10 December 2014
Successful conclusion of CUbRIK project The final review of the CUbRIK project was successfully held 25-26 November 2014, in Como, Italy. The 3-year project, which ran from October 2011 to September 2014, brought together IT and human intelligence, enhancing the search experience to augment the precision and the relevance of results when machine intelligence fails or is unable to remove uncertainty. The approach was not to emulate, but rather to incorporate human and social capabilities, from feature extraction to search and validation of multimedia content. The CUBRIK framework, released on Sourceforge, has advanced the openness of multimedia search technology by incorporating human and social computation and by enriching the semantics of multimedia content and query processing. This capability is based on programmable pipelines able to asynchronously schedule machine jobs, crowdsourcing and GWAP-based tasks. Results from different types of activities are reconciled to augment the precision and the relevance of results. Innovative solutions for multimedia scenarios can be easily designed by using this approach. The final results of CUbRIK are varied in nature, and range from the production of a series of exploitable assets (more than 30), to moving forward the state-of-the-art in these sectors, to publishing over 100 scientific papers, to attending over 100 scientific conferences or workshops, to carrying out supporting actions to communicate the results to a wide and varied audience. The added value of CUbRIK has been demonstrated by two vertical applications for two domains of practice: Business Intelligence (specifically Fashion Trends) and Digital Humanities (specifically History of Europe - histoGraph). Furthermore, new domains have also been identified for exploitation: the CUbRIK Assets have in fact been adopted by 17 technology organisations in the following 5 domains: Environment; Storage and retrieval for broadcasters and TV Producers; Health; Security; and Energy. Finally, a series of agreements have been entered into by the partners, both within and outside the original partnership, to further develop and exploit the results of the project. All project deliverables are public. The CUbRIK Consortium is composed of 15 partners including research centres, universities and companies, coordinated by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (ENG): the University of Trento, the Politecnico di Milano and its spinoff WebRatio, Nexture Consulting and Innovation Engineering from Italy; Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands; Queen Mary University of London from the United Kingdom; the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe from Luxembourg; the Fraunhofer IDMT, Attensity, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet Hannover and the
European Institute for Participatory Media from Germany; the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas from Greece; Microtask from Finland; and Homeria Open Solutions from Spain. The CUbRIK project was co-funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and had a total budget of 8.9 million Euros over three years. For further information please visit www.cubrikproject.eu or contact us at publicrelations@cubrikproject.eu