L2L
LifeLog to Lifebraries
- Network of Excellence -
Date of Preparation: March 2010
Objective ICT-2009.4.1: Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation
Coordinator name:
Coordinator organization:
Prof. Alan Smeaton
Dublin City University
Coordinator email:
alan.smeaton@dcu.ie
List of Participants
Short
Name
Dublin City University (Coordinator) DCU
Participant No. Participant Name
Country
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
IR
University of Glasgow
GU
UK
Queen Mary, University of London
QMUL
UK
* Please use the same participant numbering as that used in Proposal submission forms A2
1
Scientific Advisory Board (IAB)
IAB Member
Company / Organisation
Microsoft
Jim Gemmell
Ross Wlikinson/
?
?
Nick Belkin/Gary Marchionnini
Country
USA
Australia
USA
Practitioners Chamber/Council
Data Providers
Member
Group Company / Organisation
Country
Industrial Advisory Board
User Group Member
Company / Organisation
2
Country
Project Abstract
Traditional (digital) libraries are distinct from other archives because their content is curated and this brings a
trust and provenance to services which use digital library content. Traditional (digital) libraries have tended to
focus their content on material of artistic, cultural or other societal interest yet each one of us amass an
enormous amount of digital and digitised content ourselves in our daily lives. On the physical side – the phone
calls we send/receive, the locations we are in, our state of wellness as monitored by heart rate, Blood Pressure,
Galvanic Skin Response, the activities we are doing (walk, sit, drive, etc.) and so on. All these can be captured
automatically using sensors, and this forms the topic of lifelogging. On the virtual side of our lives we also
generate a huge amount of digital footprint – the emails, the texts, the web pages, the online transactions, the
TV we view, etc. When it comes to managing this virtual/online content, large companies such as Google are
already creating personal digital libraries, personal lifelogging in our virtual worlds based on emails, docs,
tweets, etc.
In this proposal we address the transition from lifelogging to lifebraries, moving from simply gathering and
logging data about ourselves – in our physical and our virtual worlds – to building libraries about our lives,
lifebraries ! The L2L proposal is for a network of excellence which is placed at the intersection between
technology-driven lifelogging/ambient assisted living, and the surrounding disciplines which should influence
how we manage our lifelogs. The network of people will allow us to examine how to take the principles of
conventional (digital) libraries with their curated content, trust and provenance, and then apply those
principles to personal lifelogs, and create 'lifebraries'. The use cases we're working on include dementia
studies, adaptive viewing of lifelogs depending on who is viewing, and others we've yet to define. The
technology partners include DCU, Queen Mary University of London, University of Glasgow, Vicontech in Spain,
and others. The non-technological disciplines we're looking at include information sciences, library sciences,
archivists, law, sociology, philosophy, ethnography, ethics, and psychology. The proposal hits all the right notes
in terms of cross-disciplinarity.
Objective:
• Bridging multi-disciplinary research areas to cater for new challenges in life-long digital libraries
• Building new research capacity in lifebraries to advance the state-of-the-art in digital preservation
• Exploration of targeted focus areas in lifebraries such as ethics, curation, design, implementation
and preservation
• Creating and supporting communities through a Virtual Centre of Excellence
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Table of Contents
1. Scientific and Technical Quality, Relevance to the Topics Addressed by the Call ........................... 6
1.1 Vision, concept and objectives ..................................................................................................... 6
1.1.1 Vision Imperative .................................................................................................................. 6
1.1.2 Main Objectives .................................................................................................................. 12
1.1.3 Relationship to the topic of the call ..................................................................................... 13
1.2 Long Term Integration ............................................................................................................... 13
1.2.1 Long-term Research Agenda ............................................................................................... 14
1.2.2 Virtual Centre of Excellence ............................................................................................... 14
1.2.3 The L2L Tools ..................................................................................................................... 14
1.3 Joint Program of activities .......................................................................................................... 15
1.3.1 Joint Programme on Management and Quality Assurance ................................................. 15
1.3.2 Joint Programme on Integration and Sustainability ............................................................ 15
1.3.3 Joint program on Cooperative Research.............................................................................. 24
1.3.4 Workpackage List................................................................................................................ 25
1.3.5 List of Deliverables ............................................................................................................. 26
1.3.6 List of Milestones ................................................................................................................ 27
1.3.7 Work Package Description Tables and Gantt Charts .......................................................... 28
1.3.8 Summary of Effort............................................................................................................... 41
2. Implementation................................................................................................................................. 42
2.1 Management structure and procedures ....................................................................................... 42
2.1.1 Network management organisation ..................................................................................... 42
2.1.2 Management Activities........................................................................................................ 44
2.2 Individual Participants ................................................................................................................ 48
...................................................................................................................................................... 51
2.3 Consortium as a whole ................................................................................................................... 53
2.3.1 Synergies and track-record on successful cooperation ........................................................ 53
2.3.2 Sub-contracting, New Contractors and Other Countries ..................................................... 53
2.4 Resources to be committed......................................................................................................... 53
2.4.1
2.4.2
2.4.3
Section 3.
Mobilization of Critical Mass of Human Resources ........................................................... 53
Partner Contributions .......................................................................................................... 55
EC Funding Management .................................................................................................... 56
Impact .................................................................................................................................. 57
3.1 Expected impact as listed in the Work Programme .................................................................... 57
3.2 Spreading Excellence, Exploiting Results, Disseminating Knowledge ..................................... 57
3.2.1
3.2.2
3.2.3
Section 4.
Talent Boosting ................................................................................................................... 57
Dissemination Activities ..................................................................................................... 58
Exploitation by L2L Partners .............................................................................................. 58
Ethical Issues ....................................................................................................................... 60
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Annex 1: Letters of commitment from executives of the 7 partners ..................................................... 61
Annex 2 : Letters of support and commitment from the International advisory board ......................... 62
Annex 3 : Letters of Support and Commitment from .......................................................................... 63
Annex 4 : Letters of Support and Commitment from .......................................................................... 64
Annex 5: Sample Information Sources for L2L Tools (Dublin) ........................................................... 64
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1.
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL QUALITY,
RELEVANCE TO THE TOPICS ADDRESSED BY THE
CALL
1.1 VISION, CONCEPT AND OBJECTIVES
1.1.1 Vision Imperative (3 PAGES)
Maintaining the memory of the heritage of any given culture is recognised as being far from perfect and
through the ages human beings have devised many methods to aid their memory of those cultures, from
ancient cave paintings, to verbal story telling with embellishments, to written manuscripts to maintain a more
accurate historical account, to the printing press invented by Gutenberg in the 1400’s, to audio and video
recorders in the recent past. In terms of individuals remembering aspects/activities of what they themselves
have been doing, the written diary has been popular for a long number of years. More recently, with the
advent of computing technology and the Internet, many individuals have begun to maintain online blogs to
detail aspects of their activities, which will provide a valuable repository of information for future generations
in reflect on the cultural heritage of this present generation.
Indeed we are now living in the “web 2.0” era where everyone, not just journalists or professional writers, can
easily disseminate their own thoughts and opinions. However for this information to be recorded the individual
must made an active decision to talk about the events that they have experienced. In the current world of
minute and wearable sensing, the bridging of the physical-digital divide becomes inevitable rather than merely
possible. With the advent of lifelogging we will soon be able to passively store more and more information
about the lives of a greater number of people, so the L2L initiative will look into the cultural/ethical issues
surrounding this. Very soon we will not only preserve material of the lives of the famous (e.g. Leonardo Da
Vinci), but many of the everyday ordinary citizens of Europe, thus “preserving the memories of everyone”.
Through preserving these memories we envisage Europe leading the way in richly capturing the cultural
heritage of communities throughout the world.
Almost everything we do these days is in some way monitored, sensed, or logged. We've come to accept -- or
maybe we just ignore -- this massive surveillance of our lives from a variety of sensors because it brings us
benefits. For example, we have a more secure feeling when we know there is CCTV present, we get itemised
billing of our phone usage from phone companies, and we get convenience and even loyalty bonuses as a
result of some of our regular store purchases. Lifelogging is the term used to describe recording different
aspects of your daily life, in digital form, for your own exclusive personal use. It is a form of reverse
surveillance, sometimes termed sousveillance, referring to us, the subjects, doing the watching, of ourselves.
Lifelogging can take many forms, such as capturing everything we see through wearable cameras such as the
Vicon Revue, the people around us through detecting Bluetooth devices of those we meet, the places we have
been through GPS, the landmark events we attend through augmenting our lifelogs with online web 2.0
community information, etc.
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The L2L consortium contains a world-leading range of partners with extensive lifelogging experience, from
considering psychological factors to support human memory (Leeds), to how the information should be
managed and presented (Dublin), to how it can be used to measure population health statistics (Oldenburg), to
how it can be used to directly support the quality of life of those with dementia (Lulea). These partners along
with librarian curation experts in Copenhagen, Alinari, and the Swedish National Archives will all strive towards
realising a vision of exploiting lifelogging techniques to help preserve the significant memories of everyone’s
lives.
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However given the potential revolutionary role that lifelogging could have on society in a number of ways, a
key imperative of the L2L consortium will be involving “reflectors” from the arts and humanities throughout
the process of technological advancement. World leading lawyers (Namur) and ethicists (Dublin) will play an
integral role in ensuring that the potential technological benefits of lifelogging technologies sufficiently
outweigh the perceived sociological implications. L2L will carry out an in-depth analysis of this classic
benevolence vs. malevolence scenario. The anticipated benefits include scenarios of social sharing of
experienced events or happenings (passively recorded using lifelogging technologies), an aid to support human
memory, an improved quality of life for those in the early stage of dementia conditions, increased security
through events being logged from multiple viewpoints, preserving the experiences of a loved one even long
after their passing away. However potential implications of lifelogging technologies include the breaches of
privacy of the individual, not having control of the content that others may contain on interactions with you,
regulation governing ownership of lifelog data after death, laws regarding forced sharing of lifelog data to
resolve legal disputes, etc. Another form of reflection on lifelogging content will be in presenting the shared
memories of a community of people in thought-provoking manners which best represent the cultural
heritage of this group of people, thus the role of artists in disseminating such material is important. With
lifelogging being on the cusp of an explosion in growth, the overwhelming strength of the L2L consortium will be
in providing reflectors from the arts and humanities real input into how the technology grows and develops,
thus offering the greatest be nefit to society.
8
The L2L vision contains a number of inter-related themes which require a multi-disciplinary solution
intersecting science and the humanities:
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1. HOW TO IDENTIFY INDIVIDUAL EVENTS OF INTEREST (HOW I VIEW ME) – GATHERING AND REFLECTION
… If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It
would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get
ahead with our thinking…
(James, 1890)
Unto recently most lifelogging research was concentrated on hardware miniaturisation and on data
storage. In classical exponential technological growth following Moore’s Law and Bell’s Law, small
lifelogging devices such as the Vicon Revue are now commercially available. Also numerous
predictions have been made on the future cost of storage, with most pointing towards the reality that a
lifetime of personal content could be stored for under €100. However the new challenge in
technologically realising the lifelogging vision is that of understanding one’s lifelog content and
assisting people to find target events of interest. An obvious form of content retrieval is to offer
refinement of the lifelog collection based on temporal information. Retrieval may also be enabled
based on the low-level visual features of a query image. Augmentation and annotation of the collection
with sources of context metadata is another method by which visual lifelogs may be made searchable.
Information derived from sensors such as Bluetooth and GPS may cover the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ of
events in an individual’s lifelog. An understanding of the ‘what’ or the semantics of an event can be
obtained through machine learning techniques carried out on low-level features on the captured
images in an event. Various approached to realising these functions have been achieved by the
consortium partners Dublin City University and Institute of Memory in the University of Leeds
Challenges include understanding how the human mind stores the most important events of one’s life
through considering psychological factors such as distinct events are more strongly encoded in the
memory, retrieved
events are re-encoded more strongly in memory, personal goal-fulfilling events are strongly encoded,
and many other factors too.
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Partners: DCU (event management), Leeds (psychological guidance), QMUL (lifelog image
processing), DCU ethic (guidelines on appropriate collection of content), Oldenburg & Leeds (use
case of benefits developed techniques to individuals with memory impairments).
Anticipated Dissemination:
- Ethical guidelines on best practice in capturing lifelog content
- Construction and implementation of computational model to support human memory
through identifying an individual’s most significant events
- Evaluation of benefits offered by techniques towards improving quality of life of those in
early stage dementia conditions
2. DETERMINING DIFFERENT VIEWS OF ONE’S LIFE (HOW OTHERS VIEW ME) – SHARING WITH OTHERS
Partners: Vicomtech (semantic ontology construction), Lulea (context aware information), Glasgow
(retrieval strategies), Namur (guidelines on making content available to other communities), Lulea
(use case on how community sharing of lifelog data enhances quality of life of older people)
Anticipated Dissemination:
- Guidelines on sharing lifelog content with others
- Construction and implementation of computational process to identify various (online &
physical) social networks that given events in an individual’s lifelog are related to
- Evaluation of benefits offered by techniques towards improving the quality of life of older
individuals in easily sharing appropriate content with various peers
3. PRESERVING CULTURAL HERITAGE (HOW OTHERS VIEW COMMUNITIES OF CURATED LIFELOG CONTENT) –
DIGITAL CURATION TO LIFEBRARY
Partners: Leeds (psychological guidance), Alinari (curation expertise), Swedish National Archives
(curation expertise), RSLIS (information challenges of curating multiple views of lifelog content into a
preserved digital lifebrary), DCU (integration of landmark life events to lifebrary), ARTIST (public
display of cultural heritage of shared community lifebrary), Namur (legislation guidelines on
ownership of digitally preserved lifebraries).
Anticipated Dissemination:
- Legislation guidelines on ownership rights of digital lifebrary content
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- Construction and implementation of a digital lifelog curation model to select appropriate
lifelog landmark events for digital lifebraries
- Artistic display of curated community digital lifebrary to provoke meaningful reflection on
preserving the memory of everyone.
1.1.2 Main Objectives
Integration of organisations and people: L2Lbrings together leading European research teams to
create lasting integration of the currently fragmented research efforts that individually address only
aspects of the project’s vision. The foundations for an enduring VCE will be laid by fostering the
creation of sustainable and lasting relationships between existing national research groups. The NoE’s
Joint Programme on Integration and Sustainability constitutes the suite of initiatives used to drive
integration and ensure lasting impact.
Technical integration: The L2LNoE will build an open and expandable framework for collaborative
research on semantic urban computing – the L2LPlatform.
Pan-European integration: Pan-European integration is addressed by dedicated activities for sharing
lab facilities, technological developments and resources. The NoE key objective in a Pan-European
context is twofold: (i) to enable exchange of research personnel and sharing of available resources not
already widely available; (ii) to reach out to other European institutions with specific consideration
given to the 12 new EU member states.
Dissemination and outreach: Lasting impact will be ensured by implementing an effective plan for
training, joint research, technology transfer, dissemination and exploitation that will continue beyond
the funded life of the project under the auspices of the VCE. This plan includes:

disseminating the technical developments of the network across the broader research community
in the EU and beyond

providing the means to bring project and research results directly to the general public via a
specific use case targeting the EU citizen

providing a forum for key stakeholders to contribute to shaping the project’s vision that will be
achieved via the establishment of an External Advisory Chamber bringing together interest groups
of end users and industry leaders .

influencing and contributing to key standardisation activities related to the NoE’s vision.
Industrial innovation: Close cooperation and engagement with industry is vital to ensure that
L2Land VCE research outputs transfer smoothly to commercial innovations. To this end, an
International Advisory Board (IAB) has been established featuring an initial core of representatives
from complementary industrial sectors in order to provide multiple perspectives on the NoE’s work.
The IAB will be expanded over the lifetime of the project, its mission being to assist the network in
defining research directions and to provide advice on potential exploitation of research results as they
emerge. The IAB provides a mechanism to ensure that research does not become unfocused and selfserving but rather acts as a pipeline for future products and services.
An inclusive forum for all stakeholders:
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1.1.3 Relationship to the topic of the call
L2Las an NoE: L2Lis perfectly aligned to the scope and objectives of the NoE instrument as follows:

A committed core of institutions with the ambition to integrate and coordinate their research
efforts in the novel area of Lifebraries. The consortium have an excellent scientific reputation,
have shown national and international leadership, and are highly experienced in fostering and
leading collaborative teams of researchers in the areas of ....................................... and advanced
information retrieval (IR) models. The consortium are also key players in relevant standardisation
activities, e.g. ................................... and take leading roles in a variety of world-wide
benchmarking activities (TREC, TREC-VID, INEX, CLEF, OAEI etc).

The creation of an internationally renowned virtual research centre is at the heart of this proposal
with both the Joint Programme on Integration and Sustainability and Joint Programme of
Cooperative Research built around this common goal. For the former, WP2 (Integration of
Organisations and People), WP6 (Infrastructure Integration & Sharing) and WP7 (Outreach and
Spreading Excellence) are designed to put in place the necessary pre-requisites for the existence of
a VCE, as well as instantiating the processes and mechanisms that will provide for continued
access to VCE resources and running of VCE processes beyond the lifetime of the project. In the
case of the latter, three technical R&D work packages are designed to stimulate inter-disciplinary
research in the areas of ............... (WP3), ............... (WP4) and ................(WP5) to ensure that the
VCE has a generous supply of technology
As an NoE, L2Ltargets world-class research organizations that wish to combine and integrate a
substantial part of their activities and capacities in a given field, with a view to creating a sustainable
virtual centre of excellence.
Match with strategic objectives of Objective ICT-????? This proposal addresses all target
outcomes of the strategic objective, as illustrated via the following quoted aspects of the work
programme:
Target Outcome (a)
Target Outcome (b)

Target Outcome (c)
Target Outcome (d)
Target Outcome (e) Impact and S&T leadership:
1.2 LONG TERM INTEGRATION
Various research institutions across Europe are targeting different aspects of the L2Lvision, however,
individually they cannot critically influence the direction of technological development in such a
complex field as Lifebraries. A considered and well-defined plan for long-term integration can
however help ensure that Europe as a whole is at the forefront of overseeing the evolution of this new
multidisciplinary research area. Thus, the L2Lplan for long-term integration is based around the
following core principles:
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a) it must promote a critical mass of research excellence in the relevant research areas within the
European Community;
b) it should foster convergence and synergy on technologies being developed so far independently by
distinct research communities; and
c) it should achieve resource optimization when targeting important multidisciplinary aspects of
semantic urban computing.
More specifically, the lasting impact and long-term integration rest on two main innovations:
1. The creation of an open and expandable framework for collaborative research based on a common
distributed system and associated data repository that is promoted and made available within the
research community.
2. The establishment of a Virtual Centre of Excellence that can take over the processes and
mechanisms that are initiated during the funded project life-time in order to ‘boot-strap’ long-term
integration.
1.2.1 Long-term Research Agenda
1.2.2 Virtual Centre of Excellence
However, we firmly believe that the breadth
of the L2Lvision requires more than
technical integration between academic
partners with expertise in specific technical
areas. Rather, what is truly required is
promotion of the L2Lagenda towards a
longer-term initiative that mobilises an
entire research community, and several of
the project tasks directly address this. For
this reason, the key objective of the network,
besides technical validation of a vision of
large-scale urban computing, is the
establishment of such a research community,
and furthermore one that includes not only
academia but also anyone with a vested
interest in the L2L proposition. To this end,
we will put in place a Virtual Centre of
Excellence (VCE) in the field of semantic urban computing that will bring together technical
researchers within a virtual laboratory, end users and data providers in the form of special interest
groups, and a forum for sociological and ethical debate on the issues surrounding urban computing.
The VCE will be overseen by an executive management group drawn from all mentioned
constituencies, whose key mission will be to look to ongoing integration as facilitated by the VCE.
1.2.3 The L2LPlatform
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1.3 JOINT PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES
.
1.3.1 Joint Programme on Management and Quality Assurance
This joint program is coordinated by Ms. Patricia Ho-Hune from ERCIM
The management structure is conceived to optimally support the efficient and timely organization and
delivery of the L2Lwork plan. It is designed to ensure a coherent, scientific multi-disciplinary,
administrative and financial coordination of L2L, while providing the participants with the support and
tools required for the achievement of the NoE’s objectives. In particular, the management will:





Establish a democratic yet reliable overall organisation supporting the completion of the
project activities;
Support the integration of both research teams and activities, and ensure in particular the
interaction among the different L2LWork packages and activities;
Assess the quality of work achieved and take appropriate measures if needed, in particular to
supervise and review the completion of the milestones and deliverables;
Promote the visibility of the L2Lnetwork;
Provide expertise to address Intellectual Property Rights issues;
Running through all of the management activities is a responsibility for quality assurance which is
embedded in all aspects of the network.
1.3.2 Joint Programme on Integration and Sustainability
This joint programme is is made up of three work packages on Integration of Organisations and People
(WP2), Data Capture, Demonstrators & Evaluation (WP6) and Outreach and Spreading Excellence
(WP7). The work package on Data Capture, Demonstrators & Evaluation is quite a technical work
package and is classified as RTD but we place it in the Programme on integration and sustainability
because its goal is to bring the separate strands of work in WP 3, 4 and 5, together. The Work package
on Integration of Organisations and People is mostly made from organisation activities while the work
package on Outreach and Spreading Excellence has a variety of activities, from societal impacts to
joint publications, and from web portal to running a benchmarking activity.
1.3.2.1 Integration of Organisations and People (WP2)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. Joemon Jose, University of Glasgow
Human capital is the most important asset of any network and L2L will pursue a range of activities
towards boosting the quality of researcher talent both within and outside the network. This will be
particularly aimed at young researchers and will involve researchers from a range of disciplines
involved in L2L activities which make up what we refer to Lifebrariy research and associated
cognitive and sociological research. The integration will be achieved at the level of on-site joint
research (fellowships and exchanges), visiting lectures, web conferencing, summer schools, Lifebrary
Festival, joint PhD supervision, sharing of educational resources, involvement in joint publications
and involvement in using the L2L platform described in activity A6.5 through the L2L Data challenge,
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described in activity A7.5. Care will be taken to extend the impact of the Network to other countries
than those directly represented through project partners in activity A2.5. The ultimate goal, reflected
from the very beginning, is to form a Virtual Centre of Excellence that will persist over the completion
of the L2Lproject.
The workpackage is broken into five varied activities described as follows.
Activity 2.1 – Towards A Virtual Centre of Excellence
Leader: QMUL, Prof. Ebroul Izquierdo
One of the primordial tasks for the Network is to lay the fundaments of a Virtual Centre of Excellence
(VCE) on Lifebrary research that would assure persistence of the achieved accumulation of people and
know-how and alow the EU to keep pace with, and ultimately outstrip, developments in this area
elsewhere, particularly in the US, as described in the Vision Imperative section (1.1.1) earlier in
this proposal. Initially composed and steered by the core partners, the virtual center will enlarge the
member basis by integrating new partners in its governing body by establishing a research council and
an associate membership program for academics. Clear priority will be given to enlargement with new
member states partners with the constraints to avoid over representation of a single country. When
creating the VCE it will also be a priority to target individuals in relevant EU projects, such as the
……………….. Integrated Projects for senior roles in the management and running of the VCE. The
virtual centre will also rely on its own industrial board for the purpose of continuous market awareness.
This activity targets planning and execution of the program towards the VCE on Lifebrary research.
Specifically the following sub-activities will be undertaken.
Planning of Membership and Constitution: In this activity the plan, principles, problems and
benefits of creating the envisaged centre will be analysed. This analysis will be used to produce welldefined terms of reference, membership and “mission statement” of the VCE. The results of this initial
analysis will be weighed carefully against alternatives such as affiliation to existing professional
bodies that will inevitably evolve to better represent the importance of Lifebrary research.
Strategic plan for sustainability: A carefully thought out, realistic and achievable strategic planning
process is required to achieve sustainability. This planning process should address among other issues,
legal issues pertaining to the establishment of the centre, financial sustainability, centre identity, links
to existing national centres, programmes and networks, etc.
This activity will draw and execute a plan and run sub-activities, analysis and discussions related to
the sustainability of the envisaged VCE. It will be lead by QMUL but will involve all partners.
Activity 2.2 – Researcher Mobility Programme
Leader: ??????????
Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the network activities, we will encourage the mobility of junior
as well as senior researchers within the Network and will allocate substantial funding to it. The
mobility program will have two schemes differing in both the organisational setting and their typical
duration. The Researcher Exchange Program (REP) will be open to members of the L2L Institutes and
the Fellowship Program (FP) will be reserved for PhD holders from all over the world to allow young
scientists to join research centres within the Network.
The Mobility program and procedure will adhere to specific rules described in the deliverable
“Definition of the Mobility Program”. In addition the status of this activity will be described in the
annual progress reports.
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
L2L Fellowships (FP)
This program will offer 12-18 month positions under a selection process managed by the Project
Management Board. This program will aim to recruit excellent research fellows with respect to a
particular topic addressed by the L2L research objectives. In addition contacts will systematically
be established with external academic institutes within activity A2.5 (Pan-European Integration)
as described below. The research fellow will be hosted by two L2L Members for a 6-9 month
period each and will include another short visit to at least one more L2L institute of different
discipline.
The process will follow 3 steps:
1. Launch of the call for proposals: the call for L2L fellowship will be kept open for the first two
years of the project;
2. Review and selection of best proposals will be conducted by the management Board on a
monthly basis;
3. Recruitment of candidates will be carried out through extensive advertising at all L2L member
establishments and via the other European channels for example using ERCIM channels, in
ERCIM News magazine (approximately 11,500 copies in over 100 countries worldwide).
Available funding: the Network-budget guarantees four fellowships but may increase this number
depending upon interest.

L2L Researcher Exchange Program (REP):
The mobility of researchers will consist of scientific visits and research stays between members of
different L2L institutions and such bisits can be inter-dsiciplinary or of the same research topic.
Typical stays will be of one month although shorter or longer durations will be considered
depending on which category of researchers it concerns. For each stay a joint proposal from the
visitor and hosting institutions should be prepared, describing a project summary about the interest
of the stay. Upon review of the Management board, the exchanges will be validated and refunded
by a weekly lump sum to cover travel, accommodation and subsistence costs. This program is
open to Junior and Senior Researchers from project members. To this aim the terms of the
exchange will be adapted as follows:
-
PhD Exchanges and Internships: PhD students as well as recently graduated post-docs
from within the Network will have the possibility to apply for a ‘talent-boosting’
internship within another partner. The typical duration of the internship will be 1 to 6
months. The applications will be granted through a review process managed by the
Management rating both the qualification of the applicant and the overlap of interest
between the applicant and the hosting institutes.
-
Visits of researchers (incl. senior), as well as short visits of external scientists will be
funded to enforce personal relations and understanding among scientists of the Network.
In order to comply with its goal of integration within and across the scientific
communities involved, the Network will support short visits between a founding member
(namely one of the partners of this proposal) and a non-founding or outside member,
providing that the joint research program is relevant to the project activities and the visited
institute is a founding member of the Network.
Available funding: the Network-budget forecasts more than 200 weeks for the REP but may
increase this number if there is demand. In general and whenever it is appropriate, the
17
Management board will consider shifting some budget between the two L2L Mobility schemes to
fit as much as possible with the needs of the researchers of the Network.
Finally, we will explore the industrial placement of L2L researchers engaged in their final year of PhD
studies. This will enable the transfer of technologies from L2L to allied industrial domains and to
actively strengthen industrial relationships relevant to the L2Lobjectives.
Activity 2.3 – Cooperation in Education, Teaching Materials and PhD Formation
Leader: GLA, Prof. Joemon Jose
Most of the L2L partners are leading research-oriented academic institutions and many of the senior
researchers involved in L2L teach courses at their Universities give research and invited talks, tutorials
at conferences etc. In order to consolidate such a vast experience and form a critical mass in the L2L
domain, the network will organise a set of activities aimed at co-operation in Summer School teaching,
sharing of teaching materials and the development of PhD formation in multi-disciplinary areas.
We have specified the following sub-activities:







The Network will, in its field of research interest, collect new teaching materials (lecture notes,
video lectures, talks by SEREDIPTI researchers) and form links to relevant items in already
existing repositories such as those from previous IST projects (Knowledge Web – REASE, KSpace, Reasoning Web etc.). The result will be a publicly available database of teaching resources.
The Network members will actively create commented summaries upon these resources, which
can be seen as proto-syllabi for new, dynamically built courses focussing on Lifebrary research
topics.
The Network will establish long-term cooperation in education of undergraduate students as well
as in joint supervision of PhD theses in its fields of interest. In fact, all the L2L supported
PhD students will be jointly supervised by at least 2 partners of the consortium.
The interaction among the PhD students involved in the network will be fostered by organisation
of an annual workshop – SerendiPhDi – where leading-edge research results will be semiinformally presented. The organisation of the workshop will be, for most part, carried out by the
PhD students themselves to encourage and improve the organization skills of the students.
L2L project meetings at partner institutions will also be scheduled to allow the opportunities for
senior L2L researchers to deliver guest lecturers to ‘local’ students during the times of these
meetings and to contribute to local teaching in that way, so that students from each university can
benefit from the consortium wide expertise. In addition, this will enhance our teaching repositories.
Aside from such face-to-face events, there will be joint web conferences during which the PhD
students and researchers will present their contributions to the hot research topics of the Network.
We will exploit avenues like Erasmus programmes to strengthen interaction and academic
cooperation between partners.
Activity 2.4 – Lifebrary Festival
Given the multi-disciplanry nature and activity of the network, it is important to bring all stake holders
under one roof and facilitate exchange of ideas. Towards this end, L2L Noe will organise a wekk long
Lifebrry festival. This will be an annual event and during this time we will conduct two different kinds
of activities. The fisrt one is Summer Schools and Social Networking and the second oen is
Lifebrary cross-disciplnary engagemet.
Activity 2.4.1 Summer Schools and Social Networking
Leader:
18
An annual Summer School lasting one week and consisting of 5 days x 6 hours of teaching material
will be created and will attract between 50 and 80 students, mostly from outside the network, to the
topic of Lifebrary research. Lectures will be given by senior L2L researchers and by guest lecturers
and will cover the whole range of L2L activities from technological issues like semantic web
technologies, databases, data mining and machine learning, software development and interfaces, and
societal impacts of new technologies discussing topics like law, ethics and privacy and also the issues
of cognition, emotion and information science topics related to Lifebrary consumption.
While one goal of summer schools is to gather people and to foster long-term collaborations between
young researchers, the interactions between students generally end when the summer school ends. In
order to go further and to ensure long-term relationships between summer school attendees, leading to
new collaboration opportunities and bootstrapping new research fields, we will provide access to an
online social networking application built around L2L so that attendees are encouraged to stay in
touch with each other, have the ability to interact with the school lecturers after the summer school,
and build upon their summer school experience around the L2L data centre and tools. It will also
include facilities to exchange messages as well as sharing publications, and will be done by using an
existing social networking platform.
Activity 2.4.2 – Cross-disciplinary exploration
It is important to explore ideas related to different Lifebrary domains and ensure communication
between technologysits and also the cognition group and the lawyers. Towards this goal, we will
organise a week long cross-dicsiplinary activities including:

Debates on topics related to Lifebrary research (For example: Law and ethics, philosophy, ..
and/or Cognitive and emotional aspects) . For this purpose we will invite eminent non-L2L
researchers in appropriate disciplines as well as the L2L research leaders. Participation in this
activity is open to non-L2L people so that wide dissemination of such issues are possible.

Distinguished lecture series: The idea is to invite leading researchers on this topic to talk to L2L
researchers.

Lifebrary workshops: the idea is to organise workshops on emerging Lifebrary research themes.
Activity 2.5 – Pan-European Integration
Leader:
While the Network partners are based in XXXX EU countries, the integrating activities of the network
will extend to relevant parties in the whole European space. In particular, PhD students and
researchers will be systematically invited to Summer Schools and to the mobility programme; joint
activities will be planned with related EU projects; public bodies in different European cities will be
involved in the dissemination and the like. The effort will have the following three foci.


General infrastructure. The outcomes of this activity will materialise in the form of a
contacts database, which will serve for the purposes of other activities and WPs. In parallel,
Activity 2.5 will continuously monitor the activities of the whole network in terms of keeping
their benefits, as much as possible, accessible to parties from countries not represented in the
consortium.
New EU member states. Particular attention will be paid to the situation in these states, in
which the implementation of Lifebrary applications is rather novel but often progressing fast.
The specific situation in these countries will be analysed in connection with prospective
application of technologies developed or advertised within L2L. Researchers from these states
will be invited for presentations and discussions.
19

Industrial contacts. Dedicated effort will be devoted to establishment of contact with
additional industrial subjects (aside those present in the IAB), and settle initial negotiations on
technology transfer, which will subsequently continue within Activity A7.3.
1.3.2.2 Data Capture, Demonstrators & Evaluation (WP6)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. Ebroul Isquiredo, Queen mary University of London,
Activity 6.1 Virtual Laboratory
Leader: QMUL, Dr. Alan Pearmain
The objective of this activity is to form a L2L Virtual laboratory in the Lifebrary research area. The
concept of a virtual laboratory is to make the L2L research activities to reach outside the consortium
and also make the L2L activities flourish even after the end of the project. The Virtual laboratory, a
component of our proposed Virtual Centre of Excellence (A 2.1), will host the L2L infrastructures
(A6.5), experimental data sets (A6.3), and tools developed in (WP3). The VL will work along with
other aligned sets of societies (for example: CEPIS and the SMART Society).
Activity 6.2 Evaluation Methodology
Leader: GU, Prof. Joemon Jose
Evaluation of scientific results is very important and L2L takes this as a core activity. Proper
evaluation allows characterizing the quality of the research results. However, there is no mature
evaluation methodology developed so far for Lifebrary research. Most evaluation activities are
scattered and depends on the research domain, for example: Information retrieval methodology used in
TRECVid and CLEF.
Given the cross-disciplinary and integrative nature of L2L research activities, it is important to address
the issue of evaluation methodology. Based on the scientific traditions so far, we will develop an
evaluation framework for benchmarking L2L research activities and in particular exploiting the results
of WP4. This involves developing procedures for data collection, specification of experimentation and
measures for comparison. In addition, we will develop a framework for user-centred evaluation of L2L
tools.
Activity 6.3 Data Capture & Ground Truth Generation
Leader: DCU, Prof. Alan Smeaton
The objective of this activity is the assimilation of data sources for experimentation and development
of ground truth information. The activities of L2L involve integrating noisy information from
heterogeneous data sources (cameras, audio, sense cam images, biometrics etc.). It is not trivial to
collect data for experimentation purposes. We will device mecahnsism to create test data sets (may be
getting some dedicated test suvjects as in DCU life memory research) or building infrastructures to
collect such data from general researchers who are willing to share their data. The collection and
exploitation of such data sets will be a continuous activity by facilitating collection of data as and
when they are made available. In addition, we will endeavour to create ground truth data sets from
such collections for experimentation. The consortium will make concerted effort to make such
collections publically available through our virtual laboratory (Activity 6.1).
Activity 6.4 Case Studies
Leader: DCU, Prof. Barry Smyth
20
Activity 6.4.1
Activity 6.1.3
Activity 6.5 L2L Tools
Leader:
1.3.2.3 Outreach and Spreading Excellence (WP7)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. ???
L2L has a very broad range of stakeholders to whom outreach from the Network of Excellence is
possible, and relevant. These include the following
1
The community of researchers within and outside the network (both academic and industry),
including students, postdoctoral researchers, academic Faculty, industry researchers, and
interns, who all have an interest in the challenges of leveraging ...................
2
3
Those who work within our three identified application areas –................... – for whom there
is likely benefit from access to applications developed on the L2Lplatform (activity A6.5).
Application developers who would avail of the opportunity to use the L2L tools in software
development. These could be other academic or industry researchers, but the needs of this
group will be specific and different to those researchers interested in the research challenges
of Lifebrary community??????.
Standards groups such as the ...... and others. L2L has already identified several projects at EU
and at national levels with whom we should have at least dialogue and probably some real
interaction. ...........................
Because L2Lis an activity which is immediately comprehensible to the ordinary EU citizen
who has an opportunity to benefit directly and indirectly from the L2L activity through access
to the applications developed on the L2L tools.
4
5
6
With such a broad church of constituents for interaction, in order that outreach and the spreading of
excellence is spread across this wide community, a comprehensive evaluation plan for the L2L
activities in this area will be developed early in the project which will include targets and milestones
and this will be delivered at M3. This evaluation plan will be re-visited twice during the lifetime of
the network, at M12 and M24 where the targets re-assessed and if necessary revised, with
justifications, and the performance of the network against the targets will be presented at M12, M24
and M36.
The objectives of this WP are broadly defined as:



To disseminate the activities and achievements of the L2L network to a wide and diverse
range of interested parties in a timely and efficient manner, from fellow researchers to
ordinary citizens of the EU;
To enhance the research experience and expertise of researchers working in the area of
Lifebrary research, from both within the network partners as well as from partners outside the
core group;
To contribute to the development of standards in this emerging and important area;
21
Because WP 7 is one of the WPs which focuses on joint integration and is part of the Joint programme
on Integration and Sustainability, it is one of the larger WPs in the L2L proposal and is divided into 6
broad activities, described as follows.
A7.1 Web portal, blogs & Promotional materials
Leader
The L2Lonline portal (both public & restricted areas) will be used for the exchange of information,
coordination of applications to the L2L mobility programme (A2.2) by researchers (1), support for
dissemination and registration facilities for L2L events (most activities in WP2), and will be a central
point for the consortium and for organizations, bodies, and research communities, as well as for public
awareness on the topic of aggregated sensor information. It will also support access to the L2L tools
(A6.5) for aggregated sensor data for researchers, for application developers outside the network, for
other EU and national projects (6) and for ordinary EU citizens (7) through the platform applications.
End users in the three targeted application areas (3) for L2L– ........................ – will also use the online
portal for access to applications developed on the L2L tools while application developers who use the
L2L platform (4) will avail of the online portal for documentation and support as well as progress
updates and news.
L2L blog sphere ...........
Within this activity, the L2L project will produce a range of promotional materials, both in online
form for general distribution as well as in paper for distribution at relevant conferences, workshops
and other events. A quarterly electronic newsletter starting at M3 will be used for regular information
exchange among the network and among the research community at large and will include information
on the major activities ongoing within the network including research exchanges and visits,
publications, status updates on the L2L platforms, publicity and media coverage, theses, L2Levents.
All Partners will actively help in contributing to the design of dissemination materials, through local
press activities, selecting media partners in Europe for organised events for greater coverage.
Promotion will also take place in finding synergies between ……………………. and ongoing related
projects and programmes in Europe in order to to raise awareness and exploit already existing
interested audiences from the research and industry sectors.
In addition, in order to outreach the research of the network and its outcomes outside the academic
world, we will adopt a global communication strategy using Web 2.0 services That will include
creating accounts and posting content on services such as (among others) Flickr (pictures of L2L
events), Twitter (real-time information about the network and interactivity with people interested in
L2L) as well as creating a Facebook page, so that people can become “fans” of the L2Lproject.
A7.2 – Joint Publications
Leader: QMUL, Dr. Alan Pearmain
Tangible evidence of real research collaboration within the network is the number of joint publications
produced by L2L partners. This kind of evidence also applies to demonstrating collaboration between
the Network partners and partners or collaborators outside the network. This activity will promote and
coordinate the production of joint papers, for journals, conferences, workshops and book chapters,
based on work carried out within L2L. Special emphasis and importance will be given to publications
which span across partner sites as well as to publication targets which underscore the collaborative and
multi-disciplinary nature of the L2Lworkplan.
22
In addition to producing collaborative research outputs in the Joint Programme on Research
Cooperation (WP3,4,5), the L2L network will also take a lead in promoting publication in its novel
niche area of Lifebrary research, through sponsoring special sessions at relevant conferences and
leading special issues of relevant journals. Because of the wide impact of the L2L work this will have
a wide range and will include target venues in computing and engineering, ....................... Already
identified journal targets include, but are not limited to, .........................
Relevant conferences include the ....................................
From among the wide community with likely involvement in L2L, A7.2 will directly impact the
researchers, both academic and industry(1), those working in standards groups (5), and those working
in other related national and EU projects (6).
A7.3 – Standards and Technology Transfer
Leader:
Successful and scalable aggregation of various sensor outputs depends heavily on conformance and
agreement to standards. These standards should be international, and open in nature since standards
provide interoperability while still allowing for competition between sensor equipment and services.
The L2Lpartners will not only follow the existing standards but will drive them, especially by being
involved in Digital Library standardization activities. L2L will work towards a platform which allows
easy plug-in of data taken from ……………………….. Technology transfer, raising awareness of
L2Lsuccess and opportunities for exploitation which are described in Section 3.2.3 later in this
document, will take place in the context of the operating L2Lplatform which will act as a showcase
and demonstrator of L2Lnetwork capabilities.
To achieve these aims, L2Lwill execute the following activities on technology translation:





Identify internal (L2L) and external (related research areas, big players, SMEs)
technology/knowledge which is of relevance to the network’s activities.
Establish in the L2L team of researchers, knowledge about IP and patents. Each of the XXX
academic partners in the network already have in place support units to promote IP protection
and exploitation and we will lever this in the operation of L2L.
Investigate the requirements of projects external to the L2L research. With an appropriate
work force in place, we gather user requirements collected from external researchers and
companies.
Organise and participate in EU related activities targeting ……………...
Become proactively involved in the emergence of standards in the area of the Lifebrary topic
……………
As a whole, A7.4 will impact researchers (1), application developers (4). Standards groups (5), and
other EU and national projects (6).
A7.4 Societal
A7.5 – L2L Data Challenge
Leader:
Ito help promote use of the L2L tools to develop applications other than the three case studies in A6.1,
this activity will coordinate an end-of-project challenge, open to researchers inside and outside the
network. The challenge will run during the final year of the network, when the L2L tools are most
mature and stable, and will be embedded as a track or ‘lab’ within the annual CLEF/TREC
benchmarking activity. As of 2010, the well-known CLEF benchmarking event will have an open
23
“call for tracks” or labs as they will be called. Prof. Alan Smeaton of Dublin City University is
Program Co-Chair of TREC VID series ....., so the consortium is well-connected into this activity.
The challenge will feature an activity to develop the best new application to run on the L2L tools,
using data (made available by L2L (Activity 6.3), augmented with other L2L materials. Assessment
criteria will include novelty, usefulness of the application, technical difficulty and user feedback.
Input from the International Advisory Board will be sought in the judging process and a small prize
will be awarded at an event such as the CLEF/TREC workshop meeting. Strong and wide ranging
participation in the challenge will be ensured by targeting both related EU projects such as those
previously mentioned as well as similar initiatives around eth world (e.g. ……...)
The following table summaries how each of the activities in WP7 impact different categories of
L2Lstakeholders.
A7.1: Web
Portal and
Promotional
Materials
A7.2: Joint
Publications
A7.3:
Standards and
Technology
Transfer
1. Researchers (academic
and industry)





2. Data providers

-
-


3. Niche application areas

-
-

-
4. Application developers

-

-

5. Standards groups
-


-
-
6. Other EU and national
projects



-
-
7. EU citizens

-
-

-
A7.4:
Societal
Impacts
1.3.3 Joint program on Cooperative Research
1.3.3.1 Technological Challenges in creating Lifebraries (WP3)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. Alan Smeaton
1.3.3.1 Cognitive Issues in interacting with Lifebraries (WP4)
This WP is coordinated by Dr. Larsen, RSLIS
1.3.3.1 Sciological Issues in Lifebrary Research (WP5)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. Yves/claire – namur?????
24
A7.5:
L2LPlatform
Challenge
1.3.4 Workpackage List
WP
WP title
Number
WP1
WP2
WP3
WP4
WP5
WP6
WP7
Type of Lead
Lead
Total
Activity Participant Participant Person
Number
Short
Months
Name
MGT
1
DCU/?
Management
Integration of
Organisations OTHER
and People
RTD
RTD
RTD
Infrastructure
Integration
RTD
and Sharing
Outreach and
Spreading
OTHER
Excellence
Total
Commission Start
End
Funded
Month Month
Person
Months
1
36
6
GU
1
36
7
5
4
DCU
Namur?
1
1
1
36
36
36
3
QMUL
1
36
2
??
1
36
Total project effort is ????? staff months, of which ???? (???%) is sought as a Commission
contribution
25
1.3.5 List of Deliverables
WP
No.
Del. No Deliverable Name
D7.6
D7.7
D7.8
7
7
7
7
Report on Standardisation Activities
Nature
OTHER
OTHER
OTHER
Dissemination
Level
P
P
P
P
Deliverable
Date
(month)
36
36
24, 36
18, 36
Main Deliverables
The following table lists a selection of ?? key deliverables which will each be peer-reviewed by
external experts in the field and used through the project to further assess the effectiveness of ongoing
activities. These selected deliverables are also included in the Gantt charts given in the next few
sections.
WP
No.
Del. No Deliverable Name
D1.2
A great demo of something
8
26
Nature
Dissemination
Level
PU
R
Deliverable
Date
(month)
1.3.6 List of Milestones
Milestone
No
MS2.1
WP
No.
2
Milestone Name
L2LSummer School held
Exp.
Date
9, 18,
27
2
MS2.2
Launch of the Fellowship program
2
MS2.3
Statistics table of the Researchers’
exchanges in both schemes, FP and
REP
Pan-European contact database with
broad coverage
VCE Launch
2
6, 18,
30
2
9
2
24
MS2.4
MS2.5
Means of Verification
Minutes of meeting, charter
document
Launch information on
network website
Annual project reviews
Presented at first project
review
Documentation and
promotional material
Main Milestones
The following table lists a selection of ?? critical milestones, These will be used as “special markers”
to guide porject activities. These selected milestones are also included in the Gantt charts given in the
next few sections.
Milestone
No
D1.2
WP
No.
8
Milestone Name
A great demo of something
27
Exp.
Date
Means of Verification
X year project review
Online repository is enabled
Contribution to Dx.x
Call for fellowships etc.
… etc.
1.3.7 Work Package Description Tables and Gantt Charts
Workpackage 1: Management and Quality Assurance
Workpackage number
Workpackage title
Activity type
Participant number
Participant short name
Person-months per
participant:
1
Management
MGT
1
2
20
0
M1
Start date or starting event:
3
4
5
6
7
0
0
0
0
0
Objectives
The objectives of this work package are:




To carry out the entire administrative and financial coordination of the project.
To monitor and assess the technical work and progress across work packages and teams.
To ensure timely submission of all contractual deliverables.
To elaborate and enforce quality procedures and provide a reliable IPR framework.
Description of work
The management will handle all the administrative and financial tasks connected with the activities of the
consortium: management of human resources, periodic reports, contract amendments, preparation of financial
reports, financial supervision, funding redistribution, planning and monitoring of activities, and reporting.
The management structure of L2Lis constructed to optimally support the efficient and timely execution of the
project plan. This project will be headed by the Project Coordinator (PC), who will handle the day-to-day
scientific and administrative management of the network. The PC will head a Project office to ensure the
continuity and consistency of the administrative management.
Task 1.4 – Scientific Planning (M1-M36)
Task leader: DCU



Strategic planning of main scientific activities and dissemination events (e.g. workshops, etc)
Risk analysis and contingency plans
Raising public participation and awareness by organizing public lectures and participation to EC events.
Task 1.5 – Monitoring and coordination of S&T Activities (M1-M36)
Task leader: DCU
 Monitoring of the S&T work packages
 Supervision of integration between different S&T work packages
 Scientific quality assessment
Compilation of periodic scientific activity reports into annual reportProvide a global Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) frame for the whole participants to establish precise information on: the pre-existing know-how among the
28
partners, a list of knowledge generated by the partner, which results should be subject for protection.
Deliverables
D1.1 – Human resources allocation (M2, R)
This document will informs the other beneficiaries and the Commission of the persons who shall manage and
monitor the work of the project, and their contact details
D1.2 – Quality Assurance Plan (M4, R)
This plan defines: (i) Quality processes (e.g., deliverable preparation, review preparation and post-review followup, activity-specific processes, etc.), tools and metrics, (ii) Tracking of progresses.
D1.3a-c – Periodic management report (M12, M24, M36, R)
This report comprises an explanation of the use of the resources, and a financial statement (Form C), from each
beneficiary together with a summary financial report consolidating the claimed Community contribution of all
the beneficiaries.
29
Gantt chart for WP1
30
Workpackage 2: Integration of Organisations and People
Workpackage number
2
Start date or starting event:
Workpackage title: Integration of Organisations and People
Activity type: OTHER
1
2
3
4
5
Participant number
Participant short name
Person-months per
participant:
M1
6
7
Objectives
 To lay the foundations for the Virtual Centre of Excellence in the area of Lifebrary research
 To support the research synergy by a mobility programme
 To support talent boosting among junior researchers inside and outside the network partners
 To accumulate and interlink resources suitable for education
 To extend the impact of the network to countries other than those of the partners, in particular to the new
EU member states
Description of work
Activity 2.1 – Towards the Virtual Centre of Excellence (M1-M36)
This task will lay the fundamentals of a virtual centre of excellence in the area of semantic urban computing. It
will establish governing organisation, determine membership criteria, and develop a strategic plan for
sustainability.
Activity 2.2 – Researcher Mobility Program (M1-M36)
This activity will put in place mechanisms to support the mobility of junior as well as senior researchers.
Activity 2.3 – Cooperation in Education, teaching materials and PhD Formation (M1-M36)
This activity will collect teaching materials, establish collaboration at undergraduate levels, and faciulitate
opportunaties for senior researchers to give guest lectures at visiting L2Lpartners.
Activity 2.4 – Summer Schools (M1-M36)
This task will be coordinated by DERI and will involve organising and delivering one Summer School of 1 week
duration, each year.
Activity 2.5 – Pan-European Integration (M1-M36)
A pan-European contact database for the field of the project will be developed and exploited, and the state of
urban computing in new EU member states will specifically be analysed.
Deliverables :
31
D2.1 VCE Implementation Plan – (M3, R)
D2.2.a Definition of the Mobility program – procedures (M2, P)
D2.2.b Annual Reports on Researcher Mobility – (M12, M24, M36, R)
D2.3 QMUL Roadmap towards a VCE (M12, P)
D2.4 Annual reports on Coperation in Education, teaching materials and PhD formation (M12, M24, M36, R)
D2.5 Reports on Summer School activity held that year – (M12, M24, M36, R)
D2.6 Mid-term report on postgraduate course and teaching activities – (M18, R)
D2.7 Report on State of Urban Computing in New EU Member States – (M15, R)
D2.8 VCE Constitution and Strategic Planning (M18, P)
D2.9 Annual Report (M36, P)
Milestones :
MS2.1 L2LSummer School held (M9, M18, M27)
MS2.2: Launch of the Fellowship program (M2)
MS2.3: Statistics table of the Researchers’ exchanges in both schemes, FP and REP (M6, M18, M30)
MS2.4 Pan-European contact database with broad coverage – M9
MS2.5 VCE Launch (M24)
32
Gantt chart for WP2
33
34
Workpackage 4:
35
Workpackage 6: Infrastructure Integration and Sharing
Workpackage number
6
Start date or starting event:
Workpackage title: Infrastructure Integration & Sharing
Activity type: RTD
1
2
3
4
5
Participant number
UvA
Participant short name
0
13
13
19
12
Person-months per
participant:
M1
6
7
17
16
Objectives
The objectives of this Work package are to provide mechanism for integrating L2L research results within the
consortium and also outside the consortium.
Description of work
Task 6.1 – Virtual Laboratory (M7-M36)
Task 6.2 – Evaluation Methodology (M1-M12)
Activity Leader: GU
This activity focuses on developing a set of specification for data set formations (gold standard for
experimentations), procedure for experimentation and a set o measures for comparisons. This task will be
coordinated by GU and involves all other partners.
Task 6.3 – Data Set Creation and Ground Truth Generation (M1-M36)
Activity Leader: Lulea
It is important to have large collections of data sources for validating experimental results. In this task, we will
identify and collect such data sources and clean them up for experimentation and also develop ground truth data.
This will be a continuous activity since more and more types of data sources made available publicly as the time
and technology progresses.
Task 6.4 – Case Studies (M13-M36)
Trento
Task 6.5 - L2L Platforms (M7-M36)
Activity Leader: DCU
Deliverables
D6.1 – Report on the formation of the Virtual Laboratory detailing legal and ethical issues (M12, P)
D6.2 – Report on Evaluation Methodology (M12, P)
36
D6.3– First set of data sources for experimentation (M12, P)
D6.4
Milestones
MS6.1 Implementation of Virtual Laboratory (M18)
MS6.2 First implementation of the demonstrators (M12)
Gantt chart for WP6
37
Workpackage 7: Outreach and Spreading Excellence
Workpackage number
7
M1
Start date or starting event:
Workpackage title: Outreach and Spreading Excellence
Activity type OTHER
Participant number
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
21
12
12
13
13
9
Participant short name
Person-months per participant: 5
Objectives
 To disseminate the activities and achievements of the L2L network to a wide and diverse range of
interested parties in a timely and efficient manner, from fellow researchers to ordinary citizens of the
EU;
 To enhance the research experience and expertise of researchers working in the area ….., from both
within the network partners as well as from partners outside the core group;


To contribute to the development of standards in this emerging and important area;
To study the societal impacts of new applications and services based on sensor data;
Description of work
A7.1- Web portal & Promotional materials (M1-M6)
This activity will be coordinated by ??? with assistance from all partners and will involve preparation and
dissemination of many kindsof electronic and print media. The activity will reach out to 6 of the 7 relevant
stakeholder categories identified in L2L.
A7.2 – Joint Publications (M1-M36)
Activity Leader: ??
The activity on joint publications is coordinated by ??? but will involve all partners in the network. Of particular
importance will be the coordination and production of publications which span across multiple partner sites.
Several publication initiatives including special sessions at conferences and workshops and special issues of
targetted journals, will be undertaken.
A7.3 – Standards and Technology Transfer (M1-M36)
Activity Leader:
The activity on standards and technology transfer will involve L2L taking a proactive role in the development of
standards, such as W3C standards, applicable in the sensor data domain. Led by ???, the activity will also
involve helping to set the agenda for future research in this area through strategic seminars and raising awareness
of IP issues relative to sensor data.
38
A7.4 – Societal Impacts (M13-M36)
Activity Leader: DCU
DCU will lead the investigation into the impacts that new applications built upon the L2L platform will have.
This will include assessment of the trust and belief that people – both specialist users and ordinary EU citizens –
have in the aggregated sensor content. This will involve inputs from researchers (1), data providers (2), users in
niche application areas (3) and ordinary EU citizens (7)
A7.5 – L2L Platform Challenge (M13-M36)
Activity Leader:
In the final year of the network, L2Lwill run an end-of-project challenge in the area of
Deliverables :
D7.1 Outreach and Spreading Excellence Evaluation Plan - Action plan for the first year of work package – (M3,
P)
D7.2 Outreach and Spreading Excellence Evaluation Plan (year 2) - Action plan for the second year of work
package – (M12, P)
D7.3 Societal Impact - preliminary report of the assessment of societal impact of L2L– (M18, P)
D7.4 Outreach and Spreading Excellence Evaluation Plan (year 3) - Action plan for the third year of the work
package – (M24, P)
D7.5 Final Societal Impact Report - final report of the assessment of societal impact of L2L– (M36, P)
D7.6 Report on A7.5, L2LPlatform Challenge – (M36, P)
D7.7 Report on Joint Publications – (M24, M36, P)
D7.8 Report on Standardisation Activities – (M18, M36, P)
Milestones :
MS7.1 Web portal and promotional materials in place – M6
MS7.2 10 joint publications spanning more two or more partners submitted or published – M18
MS7.3 Special seminar/workshop on the sensor web – M24
MS7.4 Standardization within the W3C Working Group on Semantic Sensor Network – M24
MS7.5 L2LPlatform Challenge completed – M33
39
Gantt chart for WP7
40
Joint Program of L2LNetwork Activities – Pert Diagram
1.3.8 Summary of Effort
Particip. Short
No.
Name
WP1
(A &
B)
WP2
WP3
WP4
WP5
WP6
WP7
Total
Person
Months
1
20
5
0
0
0
0
5
30
2
10
10
1
1
0
13
21
56
3
0
1
1
0
1
0
3
42
4
0
8
0
1
2
19
12
42
5
0
14
1
2
0
12
13
42
6
0
22
0
0
3
17
13
55
7
0
14
3
0
0
16
9
42
30
87
6
5
6
90
85
309
Total
The above table presents the requested Commission funding only.
41
2. IMPLEMENTATION
2.1 MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE AND PROCEDURES
2.1.1 Network management organisation
2.1.1.1 Scientific Coordinator
2.1.1.2 Project Coordinator
2.1.1.3 Management Board
Management Board Composition
Role
Name
Institution
Project coordinator
Prof. Alan Smeaton
DCU
WP2 Leader
Prof. Joemon Jose
GU
WP3 Leader
WP4 Leader
WP5 Leader
WP6 Leader
42
WP7 Leader
.
2.1.1.4 Members General Assembly
The Members General Assembly (MGA) is chaired by the Project Coordinator. The MGA will exist
through a general mailing list and an annual plenary meeting, with telephone conferences convened as
relevant issues arise. The annual plenary meeting will be the opportunity to gather all consortium
players, to promote cooperation and integration, provide the Management Board with a broad
audience to present the main network orientations, and give the different network bodies the
opportunity to meet.
The MGA will support one plenary meeting per year, to which all L2Lparticipants are invited, and
possibly also external guests.
2.1.1.5 Work package Leaders
Work package Leaders will ensure the monitoring and coordination of all the activities ongoing in
their work package. They are responsible to the Management Board.
The work package Leaders will organize work package meetings as required, using extensively
dedicated tools ranging from mailing lists to audio-conferencing services.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of the L2Lnetwork, establishing communication across work
packages will be essential. Audio-conferencing services on-demand will be made available and use of
cooperative workspaces and internet-based tools strongly encouraged.
To ensure that contributors to work packages work and cooperate in an integrated manner, all
deliverables produced by a given work package will be reviewed by at least two other work packages,
under the responsibility of the WP leaders and of the Scientific coordinator. The objective is to link all
WP activities closely in order to maintain constant communication across activities, so as to ensure the
early identification of problems such as interoperability issues or delays.
2.1.1.6 International Advisory Board
The International Advisory Board (IAB) is a panel of external industrial experts and academic
researchers who have a strong track record in fields related to L2L. Their role will be to advise on
network strategy and complex technical decisions. The IAB will be comprised of:
These are all senior researchers with extensive experience and leadership track records and we are
delighted that all have agreed to join the L2LInternational Advisory Board. Their letters of support
can be seen in Annex 2. The IAB members will be requested to sign a confidentiality agreement in
order to be registered on the project document repository for limited access to network reports and
43
deliverables. These external industrial and academic research experts will meet at least once per year
with the Project Management Board at a dedicated annual meeting.
2.1.1.7 Data Providers Group
2.1.1.8 User group
2.1.2 Management Activities
In order for the management to be efficient in coordinating the L2Lnetwork, several underlying
activities will have to be carried out during the entire network duration. Ranging from “Quality
Control” or “Reporting” to “Technology Watch” and “Risk Assessment”, the scope of managerial
activities is described in the following sections.
Quality Control
Quality Control will be part of the Quality Assurance System within the Project Management
Guidelines which will be developed for the implementation of the network. Processes and procedures
within the Quality Assurance System will have to prove compliance with the general principals of
standards, law and certifications.
More specifically the Quality System will be part of the Quality Assurance Plan which will be a
deliverable of the network (D1.2). This document will be used internally by the consortium to describe
the guidelines adopted by the network on documentation of network activities, periodic reporting,
preparation of financial statements, approval and submission of deliverables, and risk management.
The development of the Quality System, in order to facilitate the implementation of the quality
management, will include the following phases:

Identification of the procedures needed

Planning, design and development of the procedures and the forms to be implemented

Development of an implementation guide for all the partners
Management Reporting
The Project Office (PO) will set up standard management reporting templates for the management of
the programme. All work packages will agree Network Milestones with the PO. Each milestone
should provide assurance on timely achievement of a major work package deliverable.
All work packages will provide the PO with an updated one page report on a monthly basis. The report
will cover:


Activities during the reporting period
Major achievement of milestones against plan
44



Project and work package meetings
Deviations from plan, risks and issues affecting timely delivery, cost or quality
Next steps and foreseen actions
In addition, network monitoring will be completed with a six-monthly report, validating the major
progress of the network against the contractual milestones and presenting the resources utilised versus
the resources budgeted in terms of person-months for every team across the different work packages.
The Project Office will consolidate these reports and produce a consolidated report, which will be
submitted to the Management Board for validation and reviewed in detail with the Project Coordinator.
Finally, completion of work package activities and submission of deliverables after a careful internal
assessment will be ultimately validated by the Scientific Coordinator and the Project Coordinator.
Management Tools
A project management reporting tool will be used by the PC to produce standard reports. A web-server
will be set up (as part of the network’s web portal) with private access for consortium members,
offering online reporting and monitoring, a project library containing all current documents relating to
the network, a news board and a management information exchange. This web-based tool will
simplify the collection of information across different teams and work packages.
In addition, a collaborative working platform (e.g. BSCW) will also be used to support efficient
collaboration between the partners. The ERCIM BSCW licence will be of benefit to all partners and
will act as an internal document repository, not only for the exchange of documents in progress, but
also for storing final and validated reports or deliverables.
Information Flow
A key success factor in project management is to ensure that information circulates rapidly and
efficiently to all of the network’s actors and stakeholders.
To this end, the management will rely on a wide array of communication support tools. First,
dedicated mailing lists will be created and archived (one for each work package, for the entire network
and one for every managerial body of the network). In addition, the network will rely extensively on
free audio-conferencing for addressing technical or managerial issues. The use of voice over IP tools
will also be encouraged. Periodic technical and management meetings will also be organised to
support exchanges and discussions within the network. If necessary, collaborative workspace licences
can be acquired to further support collaboration among research teams. Ultimately, all efforts will be
made by the management to support fluid information flow and to avoid information bottlenecks.
Consortium Agreement
Before the network starts, the consortium members will sign a formal Consortium Agreement in which
roles, responsibilities and mutual obligations will be defined. These will include the sensitive
questions of intellectual property rights (IPR), and the structure and organization of the network. It
will adopt the recommended guidelines laid down by the Commission and will include:

Specific arrangements concerning intellectual property rights to be applied among the
participants and their affiliates, in compliance with the general arrangements stipulated in the
contract.
45

Management of knowledge generated by the network, and rules for knowledge transfer.

Internal organization of the consortium, its governance structure, decision-making processes,
reporting mechanisms, controls, penalties and management arrangements.

Arrangements for the distribution of the community contribution among participants and
among activities.

Rules for partners joining and leaving the consortium.

Provisions for the settlement of disputes within the partnership.
In addition, the Consortium Agreement will define rules to distribute knowledge in proportion to the
effort leading to the generation of such knowledge. In case of debate, the Management Board will
have the final say, and any conflicts will be resolved using specific voting mechanisms defined in the
Consortium Agreement.
The owner of knowledge must provide adequate and effective protection for knowledge that is capable
of industrial or commercial application. The consortium participants may publish information on
knowledge arising from the network provided this does not affect the protection of that knowledge. So
before any knowledge dissemination takes place, the matter must be agreed with the Management
Board.
Participants will also be able to use knowledge which they own arising from the network, in
accordance with the provisions agreed amongst them in the Consortium Agreement. When using
knowledge, the consortium partners will make every effort to ensure confidentiality and the need to
safeguard the interest of the consortium partners, especially their intellectual property rights.
Finally the Consortium Agreement will document in detail the treatment of intellectual property rights,
including:








Protection of knowledge
Access rights for use in the network
Access rights for using knowledge in subsequent research activities
Access rights for sub-contractors
Access rights for parties joining or leaving the network
Access rights for third parties
Specific provisions for access rights to software
Royalties resulting from substantial commercial benefits
Conflict Resolution and Relationship Breakdown
The consortium decision-making process is aimed at building consensus throughout the network with
the activities of one partner not having adverse effects on the activities of another partner.
In the event that disputes or differences arise that cannot be resolved the following process shall be
followed:
Disputes within a work package that cannot be resolved internally by the work package leader should
be referred to the Project Coordinator who will attempt to reconcile differences.
If this does not resolve the dispute, the Project Coordinator will table the issue for discussion at the
earliest opportunity with the Management Board.
46
In case the dispute remains after discussion with the Management Board, the conflict will be presented
to the Member General Assembly.
The final settlement of outstanding disputes will be managed through arbitration in Brussels under the
rules of arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce by an arbitration panel appointed under
those rules. The award of the arbitration panel will be final and binding upon the partners concerned.
Where the dispute concerns intellectual property, the dispute can be elevated to the Management
Board that can request the assistance of the European Commission IPR helpdesk or require the
creation of an IPR External Advisory Panel to provide counsel and advice. The decisions of an IPR
Strategic Task Force in such matters are binding for all partners.
47
2.2 INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPANTS
Dublin City University (DCU)
CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies at Dublin City University
(DCU) is an Irish national research centre that focuses on the intersection between
two important areas, Adaptive Sensing and Information Discovery. It is funded by
Science Foundation Ireland and by directly by industry partners including IBM,
Vodafone, Amdocs, Episensor, and others. CLARITY develops innovative new
technologies towards improving the quality of life of people in areas such as
personal health, digital media and management of our environment. CLARITY is a
partnership between University College Dublin and Dublin City University,
supported by research at the Tyndall National Institute (TNI) Cork. The overarching theme of
CLARITY's research programme – bringing information to life – refers to the harvesting and
harnessing of large volumes of sensed information, from both the physical world in which we live, and
the digital world of modern communications & computing. CLARITY brings the expertise of more
than 80 researchers plus a management and administration team in areas as diverse as new sensor
technologies, wireless networking, multi-modal imaging and analysis, content analysis and access,
distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. The group has taken part in previous and
current EU projects including the FP7 network 3DLife, the FP6 Integrated Project aceMedia and FP7
NoE K-Space as well as further projects going back several years.
Alan Smeaton is Professor of Computing in DCU and Deputy Director of CLARITY. He is a
founding coordinator of TRECVid which, since 2001, has been an annual world-wide initiative to
benchmark the effectiveness of information retrieval from digital video libraries coordinated by NIST
and funded by the US Dept. of Commerce. His early work focussed on text-based
information retrieval then moved to information retrieval of images and then video
information. He has graduated more than 25 PhD and M.Sc. research students and
currently leads a team of 16 researchers at postdoctoral and PhD levels. He is a
member of the editorial boards of 5 journals and has published almost 300
refereed papers/book chapters/proceedings. He has been program chair or co-chair
for nearly 10 international conferences and is on the program committees of between 10 and 20
conferences each year. He has 6 patents and has won significant grant income from national and
international funding agencies, and from industry.
Prof. Noel E. O’Connor is an Associate Professor in DCU and a Principal Investigator (PI) in
CLARITY, with responsibility for the research strand on Contextual Content Analysis.
His research is focused on multi-modal analysis for knowledge extraction from a
variety of sensor data sources. His research is funded under Science Foundation
Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, EU framework projects and industry contracts. Since
July 2000, he has generated over €7.9M in funding, edited 3 books of proceedings and
published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences. He is a
reviewer for Signal Processing: Image Communication, IEEE Trans. on Circuits
Systems and Video Technology, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition and Computer
Vision and Image Understanding.
In 2008, Bert Gordijn was appointed to the Chair of Ethics at DCU where he now leads DCU’s
Ethics Institute. Previously, Dr Gordijn held the post of Lecturer and Clinical
Ethicist within the Department of Ethics, Philosophy & History of Medicine at the
Radboud University, Nijmegen (Netherlands). He has been appointed to the
48
Scientific Advisory Board of the European Patent Office, the External Science Advisory Panel of the
European Chemical Industry Council, and the UNESCO expert committee on ethics and
nanotechnology. He holds a number of editorial positions in key international ethics publications
including Editor-in-Chief of the International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, published by
Springer.
Prof. Barry Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science in University
College Dublin and is a visiting Professor at Dublin City University. He is the
Director of CLARITY, an ECCAI Fellow and a co-founder, director, and Chief
Scientist of ChangingWorlds Ltd., recently acquired by Amdocs. His research covers a
broad set of topics within Artificial Intelligence including Case-Based Reasoning,
Machine Learning, User Modeling and Planning with particular focus on
Personalization techniques, which look at ways of combining ideas from these areas to develop
information systems that automatically learn about, and adapt to, the needs of individual users. He has
published over 300 refereed articles and has several best paper awards.
Apart from providing scientific leadership of the network, DCU’s will coordinate work package 7,
Outreach and Spreading Excellence, which will involve all partners. Most of DCU’s efforts are based
in work package 3 where they lead the activity on Traffic/Crowd Monitoring from Real Time
Multimedia Sources (A3.3) and DCU’s expertise in video and image processing from the Centre for
Digital Video Processing gives a strong background and skillset which can be leveraged. DCU
already has ongoing funded projects as part of CLARITY in the area of real time video processing
from sports footage and this will provide useful for this work package. DCU is also heavily involved
in work package 6 on Infrastructure Integration and Sharing, where they lead tasks on Data Sets and
Ground Truth Generation (A6.3) and on Case Studies (A6.4). The background in formal, worldwide
benchmarking activities (TREC and TRECVid) as well as the direct contact with user groups and data
providers in Dublin, makes DCU a natural choice for involvement in these activities. Finally, DCU
also leads the activity on Societal Impacts in A7.4 where the Institute of Ethics in DCU will have a
strong presence in ensuring rigorous and thorough examination of the impact of L2Lwork on the
general public in terms of privacy, identity, trust and accessibility.
49
University of Glasgow (GU)
The University of Glasgow (GU, UK,) dates from 1451. Modelled on the
University of Bologna, Glasgow was, and has remained, a University in the
European tradition and is the fourth oldest university in the Englishspeaking world. University of Glasgow is one of the top 100 universities in
the world with an international reputation for its research and teaching. Glasgow is a member of the
prestigious Russell Group of 20 leading UK research universities, is a founder member of Universitas
21, an international grouping of universities dedicated to setting worldwide standards for higher
education and is a member of IRUN (International Research Universities Network).
The Department of Computing Science (DCS) has 32 full-time academic staff and in the recent
research assessment exercise, 80% of DCS researchers are categorized as internationally leading. The
Information Retrieval Group is one of its 7 research laboratories and has six senior academics, led by
Professor Keith van Rijsbergen, six post-doctoral research fellows and fifteen PhD students. The
group has a long and substantial research history in a wide area of information retrieval research from
theoretical modeling of the retrieval process to large-scale text retrieval systems building and to the
interactive evaluation of multimedia and multimodal information retrieval systems.
Joemon M. Jose is a Professor at the DCS. He is a fellow of the BCS, IET and a
chartered information technology professional (CITP), member of the ACM and IEEE.
He has a well-established reputation in research on multimedia information retrieval,
developing advanced retrieval models, studying the role of emotion in search,
personalization and adaptive retrieval. He has published over 110 journal and
conference articles and leads a team of 6 PhD students and 3 post-doctoral researchers.
He recently completed 3 major EU funded projects on multimedia retrieval and multimodal interaction (SALERO, MIAUCE, SEMEDIA). He was also involved in the K-SPACE and IPRACINE projects. He was the recipient of a short-term research fellowship (STRF 2003) from BT
Exact Laboratories on adaptive retrieval. He is a co-chair of the ECDL 2010 conference, and had
organised numerous conferences and events including AIR 2008, SSMS 2007, AIR 2006, AMR 2005,
IRiX 2005 & IRFEST 2005. He was a guest editor for the Information Processing and Management on
Adaptive Retrieval and a Key note speaker for the RIAO 2010 conference.
C. J. (Keith) van Rijsbergen is an Emeritus Professor at the DCS and his research in
Information Retrieval covers both theoretical and experimental aspects. He has written
two books on information retrieval and is co-author of "Information Retrieval:
Uncertainty and Logics". His research interests are in the mathematical foundations of
information retrieval and currently develop an IR model based on quantum theory. He
is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the
IET, the BCS and the ACM. He is the chair of the RAE assessment panel for computing science and
of the Information Retrieval Faculty advisory board. van Rijsbergen was the recipient of the Tony
Strix Award in 2004 and the Gerald Salton Award in 2006.
50
Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL)
Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) is one of the UK's
leading research-focused higher education institutions. Amongst
the largest of the colleges of the University of London, QMUL's
3,000 staff delivers world class research across a wide range of
subjects in Science and Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry and
Humanities. QMUL is ranked in the top 11th leading research
Universities in the UK according to the 2008 Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE) and fourth amongst University of London multifaculty colleges. With a budget of £260 million per annum and a
yearly economic impact on the UK economy of some £600 million,
Queen Mary is a research-focused university, which has made a
strategic commitment to the highest quality of research.
QMUL hosts one of the UK leading research groups in digital
media processing, computer vision and digital libraries: The Multimedia and Vision group (MMV)
enjoys a distinguished reputation for innovation, receiving direct funding from overseas organisations
such as Nokia, Philips, Nortel, the Department of Defence and the EU. The MMV group has 39
members, including four members of academic staff. The group has participated and coordinated
many EU funded projects including RACE MAVT; ACTS MOMUSYS, PANORAMA and Custom
TV; Esprit UNITE; Basic research DRUMS; IST SAMBITS, IMPACT, MARINER, SHUFFLE,
CRUMPET, EDEN, SADEGUARD, SCHEMA and several others. It coordinated the STREP
BUSMAN, the FP6 NoE K-Space and the COST292 Action. It was the initiator, main contributors and
steering member of FP6 IP Projects aceMedia and MESH, it coordinated the STREP EASAIER and
was core member of the STREP RUSHES. In FP7 ICT, the group a partner in Papyrus, APIDIS. It
also initiated and is one of the four core partner of NoE PetaMedia. In the last 3 years only, the group
has published over 100 journal papers, several of them in the IEE and IEEE Transactions in the field,
over 300 refereed conference papers and secured over £4 Million grants funding from various sources.
Prof. Ebroul Izquierdo holds the Chair of Multimedia and Vision and is head of
the MMV group. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow member of The Institution
of Engineering and Technology (IET), chairman of the Visual Information
Engineering professional network of the IET, a senior member of the IEEE, and a
member of the British Machine Vision Association. He is an associate editor of the
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and has been
guest editor of numerous other journals. Prof. Izquierdo has a substantial trackrecord in participation and coordination of European cooperative projects. His
involvement in EU projects gets back to the early nineties when he participated in the PANORAMA
project (1993-1996). He has participated in over 15 other EU projects including 3 IPs, over 10
STREPS, 4 NoEs, 2 CAs and 3 COST actions. He coordinated the STREP BUSMAN (8 partners) the
European research network Cost292 involving 38 institutions world-wide and the network of
excellence on semantic inference for automatic annotation and retrieval of multimedia content, KSpace involving 14 European key research institutions and industrial players. He initiated and was
main contributor of the large IPs aceMedia (14 partners) and MESH (12 partners). He is also a
member of the steering committee of the Networked Electronic Media platform NEM and the Future
Internet Task Force. Prof. Izquierdo has published over 300 technical papers and chapters inbooks.
Dr. Dr. Alan Pearmain is a senior lecturer in the Department. He joined the
department in 1979 after previously working at University College, Dublin and
Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. He has worked in several RACE
and ACTS projects (RACE R-1083: PARASOL, RACE R-2083: MAVT Mobile Audio Vis-ual Terminal, ACTS AC-098 MoMuSys - Mobile Audio-
51
Video Systems) and on RACE AC-360 CustomTV. He was workgroup leader for the hardware
development workgroup in MoMuSys and is currently working in the IST project SAMBITS. He has
published many papers and sections of books. Recent publications have been on Multimedia systems
and VLSI design tools. He has BSc (Eng) and PhD degrees from Southampton University, England.
52
2.3 CONSORTIUM AS A WHOLE
2.3.1 Synergies and track-record on successful cooperation
.
2.3.2 Sub-contracting, New Contractors and Other Countries
Sub-contracting is not planned in this network. It is not planned to add any new contractors during the
course of this Network of Excellence. However a main goal of L2L is to achieve Pan-European
integration, thus researchers from new affiliated partners will be included in the NoE activities, though
funded through the founding partners. None of the L2L contractors are from non-EU countries.
2.4 RESOURCES TO BE COMMITTED
2.4.1 Mobilization of Critical Mass of Human Resources
53
Should include the following table …
54
2.4.2 Partner Contributions
.
Dublin City University
Glasgow University
The department of Computing Science (DCS), Glasgow University brings in expertise through their
information retrieval group and the Inference group. Both these groups together consists of over 50
researchers with a number of fundings from industry, UK funding bodies and EU IST programmes.
Both these grups have large computational facilities and also the University provides a number of
GRID computing facilities. Recently, GLA have purchased 52 quad core Optron computational
servers for research purposes. In addition, GLA have a back-up server with 16TB of storage.
Specifically, GLA will bring in the following funded projects through their IR and Inference research
groups: Foundations research in information retrieval inspired by quantum theory (EPSRC,UK);
Towards context-sensitive information retrieval based on quantum theory: with applications to crossmedia search and structured document access (EPSRC, UK); Puppy-IR (EU-IST); Cross Disciplinary
Account - Computational Statistics and Cognitive Neuroscience (EPSRC, UK); mathematical &
Statistical Modelling of Cytokine Receptor Cross-Regulation by Cyclic Amp (BHF, UK), LSLR:
Large Scale Logical Retrieval (Matrixware, Austria).
Queen Mary, University of London
The QMUL MMV group has fully access to a computational cluster consisting of 200 dual core
(>2GHz) nodes with 4GB RAM. As the WP3 “real-time large-scale data analysis” leader, it is
anticipated that this equipment would be used in L2L to run machine learning process.
The MMV enjoys a distinguished reputation for innovation, receiving direct funding from overseas
organisations such as Nokia, Philips, Nortel, the Department of Defence and the EU. The group is
funded to develop event detection, scalable coding and streaming of multimedia, web mining and
information extraction, and multimedia information retrieval. The expertise and developed technique
will be integrated in the L2L activities. The MMV group has 36 members, including four members of
academic staff. The group has participated and coordinated many EU funded projects including RACE
MAVT; ACTS MOMUSYS, PANORAMA and Custom TV; Esprit UNITE; Basic research DRUMS;
IST SAMBITS, IMPACT, MARINER, SHUFFLE, CRUMPET, EDEN, SADEGUARD, SCHEMA,
BUSMAN and several others. It coordinated the IST NoE K-Space and the COST292 Action. It was
one of the main contributors and steering member of FP6 IST Integrated Projects aceMedia and
MESH, Co-ordinator of the STReP EASAIER and a partner in RUSHES. In FP7 ICT, the group is a
partner in Papyrus and APIDIS, and a core partner of the NoE PetaMedia.
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2.4.3 EC Funding Management
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SECTION 3. IMPACT
3.1
EXPECTED IMPACT AS LISTED IN THE WORK
PROGRAMME

Better leveraging of human skills, improved quality and quantity of output and reduced
time and cost allowing users to concentrate on more creative and innovative activities.



Increased EU competitiveness in the global knowledge economy by fostering standardsbased integration and exploitation of information resources and services across
domains and organisational boundaries.

3.2 SPREADING EXCELLENCE, EXPLOITING RESULTS,
DISSEMINATING KNOWLEDGE
3.2.1 Talent Boosting
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3.2.2 Dissemination Activities
3.2.3 Exploitation by L2L Partners
Dublin City University
Glasgow University
Like the other partners, Glasgow University also has a dedicated department for research and
commercialisation (Research & Enterprise) which facilitates exploitation in multiple ways. First of all,
all research activities will be used to strengthen the University research portfolio and subsequently
exploited for teaching and research training (PhD, Masters degrees). Secondly, the Universities
commercial arm, the research and enterprise division, is always in look out for commercial
exploitation and support University researchers in technology transfer and spin-off formation. There is
also dedicated funding in Scotland for exploring spin-offs from University research (e.g., Proof of
concept funding from Scottish Executive). Finally, the research groups involved has a number of
industry connections (for e.g., SHARP, Kodak, BT, Microsoft etc.) which will be exploited for
technology transfer.
Queen Mary University of London
Queen Mary University of London, is an independent, non-profit research and development institution.
It conducts contract research and development projects in the areas of multimedia processing,
information and communication technology. The costumers are a broad range of industrial,
commercial and public service organizations in the national as well as the international market.
QMUL will exploit the results and knowledge from this project by generating research papers to
reinforce its standing a major research-led university and to maintain its position in the competitive
UK Research Assessment Exercise. The work will extend the ability of the College to generate new
research funding from other sources, such as UK Government and industry. Income to the College
from HEFCE (the QR component) depends specifically on its research standing. QMUL has a wellestablished exploitation office. This has already led to a number of initiatives including the formation
of a spin-off company based on the work of a recent EU-funded projects (IMPACT, BUSMAN,
aceMedia, Mesh, and K-space) within the Department of Electronic Engineering. QMUL will also
exploit the results from the IP in its consultancy activities. QMUL will use its experience form L2L to
support co-operation with local industries and develop experts for companies interested in using the
technology developed. QMUL will also use its longstanding working relation with the BBC,
Multimedia and Telecommunications industry to exploit the obtained results.
Being part of an academic institution, The MMV and the C4DM groups at QMUL are also keen to
advance their reputation by publishing their research work and undertaking consultancy. The
knowledge gained from the L2L project will ensure that the content of QMUL's final year degree
courses and its postgraduate courses is kept abreast of current and forthcoming developments in the
Multimedia area. In particular, the Department has set up new courses in Interactive Media Design and
in Multimedia Systems Technology. These two courses are well-placed to disseminate among MSc
students cutting-edge technological results of L2L. The initiative shown by QMUL with respect to
these new courses has led to it receiving a special commendation from the UK Higher Education
Funding Council. QMUL frequently organises and contributes to major international conferences,
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research journals and publishes books on Multimedia. These activities will be also used to disseminate
the results of the project.
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SECTION 4. ETHICAL ISSUES
ETHICAL ISSUES TABLE
YES
Informed consent
Does the proposal involve children?
Does the proposal involve patients or persons notable to give consent?
Does the proposal involve adult healthy volunteers?
Does the proposal involve Human Genetic Material?
Does the proposal involve Human biological samples?
Does the proposal involve Human data collection?
Research on Human embryo/foetus
Does the proposal involve Human Embryos?
Does the proposal involve Human Foetal Tissue / Cells?
Does the proposal involve Human Embryonic Stem Cells?
Privacy
Does the proposal involve processing of genetic information or personal data (eg.
health, sexual lifestyle, ethnicity, political opinion, religious or philosophical
conviction)
Does the proposal involve tracking the location or observation of people?
Research on Animals
Does the proposal involve research on animals?
Are those animals transgenic small laboratory animals?
Are those animals transgenic farm animals?
Are those animals cloned farm animals?
Are those animals non-human primates?
Research Involving Developing Countries
Use of local resources (genetic, animal, plant etc)
Benefit to local community (capacity building i.e. access to healthcare, education
etc)
Dual Use
Research having direct military application
Research having the potential for terrorist abuse
ICT Implants
Does the proposal involve clinical trials of ICT implants?
I CONFIRM THAT NONE OF THE ABOVE ISSUES APPLY TO MY
PROPOSAL
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Page
ANNEX 1: LETTERS OF COMMITMENT
EXECUTIVES OF THE 7 PARTNERS
61
FROM
ANNEX
2 : LETTERS
COMMITMENT
FROM
ADVISORY BOARD
OF
THE
62
SUPPORT
AND
INTERNATIONAL
ANNEX
3:
LETTERS
OF
SUPPORT
COMMITMENT FROM DATA PROVIDERS
63
AND
ANNEX
4:
LETTERS
OF
SUPPORT
COMMITMENT FROM USERS GROUP
AND
ANNEX 5: SAMPLE INFORMATION SOURCES FOR
L2L PLATFORM (DUBLIN)
64