Exalead At The Forefront Of Search And Innovation In Europe

Exalead, a global provider of search-based business application (SBA) technology, today announced that it is partnering with industry leaders and European academics on the development of two new projects, I-SEARCH and GLOCAL, that are being funded by the European Commission’s ‘Networked Media’ objective of the 4th FP7 call.

The GLOCAL project is developing a platform that can search photos, videos and sound recordings that relate to particular events. The project is inspired by the idea of recreating human behaviour by mimicking the way we mentally file away concepts and objects from our day-to-day lives. GLOCAL characterises media files as the events they represent, such as the Olympics, a wedding, political election or natural disasters.

The I-SEARCH project is dedicated to developing a platform to manage media with a special focus on 2D and 3D files. A data model will be developed that can capture the details and specifications of a 2D or 3D image or video. Users can then search multimedia collections more efficiently using an advanced multimodal system instead of simple keywords. For example, users can draw a chair with their mouse or upload a photo of a chair, and the system will recognise the image as a chair and bring up similar sketches in a furniture supplier catalogue.

Information access systems face several technical and scientific challenges, but the European Commission is focusing special attention on the search and retrieval of multimedia information. It launched these two new projects to promote the development of new collaborative tools to find and share multimedia data both on the Web and on social networks.

"As a European research programme funded by the European Commission, our research engineers are using their expertise to collaborate with industry and academic partners to create multimedia information access systems," explained Exalead’s UK and Ireland Managing Director, Raymond Bentinck. "Exalead CloudView plays an integral role in the GLOCAL system architecture, and is fully integrated into the I-SEARCH platform."

For more information about the GLOCAL project, please visit the project website at www.glocal-project.eu. For more information about the I-SEARCH project, please visit the project website at http://www.isearch-project.eu/isearch/.