Improving the accessibility of content for the Deaf community is an important goal for both EU governments and broadcast industry regulators. Although legislation is being used to coerce content producers and broadcasters to do so, the cost of producing sign-language content and the negative impact of having a sign-interpreter appearing on the content for hearing individuals has relegated sign-language programming to late nights or a small number of sign-presented programs. A low-cost solution for personalized sign-interpreted content creation can address both of these problems, leading to greater accessibility to media content for Deaf users. CONTENT4ALL proposes such a solution to the problem in the short-term, which is also commericalizable, and proposes innovations to technologies that can lead to automated sign-translation capabilities in long-term. To this end, it builds upon the technologies demonstrated by the consortium partners in previous EU projects. As a first development a remote signing apparatus (located off-premises of the broadcaster) will be produced to capture a human sign-interpreter’s signs, pose and facial expressions and to parameterize this information. Then, it will be rendered photo-realistically as a 3D representation of the human sign-interpreter at the broadcaster for production of the personalized stream for Deaf users. While this solution can be used commercially, resulting datasets will provide a vast source of information for learning how to parameterize sign information for translation purposes. The second development of CONTENT4ALL will focus on advancing the algorithms/models used to do so, with the intent to create an open dataset for further research into automated signing. Finally, CONTENT4ALL will demonstrate automated sign-translation applied to a real-world TV broadcasting scenario, which is envisaged to lead to new approaches and innovations in the area in the long-run.

Recent market research has revealed a globally growing interest on documentaries both from the demand and supply side. Documentary genre has now become the 2nd most populated content-wise genre in the movie titles catalog, surpassing traditionally popular genres such as comedy or adventure films. At the same time modern audiences appear willing to immerse into more interactive and personalised viewing experiences, through second-screen content and advanced video formats such as 360° video. Documentaries, even in their linear version, involve high costs in all phases (pre-production, production, post-production) due to certain inefficiencies, partly attributed to the lack of scientifically-proven cost-effective ICT tools. PRODUCER aims at filling this gap, by delivering a set of innovative ICT tools that focus on supporting various stages of the documentary creation process, ranging from the user engagement and audience building, to the final documentary delivery. Apart from the key objective of reducing the overall production cost and time, enabling small documentary production houses (SMEs) to increase their market share and competitiveness, our project would result in: a) providing greater creativity and productivity to documentary creation professionals, stimulated by new production sophisticated tools that enable searching, annotating, editing, personalizing professional and user generated content, b) enhancing viewers’ experience and satisfaction by generating multi-layered documentaries, and delivering to the viewer personalized services, and c) facilitating the promotion of the documentaries to investors. The consortium is composed of three SME partners, one broadcaster, one large ICT industry, and two research institutions, all of them actively involved as key actors in offering adequate competence for the accomplishment of the project objectives

The traditional media landscape is in the middle of a monumental shift: boundaries between professional media houses, prosumers and small creators are blurring, the speed of communication and publishing is increasing, audiences are seeking more user-driven and accessible multimedia experiences. MediaVerse (MV) is an answer to this shift: a decentralized network for intelligent, automated, and accessible digital asset management systems, where traditional stakeholders and other media owners can share, enrich, verify, and monetize multimedia content. With this, MV aspires to disrupt current practices of working in isolated silos, while enabling secure and traceable media exchange. An instance of MV can be deployed as a node in the decentralized MV network, and provides its users with a blockchain-enabled rights management solution, AI-powered identification services and smart contracts that automate cross-network rights negotiation and content monetization. Following the European way, MV aspires to help users create and publish content, while keeping control over the content shared. For this, several AI-driven features are implemented towards supporting automated editorial content moderation and identification, authoring immersive experiences, making content accessible, and providing actionable insights through social analytics and collaboration tools. Integrated content adaptation services ensure the distribution of the created media over several networks, platforms and end-devices. The project will be validated through large scale pilots in the field of citizen journalism and co-creation of immersive and inclusive media, foreseeing also a STARTS-inspired use case that involves artistic experiments and practices, pushing forward creativity for a critical approach to user-centric media.

Nowadays any communication barrier is detrimental to society. This project will research and develop the SignON communication service that uses machine translation to translate between Sign and spoken languages. This service will facilitate the exchange of information among deaf and hard of hearing, and hearing individuals. In this user-centric and community-driven project we will tightly collaborate with European deaf and hard of hearing communities to (re)define use-cases, co-design and co-develop the SignON service and application, assess the quality and validate their acceptance. Our ultimate objective is the fair, unbiased and inclusive spread of information and digital content in European society. Our project will develop a free, open application and framework for conversion between video (capturing and understanding Sign language), audio and text and translation between Sign and spoken languages. To facilitate these tasks we propose a common representation for mapping of video, audio and text into a unified space, that will be used for translating into the target modality and language. To ensure wide uptake, improved sign language detection and synthesis, as well as multilingual speech processing on mobile devices for everyone, we will deploy the SignON service as a smart phone application running on standard modern devices. We envisage the application as a light-weight interface. The SignON framework, however, will be distributed on the cloud where the computationally intensive tasks will be executed.The project will be driven by a focused set of use-cases tailored towards the deaf communities. We target the Irish, British, Dutch, Flemish and Spanish Sign and English, Irish, Dutch, Spanish spoken languages. However, SignON will incorporate sophisticated machine learning capabilities that will allow (i) learning new Sign, written and spoken languages; (ii) style-, domain- and user-adaptation and (iii) automatic error correction, based on user feedback

BEinCPPS Innovation Action aims to integrate and experiment a CPS-oriented Future Internet-based machine-factory-cloud service platform firstly intensively in five selected Smart Specialization Strategy Vanguard regions (Lombardia in Italy, Euskadi in Spain, Baden Wuertemberg in Germany, Norte in Portugal, Rhone Alpes in France), afterwards extensively in all European regions, by involving local competence centers and manufacturing SMEs. The final aim of this Innovation Action is to dramatically improve the adoption of CPPSs all over Europe by means of the creation, nurturing and flourishing of CPS-driven regional innovation ecosystems, made of competence centers, manufacturing enterprises and IT SMEs. The BE in CPPS project stems upon three distinct pillars: • A FI-based three-layered (machine-factory-cloud) open source platforms federation, integrated from state-of-the-art R&I advances in the fields of Internet of Things, Future Internet and CPS / Smart Systems and able to bi-directionally interoperate data pertaining to the machine, the factory and the cloud levels. • A pan-European SME-oriented experimentation ecosystem. In a first phase of the project, the five Champions will provide requirements to the platforms integrators. In a second phase, an Open Call for IT SMEs developers (applications experiments) will award 10 third parties. In a final third phase, the extended platform will be instantiated and deployed in additional 10 third parties equipment experiment SMEs. • A well-founded method and toolbox for Innovation management, where an existing TRL-based methodology for KETs technology transfer will be enriched by a CPPS certification, education and training programme for young talents and experienced blue collar workers and by a well-founded three-fold (objectives-variables-indicators) method for results assessment and evaluation.