The Newsletter has been in touch with two other researchers able to take advantage of the DELOS exchange programme in the autumn, Arne Jacobs and Nicola Ferro.

Arne, of TZI, worked on the Context-of-Capture-task of the Audiovisual and Non-Traditional Objects cluster while visiting the Technical University of Crete. He and his host colleagues, principally Nektarios Moumoutzis and Georgios Ntampitzias worked in particular on the creation of the system architecture integrating partners' contributions. They also manually analyzed several hours of news video material, creating a news structure model for one news series format, and they also began developing automatic detectors for "visual structurizing tokens" characteristic for that format.

In addition to the benefits that such collaboration brought to his research, Arne remarked that speaking English all the time while in Crete proved to be very good practice. "The people at TUC are all very kind", Arne commented to the Newsletter, saying that being able to see Greece a little more from the perspective of the Greeks had also been very interesting.

Meanwhile Nicola had learnt of the Researcher Exchange Scheme from Prof. Maristella Agosti, his research co-ordinator for DELOS at the University of Padua and was thus able to collaborate with colleagues at University of Rome 1, principally Emanuele Panizzi and Rosa Trinchese. His researcher exchange was most concerned with DiLAS (Digital Library Annotation Service), a DELOS project with the aim of designing and developing an annotation service for digital libraries which will be tested and evaluated by users. A paper DiLAS: a Digital Library Annotation Service, co-authored with other partners, was presented in Paris in November.

Nicola was also involved in the integration of the FAST system, an annotation service for DLs developed by University of Padua, with the MADCOW system, a Web annotation system developed by University of Rome, in order to provide part of the first prototype of the DiLAS system.

Commenting on the advantages he saw in the exchange, Nicola felt it represented a distinct step forward for the DiLAS Project thanks to the face-to-face contact it provided and so allowing him and his colleagues to cover a pleasing amount of ground in the course of only two weeks. From a more personal standpoint, Nicola also felt the exchange provided the opportunity to see first-hand how other colleagues worked. He very much appreciated his Rome I colleagues' friendly and hospitable welcome.

Further Information:
Agosti, M., Albrechtsen, H., Ferro, N., Frommholz, I., Hansen, P., Orio, N., Panizzi, E., Pejtersen, A. M., and Thiel, U. (2005). DiLAS: a Digital Library Annotation Service. In Boujut, J.-F., editor, Proc. International Workshop on Annotation for Collaboration - Methods, Tools, and Practices (IWAC 2005), pages 91-101. CNRS - Programme société de l'information.
http://www.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/bib/docs/Agosti_etal_05.html.en

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Publication date: March 2006
File last modified: Monday, 22-May-2006

The Delos Newsletter is published by the Delos Network of Excellence
and is edited by Richard Waller of UKOLN, University of Bath, UK.

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