MediaDigits

There are mainly two sorts of motivations to go to a conference. The first one would be to be confronted to other scientific scholars with high-level accomplishment, the second would be that conferences are a very good occasion to visit a nice place (even if many institutions, like mine, refuse to pay for conference organized in tourists resorts). As a matter of fact, not only did the Triple-I 2008 edition achieved a very satisfactory scientific level, but Graz was a delicious place to enjoy all these presentations. Now let’s talk about the conference itself.

There is something that everyone seems to be very worried about in the semantic web community, is the purpose of this technology. Many discussions and keynotes were organized in order to identify what were the challenges that the semantic web was about to face. Organizing and structuring the knowledge is definitely the most obvious goal of the semantic web, but indeed, quite a few of use-cases were proposed. Prof Henry Lieberman (MIT Media Laboratory, USA) identifies the goals of the semantic web as a way to enhance common sense for machines (arguing that common sense is the bottleneck for any artificial intelligence) and asserts five ways to enrich the applications which are using semantic web:

• Map from goals to concrete actions
• Anticipate the use of the application
• Make most likely things easiest to do
• Integrate applications (diminish the role of the user interface)

Some industry partners did presentations (I could not see all of them) : SAP (with a very completed solution for collaborative work) and us (BMW Forschung und Technik and our infotainment platform), IBM also, etc. A brilliant keynote was made by Peter Kemper on the use of Wikis at Shell. The rest of the presentations were made by people from academical background, universities and research institutes.

There is one point that made no debate, the semantic web exists, and there are already huge databases of tagged media available on the web. What can we do with them? The answer is not clear, and I would bet that they will not be for a long time (because I do not see any killer-app’ for the moment). Most people argue that it is necessary to prepare the future and to tag as much information as possible. Other people argue that it is necessary to make more consistent the existing tag systems. Katrin Weller and Isabella Peters (Dusseldorf University, Germany) made a very interesting presentation on tag organization strategies called “tag gardening”. I was one of the rare people to defend the idea that the most part of the knowledge is hidden not in the relationship existing between the different databases, but in the dynamic process of their evolution, i.e. there is more knowledge to get by observing how the relationships between the knowledge representations are transformed than by observing the knowledge representations themselves. Dr Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany) in his closing lecture of a workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web made it clear that semiotic system are dynamics and should be considered as such.

On the top of that, the conference was a very interesting way to make contacts with other researchers, and especially PhD students (Special thanks to Ahmet Yildirim from the technical university of Istanbul who presented an interesting tagging technique using both object and predicate and who borrowed me his computer). The Triple-I was also a very social event. In spite of the some inconvenient events (my laptop broke at my arrival in Graz), I will have a very nice souvenir of the Triple-I’ 08 conference.

The blog: Multimedia actuality

Mediadigits is a website dedicated to new multimedia technologies. Nowadays, multimedia has step out the conventional box of personal computers and his creeping into various objects like embedded systems, smart and mobile devices. New usage came along with those innovations, like content share or social web.

The author: a young researcher

I graduated from Telecom ParisSud, the electrical engineering school of the french National Institute of Telecommunications. I am now working for the BMW think tank in Munich as an engineer and I am currently writing my PhD thesis on future automotive entertainment technologies. I wanted to discuss ideas and findings with other people. I already had a blog named blogostef but since it is mainly personal stuff written in French I thought that a dedicated English-written blog would be more accurate for the techno-audience.

I graduated in 2007 from the National Institute of Telecommunications (Evry, France) and the Eurecom Institute (Sophia-Antipolis, France) and now have an engineer degree in telecommunication techniques. I have worked formerly for my Master Thesis on MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards and the use of social web for music recommendation and personalisation.

I am also supporting (more or less actively ;-)) the flock project which intends to develop a social web-browser.

• My research topics ;
• My profile onLinkedIn.

Le blog : L’actualité du multimédia

Mediadigits est un site web dédié à l’actualité des concepts et des technologies dans le domaine du multimédia. Aujourd’hui, le multimédia s’est echappé des micro-ordinateurs pour s’installer dans divers objets, créant de nouveaux usages comme le partage de contenu en ligne ou les réseaux cyberassociatifs.

L’auteur : Un jeune chercheur

Ingénieur de Telecom ParisSud (ex Telecom INT), je travaille pour le think tank de BMW à Munich ou je m’occupe plus spécialement du multimédia. J’écris actuellement une thèse sur les futurs loisirs et divertissement embarqués dans les voitures et j’ai créé ce blog afin de discuter des nouveaux concepts. J’appartiens au groupe communications multimédia de l’Institut Eurécom. J’ai déjà travaillé sur les standards MPEG-7 et MPEG-21 et l’utilisation de filtrage social pour la personnalisation et le recommandation de musique.

Je soutiens (plus ou moins activement ;-)) le projet Flock de butineur internet cyberassociatif.

Quelques liens concernant mon activité professionnelle :

• Travaux de recherche ;
• Ma page sur LinkedIn.

False start? Might be that indeed. How to explain it? I do not really know but I can propound some assumptions:

• Two single house movings (one for France to Germany and another one from a Munich address to another one) took me away from my initial goal of having a bilingual blog dedicated to new technologies. Moreover, I do not have any internet connection at home so far;
• I was very busy with the beginning of my PhD thesis and this lead me to forget about writting posts for my blog. I feared I came with unfinished ideas and unprepared concepts;
• I had a general lack of motivation which lead me to abandon for some months my personal blog.

And something happened. I received the new book of Francis Pisani, famous french blogger of Transnets, exiled in the Silicon Valley and coauthor of Comment le web va changer le monde (”How the web is going to change the world”). Indeed, some weeks before, his editor launched a promotion operation to bloggers who would like to receive the book for free. I try to enlist but I though that I was in the list of taken bloggers.

As a matter of fact, I was really suprised when I found last Saturday this big enveloppe from Pearson Education, in my mail box. I said to my self that I had to start writting again and working on this blog. A new released book for free, I need to deserve it! I have not finished to read it so far, since I am taking a lot of notes and writting remarks. This will be indeed the subject of my next post.