Item Adaptation, currently at SoFCD level). In July 2002, ITEC successfully hosted the 61st MPEG meeting and in August 2003, the 6th Joint Modular Languages Conference (JMLC’03) and the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par’03), all held at the University Klagenfurt Austria.