FCT announces seven Digital Media R&D grants

Interdisciplinary research,
education and capacity building

12 Aug 2010

The Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation has awarded funding to seven teams of researchers from Portugal and UT Austin under the 2009 CoLab R&D call for Digital Media.

The awards include six strategic projects and one exploratory project. Each project will be led by a principal investigator from Portugal working with a team drawn from UT Austin and other Portuguese universities and industrial partners.

The projects and their lead researchers:

REACTION - Retrieval, Extraction, and Aggregation Computing Technology for Integrating and Organizing News will take computational journalism to the next level by developing a set of new algorithms, tools and methodologies for media analytics. The project aims to help journalists and researchers make better sense of what is news and what is not among the massive amounts of data produced every day.
Mário Silva, FC/UL
Luis Francisco-Revilla, UT Austin
Matt Lease, UT Austin

Project Breadcrumbs will capitalize on public participation in the global news cycle to enable journalists to harness reader participation. It will build bridges between online news and social media so journalists can understand the interests of their readers and the implicit relationships that readers perceive between different articles and events in order to identify valuable contributors and follow new leads for further writing.
Álvaro Figueira, INESC Porto, U.Porto
Luis Francisco-Revilla, UT Austin

INVITE: social Identity and partNership in VIrTual Environments will use "serious games" to understand how human partnerships are created, maintained and terminated in virtual environments.
Rui Prada, IST
Jorge Peña, UT Austin

LIFEisGAME: LearnIng of Facial Emotions usIng Serious GAMEs will embed real-time computer vision/graphics-based facial expression analysis/synthesis into a game in order to teach children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to recognize facial emotions.
Verónica Orvalho, U.Porto
Jake Aggarwal, UT Austin
Yan Zhang, UT Austin

ImTV - On-Demand Immersive-TV for Communities of Media Producers and Consumers aims at offering consumers a personalized combination of mainstream TV content and online user-generated content based on algorithms that process content metadata, user and community feedback.
João Magalhães, FCT/UNL
Sharon Strover, UT Austin
Luis Francisco-Revilla, UT Austin

iDTV-HEALTH: Inclusive services to promote health and wellness via digital interactive television will evaluate the potential of digital interactive television (iDTV) to promote health care and wellness services and information to Portuguese age 55 and older with low technology literacy.
Manuel Damásio, U.Lusófona
Laura Stein, UT Austin
Michael Mackert, UT Austin

SEE-THROUGH-SOUND:The perception and cognition of space and its features by mapping visual information into sound and sound structures is an exploratory project.
Tomás Henriques, FCSH/UNL

"This grant reflects the fact that digital media is multidisciplinary and to do meaningful work you need talent and insight from people across multiple areas," said Sharon Strover, director of CoLab's Digital Media program and Professor of Radio-TV-Film at UT Austin. "We hope this project will create a foundation for developing and working with the future leadership in the area of digital media."

For more information see: