15th December 2006, 11:30-12:30 - Roger Steven Building, Lecture Theatre 21 (RSLT-21)

Keynote: Roberto Cencioni, An Overview of the European Commission IST Framework Programme

• Roberto Cencioni is a 1974 graduate from the University of Rome with a degree in statistics. Project leader in charge of software development and computer operations within a major telecommunications company, he joined the European Commission in 1977 and worked initially on a large-scale machine translation project. He then managed several teams developing distributed office and communication systems until the early 1990s, when he was entrusted with the co-ordination of R&D programmes in the area of speech and language technologies. Mr. Cencioni's responsibilities included non-research programmes such as MLIS and eContent until mid-2001, when he was appointed as the head of the Information Society Directorate-General unit managing the Safer Internet Action Plan and European research projects in the field of information access and multimedia content management. Mr. Cencioni heads the unit entrusted with R&D activities in the area of knowledge and interactive content technologies since January 2003.
  
  Abstract
• The purpose of this session is to present the research lines envisaged within the Intelligent Content & Semantics objective of the ICT work-programme. These themes result from extensive consultations. They build on work performed under FP6 in areas such as cross-media and adaptive content, semantics and knowledge systems, multimedia categorisation and search technologies. Intelligent Content & Semantics is intended to address and accelerate the convergence of Web, multimedia and knowledge engineering technologies.
  While providing an evolutionary path for ongoing efforts, the objective exhibits a number of new features. In particular, it encompasses formal, social and ambient knowledge, thus broadening the document-centric vision that inspired most of FP6 work. Foundational and component technology work will be complemented by systems oriented research primarily geared towards media, enterprise and scientific content and knowledge resources.
  The session will provide delegates with a better understanding of both rationale and aims of the objective, thus helping them identify opportunities for ambitious endeavours in the following areas: a) Content authoring: better ICT support for creativity and experience; novel forms of interactive and expressive content; b) Content workflow: automated, metadata based content flows encompassing novel and legacy content assets; c) Personalisation, contextualisation and dynamic device adaptation; technologies for personalised distribution and immersive consumption of adaptive content; d) Knowledge management systems for organisations and communities exploiting semantic clues embedded in multimedia resources, data streams and ICT-based processes; e) Semantic foundations: moving beyond current formalisms, catering for probabilistic and temporal modelling and approximate reasoning; web integration of heterogeneous data sources.
  
  Slide - Part 1

Slide - Part 2