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The Core Technology Cluster
Contact : Jean-Luc Gauvain, gauvain(at)limsi.fr, CTC project leader, Volker Steinbiss, steinbiss(at)i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de, Corpus project leader.
The main goals of the core technology cluster (CTC) project are to improve the state-of-the-art in automatic multimedia document structuring and indexing, and to develop and evaluate the core technologies needed for the Use Case projects. The targeted core technologies include
- text processing,
- translation,
- speech processing,
- audio and music processing,
- image and video processing,
- data coding and protection,
- cross-modal processing,
- and search and navigation methods for multimedia and multilingual documents
The CTC project develops technologies that can be applied to a wide range of documents along with tools to adapt them to specific types of documents in order to improve their accuracies. The project avoids developing methods and models that are only suitable for very specific cases. As much as possible all the data processing components developed in the project use and generate representations that conform to widely accepted standards and open formats.
Comparative evaluation of the technologies is a strategic approach of the CTC project (cf. WP12). Each partner developing a technology (or some technology components) is expected to take part in the periodic evaluations. This is not per se to evaluate each partner's progress (unless a partner is clearly under-performing), but to objectively assess the methods and models developed by the consortium in order to increase the information exchange among the partners, so that all partners can benefit from the advances made. The main objective of these evaluations being to exchange information and to understand the value of each other's results, with the evident effect of greatly improving project efficiency. Within this competitive framework, what could be seen as a duplication of effort will in fact be mostly beneficial to the project as it allows alternate methods, models, and implementations to be compared. Another benefit of developing various methods and models is that it allows for significant performance improvement which can be obtained by combining methods, and thereby provides the means of taking advantage of the partner complementarity.
Partners participating in the CTC activities include technology developers and technology suppliers (also sometimes called technology packagers). The role of the technology developers is to carry out the research and development activities needed to significantly improve the core technologies, whereas the role of the technology suppliers is to deliver the technologies for integration within the application projects. By design, each CTC task/technology construction should have at least one technology developer and one technology supplier, but for a given task/technology a partner can be both a developer and a supplier.
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