Subject: Pre-doctoral positions in Multimedia Archives and Video Analysis

From: Luís Teixeira <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 09:45:25 +0100

<< Apologies for duplicate copies! >>

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Pre-doctoral positions in Multimedia Archives
and Video Analysis
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INESC Porto, PORTUGAL
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Applications are invited for two pre-doctoral research position in the areas
of multimedia archives and video analysis for multimedia information
retrieval systems. The positions are for periods of six months to two and
a half years and are funded by the European Commission project MOUMIR
- MOdels for Unified Multimedia Information Retrieval, with university
collaborators from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), INRIA (France), Ben
Gurion University (Israel), Aristotle University of Thessonaliki (Greece),
Cambridge University (UK), INESC Porto (Portugal) and content providers
from RTP (the Portuguese public TV broadcaster) and BAL-Bridgeman
Art Library (UK).

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Position in Multimedia Archives
Multimedia Archives are at the centre of many content-rich applications
and information services which are getting increasing attention and
investment. Searching multimedia archives requires the use of metadata
descriptions according to emerging standards.
The proposed goal is to start with an existing specification of a metadata
description scheme for multimedia materials and develop tools to store,
browse and query an archive of such items.
The metadata description scheme has taken into account the on-going work by
several communities:
    - the archival description community on a standard for the traditional
      documents (ISAD) and on dealing with new types of documents, electronic,
      multimedia, distributed;
    - the multimedia/Internet search community on indexing the raw texts,
      and on characterising the other components of the Web sites;
    - the video coding community on searching audio and video sequences,
      and describing its contents in particular using the emerging MPEG7 
standard.

An application area will be selected for the prototype, either photography
archives or broadcaster video archives.

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Position in Video Analysis
The main objective of this work is to participate in the development of the
basis for a Video Analysis System with an high level of integration of the
video analysis tools. For that purpose a Generic Video Analysis Toolbox will
be implemented, including a wide variety of techniques for video
segmentation (face/object detection), scene cuts detection, global and camera
motion estimation and text extraction. In order to obtain an integrated set of
tools, evaluation tests will be performed to determine the inter-relations and
synergies among the different content-based tools. The results of those
tests will allow the improvement of the performance of each specific tool 
based on
the information provided by the others. Based on the information provided by
the video analysis tools, software for the video interpretation will be
implemented in order to achieve a description of the video content. A
specific type of application, like video content filtering applied to TV 
News, will
be selected, to validate the developed techniques.

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The successful applicant will be an independent-minded and ambitious
researcher with a MsC or equivalent on related areas. It will be possible to
include the applicants on the PhD programmes of the Porto University
(Faculdade de Engenharia - Engineering College,
http://www.fe.up.pt/feupwww/bem-vindo.html)

The European Commission stipulates that candidates should be EU
Nationals, or nationals of 5th Framework member countries, who
have not been resident in Portugal for more than 12 months.
Applications including CV and two academic references should be sent to the
address below.

Contact at INESC Porto with:
Prof. Luis Corte-Real, email: [email-masked]
Prof. Gabriel David, email: [email-masked]

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INESC Porto - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores do Porto
(Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto)
(http://www2.inescporto.pt/uk/default1.asp)
is a private non-profit association that was created in December 1998,
having as associates INESC and the University of Porto.

INESC Porto is an interface between the academic world and the Information
Technology, Telecommunications and Electronics (ITT&E) industrial sector,
carrying out scientific research and development as well as technology
transfer and advanced professional training.

The ultimate goals of INESC Porto are to achieve high international
standards in science and technology as well as carrying out on the job
training of human resources, in its areas of expertise. At the same time,
as a result of its tight coupling to the University through the involvement
of a significant number of professors in its activities, INESC Porto also
promotes the adequacy of the teaching system to the needs of the
economical and social fabric.
INESC Porto is therefore a strategic instrument of the University and a
source of R&D and of young scientists to the ITT&T industry.

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Luis Miguel Lopes Teixeira
Escola das Artes - Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Rua Diogo Botelho, 1327, 4169-005 Porto, Portugal
Email: [email-masked]   http://artes.ucp.pt/dsi

INESC - Unidade de Telecomunicações & Multimedia
Prc. da República, 93, 4050-497 Porto, Portugal
Phone: + 351 22 2094237         Fax: + 351 22 2087829
Email: [email-masked]      http://telecom.inescn.pt/people/lmt/index.htm