Computer Vision Center news and articles
The CVC researcher, Dr. Debora Gil, was interviewed at “De Boca a Orella” at Radio 4 (RNE) in a special program about Robotics and Society. She explained how Artificial Intelligence is currently used in the health and wellbeing sector.
You can listen the whole program here (in Catalan): http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/de-boca-a-orella/boca-orella-dilluns-25-marc-2019-1a-hora/5090503/
Our director, Dr. Josep Lladós, was interviewed at Revolució 4.0 (Catalunya Radio) by Xantal Llavina. The interview was carried out within the section “Catalunya Valley” in which Daniel Marco, director of SmartCatalonia, Department of Digital Policies and AAPP of the Generalitat de Catalunya, invited Dr. Josep Lladós to explain the CVC’s research.
You can listen the audio here (in Catalan): https://www.ccma.cat/catradio/alacarta/revolucio-4-0/al-centre-de-visio-per-computador-ja-utilitzen-el-cotxe-autonom/audio/1034013/
Our Director, Dr. Josep Lladós, was interviewed at TV3 news the last Sunday 27th of March, talking on Crowd Counting.
You can watch the clip here (in Catalan):
CVC’s associate director, Dr. Fernando Vilariño, was interviewed at Connecticat.cat to talk about the open science project “Scanning in 3D Sant Cugat’s Monastery Capitals”, carried out in the Library Living Lab the last year.
Connecti.cat is a program based on live connections broadcast every afternoon at several local TV channels in Catalonia.
You can watch the video here (in Catalan): http://www.alacarta.cat/connecticat/capitol/connecticat_20022019
The European Commission has chosen Time Machine as one of the six proposals retained for preparing large scale research initiatives to be strategically developed in the next decade. €1 million in funding has been granted for preparing the detailed roadmaps of this initiative that aims at extracting and utilising the Big Data of the past. Time Machine foresees to design and implement advanced new digitisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to mine Europe’s vast cultural heritage, providing fair and free access to information that will support future scientific and technological developments in Europe.
The Time Machine will create advanced AI technologies to make sense of vast amounts of information from complex historical data sets. This will enable the transformation of fragmented data – with content ranging from medieval manuscripts and historical objects to smartphone and satellite images – into useable knowledge for industry. In essence, a large-scale computing and digitisation infrastructure will map Europe’s entire social, cultural and geographical evolution. Considering the unprecedented scale and complexity of the data, The Time Machine’s AI even has the potential to create a strong competitive advantage for Europe in the global AI race.
“Time Machine is likely to become one of the most advanced Artificial Intelligence systems ever built, trained on data from wider geographical and temporal horizons”, explains Frederic Kaplan, Professor of Digital Humanities at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Coordinator of the Time Machine Project.
Cultural Heritage is one of our most precious assets, and the Time Machine’s ten-year research and innovation program will strive to show that rather than being a cost, cultural heritage investment will actually be an important economic driver across industries. This constant source of new knowledge will be an economic motor, giving rise to new professions, services and products in areas such as education, creative industries, policy making, smart tourism, smart cities and environmental modelling. For example, services for comparing territorial configurations across space and time will become an essential tool in developing modern land use policy or city planning. Likewise, the tourism industry will be transformed by professionals capable of creating and managing newly possible experiences at the intersection of the digital and physical world. These industries will have a pan-European platform for knowledge exchange which will add a new dimension to their strategic planning and innovation capabilities.
Time Machine will mark a new age for Social Sciences and Humanities, as it will offer open access to Europe’s past via unified data and new AI services. This will give “super powers” to researchers by revolutionising the individual researcher’s search capabilities, drastically raising the overall scale and scope of social sciences and humanities research. The resulting knowledge will enable the field to effectively contribute to the development of strategic answers to major pan-European challenges such as sustainable growth, social welfare, migration and integration of migrants, and the safeguarding of European democracy.
Education is a crucial factor for the social and economic well-being in Europe and the world, and Time Machine will help transform it by creating a dynamic new industry for the production of educative digital material based on aligned massive datasets. The resulting online courses, materials, simulations and other experiences will promote active engagement with our combined cultural heritage and make continuous learning more accessible and inclusive.
Time Machine promotes a unique alliance of leading European academic and research organisations, Cultural Heritage institutions and private enterprises that are fully aware of the huge potential of digitisation and the very promising new paths for science, technology and innovation that can be opened through the information system that will be developed, based on the Big Data of the Past. In addition to the 33 core institutions that will be funded by the European Commission, more than 200 organisations from 33 countries are participating to the initiatives, including seven national libraries (Austria, Belgium, France, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland), 19 state archives (Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary,Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland), famous museums (Louvre, Rijkmuseum), 95 academic and research institutions, 30 European companies and 18 governmental bodies.
Time Machine is also a growing network of cities. The project is based on a “franchise” operation model grouping scholars, cultural heritage organisations, government bodies and large groups of volunteers around specific integrated projects focusing on cities. The engagement of a large number of volunteers, often local citizens, in these Local Time Machine initiatives is another key element to ensure their long-term sustainability of the project. Local Time Machines are currently being developed in Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, Jerusalem, Budapest, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Dresden, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Naples, Utrecht, Limburg and more. In the next 12 months, Time Machine is expected to grow as a large community of communities, sharing a standardised platform, with more empowering tools.
In early 2016, the European Commission held a public consultation of the research
community to gather ideas on science and technology challenges that could be
addressed through future FET Flagships. End of 2016, Commissioner Oettinger
hosted a round-table event with high-level
representatives from the Member States, industry and academia. They agreed on
three major areas where promising grand science and technology challenges could
be addressed by the FET Flagships: “ICT
and connected society”, “Health and the life sciences” and “Energy, environment and climate
change”. As a result, a call for preparatory actions for future research
initiatives was launched in October 2017 as part of the Horizon 2020 FET Work Programme 2018. From the 33
proposals submitted, six were selected after a two-stage evaluation by
independent high-level experts.
The computer vision Centre (CVC), along with the Centre for demographic studies (CED), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Culture’s department of the Catalan Government (Regional Archives) have been carrying out different projects for the historical memory’s recovery from historical documents, such as census (XARXES project) or marriage documents (Five centuries of Marriages project). The extraction of nominative information of these documents with computer vision techniques and the linkage between different sources, allows the creation of a “historical social network” as a model of representation of historical knowledge.
The exploitation of this social network’s data with Artificial Intelligence techniques allows the generation of new formats and experiences to interpret our history. The social network metaphor as a representation of the Big Data of the past allows to reconstruct genealogical trees, describe vital trajectories of people and groups, study migrations, etc. Citizen participation is essential in the reconstruction of history, not only to help validate the automatic emptying of archives, but also to provide information deposited in natural archives (oral history) or personal collection materials (photographs or private documents).
Time Machine Catalonia
The Time Machine project is structured from local subprojects that personalize the vision of the different European regions identities. In Catalonia, it has begun to articulate the community Time Machine under the concept of “innovation 2.0”, grouping the agents that come together in the four-helix model: research, companies, administration and society.