Multimedia Semantics: Opportunities for Knowledge Transfer and Innovation in Industry

at the Innovation through Knowledge Transfer 2014 event, London (UK), April 4 2014.

InnovationKT 2014 is an international conference focussing on innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer between research organisations and businesses.

The MediaMixer innovation day will offer insights into the current state of innovation in semantic multimedia, stimulate discussion to assess the outlook and possibilities for knowledge transfer by considering the broader industry context, and provide an opportunity to network with experts from academia and industry.

Involving speakers and contributors from (among others):

• Sue Malden (FOCAL Chair) and Hubert Best (Legal Advisor to FOCAL)
• Getty Images
• Pearson
• Sound and Vision

WHAT THE INNOVATION DAY OFFERS

The morning sessions will:

• Present an overview of semantic multimedia, from the perspective of MediaMixer’s technology partners and R&D expertise, with a summary of opportunities and outlook through MediaMixer’s knowledge and technology transfer offer, from MediaMixer’s Project Coordinator Lyndon Nixon (MODUL University).
• Feature an early technology adopters panel of short talks by early adopters of multimedia semantics within a variety of perspectives: digital media copyright (Universidad de Lleida), semantic publishing (Ontoba), broadcast news (Condat), and scalable media asset annotation for content owners (Tagasauris) – moderated by Lyndon Nixon
• Features an addressing challenges, possibilities and outlook panel, set within the wider content industry context, from publishing (Pearson), content (Getty Images), copyright (Hubert Best, FOCAL) and media archives (Netherlands Sound and Vision) – panel discussion moderated by Sue Malden (FOCAL)

The workshop also welcomes lightning talks and contributions from all attendees in the afternoon sessions.

Contributions will be summarised in the InKT proceedings

Live note taking will take place at http://titanpad.com/mediamixer

Participants are encouraged to tweet questions and comments @project_mmixer

ABOUT MEDIAMIXER

MediaMixer is a European FP7-funded Consortium that brings together a group of leading organisations innovating in multimedia technologies.

MediaMixer is founded on the premise that a combination of innovations in media analysis, annotation, rights and management that uses multimedia web standards will ultimately enable a globally-connected media ecosystem to benefit producers and consumers of digital media, bringing new opportunities to discover, enrich and re-use online media in new contexts, enabling new business models, bringing greater value to content along new value chains.

ABOUT MEDIAMIXER INNOVATION AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

MediaMixer maintains a goal is to help organisations understand the technical challenges in adoption of semantic multimedia using web standards, and address and incorporate emergent innovations in multimedia solution.

To fully leverage the opportunities of an abundance of media content available on the web, yet address the challenge of media scales, complexity and disruptions in the classical media value chains, organisations will increasingly be required to adapt to complex media lifecycles in their systems and workflows.

MediaMixer experts will be present at the event to guide discussions and are available for networking after the presentation sessions.

SCHEDULE

• Registration is available from 8:15am, coffee at 10:30am
• 11:00 -11:20 Session 1: MediaMixer – why we do need innovative multimedia solutions?
  Speaker: Lyndon Nixon (MODUL University Vienna GmbH)
  Summary: The media ecosystem that companies operate within is changing rapidly thanks to the greater ease of creating and publishing media assets, the growing scale and complexity of enterprise media, and the disruptions in the media value chain caused by media sharing and remixing. We will present current trends in online media, the future media ecosystem that companies need to prepare for, and why this means new solutions are needed for media technologies.

  Lyndon Nixon opened the Innovation Day with a short presentation on what is this “MediaMixer” all about anyway? He looked at the trends towards digitalisation of media and it moving online, and the new challenges arising for any media organisation with regard to storage and maintenance of their digital media such that future retrieval and re-use is facilitated. The MediaMixer core technologies are a set of tools, services and specifications that will support future re-use of media through richer analysis, annotation, fragmentation and copyright management of online media content.

  Click here to watch the recorded talk “MediaMixer – why we do need innovative multimedia solutions?” by Lyndon Nixon

• 11:20 – 12:10 Session 2: Early multimedia technology adopters panel
  Moderator: Lyndon Nixon (MODUL University Vienna GmbH)
  Speakers: Julian Everett (Ontoba), Rolf Fricke (CONDAT), Roberto Garcia (U de Lleida)
  Summary: A panel of experts will introduce and discuss their experiences in adopting emerging semantic media technologies or commitment to strategies, defining media stakeholders addressed and highlighting the expected benefits of the approach.  Views are drawn from a variety of perspectives: digital copyright (Universidad de Lleida), archival from the institutional sector, semantic publishing (Ontoba), news broadcast (Condat), and semantically connected media (Tagasauris).

  The first panel of the Innovation Day was made up of representatives of early adopters of MediaMixer technologies, who reflected on industry uptake of the analysis, annotation and copyright management of media assets. Moderator Lyndon Nixon asked if companies are coming to them, aware of the innovative solutions they provide. Technology transfer is still difficult, but Roberto reflected on starting small to show benefits when the companies already wanted something much bigger! Julien noted that there is some awareness of ‘semantics’ but progress is only made by integrating with development teams and ‘learning by doing’. Rolf added that in the broadcast industry the awareness is more on the business side: that opportunities are being lost with valuable content ‘sleeping’ in their archives. When they hear there is a solution to monetarize this content, they are interested – regardless of the technology.	Click here to watch the recorded panel “Early multimedia technology adopters panel” with Julian Everett, Rolf Fricke, Roberto Garcia and Lyndon Nixon
  Rolf Fricke spoke about technology transfer with TV broadcasters. They have learnt it is increasingly difficult to re-sell whole media assets later, when the content itself is no longer recent, but in cases of news and sport for example, customers in later time are interested in accessing specific parts, e.g. for specific persons or events.The Semantic Newsroom product developed by CONDAT shows how the MediaMixer technology allows newsrooms eased access to relevant video fragments for supplementing their news programming.	Click here to watch the recorded panel “Implementation of Media Fragment Retrieval for TV Archives & Lessons Learned” by Rolf Fricke
  Julien Everett spoke about knowledge and technology transfer towards media publishers, having for example worked with the BBC on a number of projects.He notes that online publishing is traditionally closed, and the frustration internally is largest with the product development people who have a new idea, the issue being this is tightly coupled with software development projects that raise new technology requirements.Between the groups within companies, data interoperability is still a barrier. There is still a need to break down content silos, the organisations are not interested in technology innovation but are in product innovation (so this drives any tech transfer). Data interoperability remains a key driver for uptake of semantic technology.	Click here to watch the recorded panel “Digital Media, Publishing and Semantic Architecture” by Julian Everett
  Roberto Garcia addressed interest in new copyright management technology.He reported on a pilot with Sony DADC, noting that companies are realising there are new opportunities to monetarize online media outside of the old model of selling a product at a unit price. Permitted re-use of IP on YouTube with revenue sharing, for example, but the ContentID solution is often not flexible enough for media owners who want to protect their content in some contexts while happy to monetarize it in others.The Copyright Ontology can be a solution to flexible determination of contractual agreements in media re-use on the Web.	Click here to watch the recorded panel “Semantic Technologies for User Generated Content Copyright Management” by Roberto Garcia

• 12:10 – 13:00 Session 3: Multimedia innovation: challenges, possibilities and outlook panel
  Moderator: Sue Malden (FOCAL Chair)
  Speakers: Hubert Best (Legal Advisor to FOCAL), Bouke Huurnink (Sound and Vision), Jonathan Lockwood (Getty Images), Madi Solomon (Pearson)
  Summary: From a wider content industry perspective, what possibilities might the availability of emergent technical know-how in multimedia semantics offer?   How might semantically-related multimedia impact commercial stakeholders in audiovisual media?  What are the existing priorities in play in the commercial digital media ecosystem, how do traditional archives fit, what part might the web semantics play, what are the factors requiring wider community engagement, and what factors are currently serving to drive technology adoption? Reflecting on commonalities between early adopters’ experiences and the current priorities of industry panellists, participants will explore possibilities for going forward, helping inform practitioners as to the future outlook of multimedia semantics set in context, and help explore broader industry challenges and priorities that should be addressed if the potential of the approaches underpinning the MediaMixer project are to be realised.

  The second panel on the other hand represented the “demand” side, industry representatives who need to be convinced of the MediaMixer technology (or convince others in their organization).FOCAL Chair Sue Malden noted that typically technological solutions and ideas are pushing at product development without fully appreciating the nature of the business, which is the wrong way around. Archives are moving from B2B to B2C business models, which does need support how to facilitate retrieval and re-use of the media they have online.FOCALs Legal Advisor Hubert Best added to this a strong reminder of the importance of copyright within this industry. This isn’t an attitude that can shift as quickly as the technology changes around it, leading to today’s disconnect between seamless sharing online of (copyrighted) material and the industry struggles with protecting it at all costs. There is a need for international harmonisation of copyright law in a borderless (digital) world. There was also the timely reminder that semantics are useless if the meaning is taken out of them by lack of protection!
  Bouke Huurnink addressed the general issues with technology transfer processes within media archives. The technologists are moving much more quickly than the archivists they are working for! A Scrum methodology has proven effective for collaboration with regular meetings and updates – stakeholders test the progress every two weeks. Rights is indeed the biggest issue! Prototyping is using public domain materials. Semantic augmentation of archivists annotations is taking place, but the scale of the work quickly becomes an issue.	Click here to watch the recorded panel “The Accelerator: Case study” by Bouke Huurnink
  Jonathan Lockwood presented the innovative new approach of Getty Images – Embed. This is a reaction to the realities of the online world: the ease of copying online imagery and re-using it on Websites, even though often this imagery is protected and re-use is prohibited without purchase, e.g. from Getty Image’s large image repository! A legitimate option to right click! Embed is an embedded viewer: an iframe to a gettyimages.com image with branding and attribution. Terms include right to collect data, remove at any time or place ads. Non-commercial use only. PicScout visual matching allows us to find unauthorized usage, so Embed is the only legal path to using Getty’s content. Thus Getty proposes a new way to protect its content in an online world, ensuring frictionless licensing to encourage proper, legal conduct in re-using online media!
  Madi Solomon is “Director of Semantic Platforms and Metadata”. Not a common job title! Pearson was about (paper) books, but now its content is transmedia! So this is about organizations adapting to the realities of the world around them: consumers are switching to e-books, podcasts, and other digital media…Madi recounts how she is involved in getting Pearson to move to use of Linked Data in its metadata; there is still a need for ‘good’ data for this and all of the data has to be good! She reflects, “Semantics do make peoples eye glaze over – if I switch on a light, it should come on, I don’t need to understand how the electricity got to the light.”	Click here to watch the recorded panel “Always learning” by Madi Solomon

• 13:00 – 14:00 Lunch & networking
• 14:00 – 14:45 Lightning talks by participants

  • Todd Carter, Tagasauris (spoke to us over Skype from San Francisco. Unfortunately due to this, no recording is available)

  • Marko Samec: “Media production from academia to industry”

    Marko Samec presents his company Out of the Box, which holds events for research and industry. It has now started filming lectures, now working with VideoLectures.NET.

    Click here to watch the recorded talk “Media production from academia to industry” by Marko Samec

  • Karen Colbron: “Shared knowledge, shared data”

    Shared knowledge, shared data. Technologists cant work with collections they don’ know, collection owners can’t work with technologies they dont understand. The Presto4U project is looking at bringing together communities (nine have been set up, e.g. research institutions, footage, production, learning). Each community has a core set of experts (committee). Anyone can join and participate – https://www.prestocentre.org/4u

  • Elitza Bantcheva: “Deluxe Media”

    Elitza Bantcheva presented the company Deluxe Media, which is involved in an EU project TransLectures. Topics are: Speech recognition, multilingual translation. Machine learning is very ignorant of context and needs semantic analysis to improve. Deluxe Media has learnt a lot through participation – it is very important to be agile even in large organisations!

    Click here to watch the recorded talk “Deluxe Media” by Elitza Bantcheva

  • Dermot Frost: “DRI – constructing the modern multimedia repository”

    Dermot Frost describes a big Irish project for digitising and preserving Irish archives like RTE and the Trinity Library. This is part of the Insight Centre, the recently set up National Centre for Linked Data and Analytics. They are planning Getty-like public access to streamed material to promote the content as well as using YouTube as the way to get revenue from popular content by adding some ads. As such, the project outcome strongly reflects MediaMixers vision of the future media industry online, with easier access to digitised media and use of semantics and fragmentation to improve the process.

    Click here to watch the recorded talk “DRI – constructing the modern multimedia repository” by Dermot Frost

• 14:45 – 15:00 Wrap up (Lyndon Nixon and David Willox): we will summarize the discussions of the event, communicate how MediaMixer can facilitate knowledge transfer into companies and elicit further perspectives and final comments from participants.
  

  To wrap up, Lyndon Nixon invited ICM Reporting’s David Willox to conduct an exercise with the attendees.David introduced the Theory of Constraints, which has the important maxim “technology can bring benefits if, and only if, it diminishes a limitation (E. Goldblatt)”. He encouraged critical thinking among the technologists if their technology indeed is meeting a need for the industry. What limitation is diminished by the technology? How did we accommodate it in the past? How do we need to change these rules? Lyndon Nixon closed the meeting reflecting that from the MediaMixer perspective, the takeout might be that the market has matured a lot in the last two years (when the project proposal was written) in relation with semantic data (linked data) adoption, media fragments, etc. In any case, a lot of work is still to be done ahead. From the point of copyright, its clear that industry sees it as a big issue but not clear yet the best way to address it.

  Click here to watch the recorded wrap up with Lyndon Nixon and David Willox

• 15:00 – 15:45 Networking. One-to-one meetings between MediaMixer experts and attendees are possible.

CONTRIBUTORS (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

HUBERT BEST (ENN Advokatbyrå)

Hubert Best specialises in international copyright and media law. Having been International Head of Media in a leading London City firm he founded his own specialist firm, and now practises in London and Stockholm advising media organisations around the world, including FOCAL. His larger projects have included several Olympic and Commonwealth Games, London’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Hubert will speak on the topic ‘The changing face of copyright in media business: opportunities and impacts‘.

Hubert Best gave an interview to ICM Reporting answering the question what are the key changes currently in copyright law and how it is expected to develop in the future, and how this changing environment affects the media industry and society.

Click here to watch “Hubert Best speaking at the Media Mixer Conference”

TODD CARTER (TAGASAURIS)

Todd Carter is the CEO and Co-founder of Tagasauris, Inc. Todd is widely respected as a creative visionary and leader in media and digital assets, linked open data and semantic web community, with over 20 years experience working with data archives, libraries and information technology systems. Tagasauris has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Business Week, The Economist and a host of others. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Tagasauris and The Museum of the City of New York a grant to annotate the museum’s archive. Tagasauris promises to be a game-changer in the media industry.

JULIAN EVERETT (ONTOBA)

Julian Everett is a solutions architect with a background in building distributed middleware services for digital media and financial services organisations. Prior to joining Ontoba he worked as Chief Technical Architect for the BBC’s international/commercial online services. His current areas of interest include JavaScript Everywhere linked data applications, hypermedia application design, HTTP and global content delivery architectures.

Julian will speak on the topic ‘Semantic Publishing and Architecture‘.

Julien Everett gave an interview to ICM Reporting answering the question of what situations he faces when working with media industry organizations on innovative technological solutions, and what can be done about this.

Click here to watch “Julian Everett (Ontoba)”

ROLF FRICKE (CONDAT)

Rolf Fricke is responsible for R&D at Condat AG including the integration of innovative technology into the TV/Media production process. He has long term experience in industry projects for TV-Broadcasters, Publishers and Content Providers and participates in R&D projects as software architect, developer and researcher.

Rolf will speak on “Implementation of Media Fragment Retrieval for TV Archives & Lessons Learned“, where media innovation is benefitting the workflow of broadcast TV newsrooms and now being transferred to other domains.

Rolf Fricke gave an interview to ICM Reporting answering the question how to characterise the usage of new technologies in broadcasters’ newsrooms, and how the use of semantics differs from other solutions.

Click here to watch “Rolfe Fricke from Condat AG”

ROBERTO GARCIA (UNIVERSITY OF LLEIDA)

Roberto García is associate professor and researcher at Universitat de Lleida (Spain). He has has almost 15 years of experience in semantic web research and its application to media and copyright management, like the Copyright Ontology.

Roberto will speak on “Semantic Technologies for User Generated Content Copyright Management“, illustrating how semantic copyright management can help better manage and improve the revenue stream obtained from owned content being reused in UGC platforms like YouTube.

Roberto Garcia gave an interview to ICM Reporting explaining his work on digital copyright management. modelling copyright in an ontology and transferring this innovation into the media industry.

Click here to watch “Roberto Garcia (U de Lleida)”

BOUKE HUURNINK (SOUND AND VISION)

Bouke Huurnink is product development manager at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He leads a development team that specialises in multimedia access, and in this role liaises between R&D, IT, and other stakeholders. His background is in video retrieval, and he defended his PhD thesis, entitled “Search in Audiovisual Broadcast Archives”, in November 2010.

Bouke will speak on “Technology and knowledge transfer in a modern audiovisual archive: experiences and observations”. Using Sound and Vision as a case study, he will focus on issues a ‘modern’ media archive faces – not only technologically, but also in terms of actually achieving knowlege and technology transfer.

Bouke Huurnink gave an interview to ICM Reporting about the Accelerator set up at Sound and Vision to improve knowledge and technology transfer from research activities to the production systems of a media archive.

Click here to watch “Bouke Huurnink from Sound and Vision”

JONATHAN LOCKWOOD (GETTY IMAGES)

Jonathan Lockwood is an in-house lawyer at Getty Images in London. He has been with Getty Images for 11 years during which time he’s provided legal support to all company functions. Getty Images was one of the first companies to license images over the web and is in continual pursuit of more innovative licensing solutions, “Embed” being one of its more recent developments.

Jonathan will speak on the topic ‘Embed. Getty Images encouraging a legitimate alternative to right-click.‘.

SUE MALDEN (FOCAL)

Sue Malden is an independent media archive management consultant and chair of the Federation of Commercial Audio Visual Archives (FOCAL International).

The Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International is a professional not-for-profit trade association formed in 1985 which is fully established as one of the leading voices in the industry.

Sue Malden, FOCAL International Chair, gave an interview to ICM Reporting on her personal view of the commercial audiovisual archive industry. She acknowledges the lack of awareness of semantic annotation among the wider industry and that archives still run on very traditional models. Competition among archives means that there is a real barrier to interest in meta-search across different providers. Finally, Sue notes that archives still need to address growing demand from a wider group of consumers for their content and work out business models for that.

Click here to watch “Sue Malden talks about the MediaMixer Conference”

Dr. LYNDON NIXON (MODUL UNIVERSITY)

Dr Nixon is Senior Researcher in the New Media Technology group at the MODUL University Vienna, where he leads European research projects such as MediaMixer. He has been active in the research area of multimedia annotation and presentation since 2001, with a focus on enriching Television with additional content. He also teaches a MBA on Media Asset Management and Re-use.

Lyndon will speak on “MediaMixer – why we do need innovative multimedia solutions?“, grounding the efforts of MediaMixer to transfer knowledge and multimedia technology into media companies in the trends we see in online and enterprise media and a vision of future media sharing and re-use which can benefit any media owner or consumer.

Lyndon Nixon, MediaMixer project co-ordinator, explains what is the MediaMixer project and why it organised today’s Innovation Day.

Click here to watch “What is the MediaMixer Project”

Click here to watch “The MediaMixer Innovation Day”

MADI SOLOMON (PEARSON)

Madi Solomon is Director of Semantic Platforms & Metadata for Pearson Plc, the international media company that owns The Financial Times and Pearson Education. She is responsible for leading metadata and information functions, defining and delivering the semantic-enabled strategies for the enterprise.

Madi will speak on “Linked data in education: a natural selection”. Pearson, the world’s largest education company, is undergoing its own forced revolution as it transforms from a primarily textbook-centric publishing company to a digital educational resources distribution company. She will share the challenges in changing the mind-set of a traditional education company to embrace data-driven decisions.

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