Partners

Fundació Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Fundació Universitat Pompeu Fabra (FBM-UPF, E) – is a non-profit-making organisation established by Universitat Pompeu Fabra at the beginning of 2002. The Fundació contributes to the accomplishment of the objectives of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, which is a rapidly expanding public university, having earned a strong reputation since it was created in 1990. At present the University provides seventeen qualifications in all fields of knowledge: experimental, health and life sciences, social and communication sciences, the humanities, and technical studies, and has more than eight thousand students.

The creation and transfer of new communication products and services requires a multidisciplinary environment working closely with the information society based at Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, Advertising, Linguistics, Translation, Computing, Telecommunications, Social Sciences and Design. This environment allows us to gather together researchers capable of enriching the project “Estació de la Comunicació”. This groups the Escola Superior Politècnica, delivering degrees in Computer Science and Telematics; the Departament de Tecnologia, specialising in digital communication technology and the Institut Universitàri de l’Audiovisual, an interdisciplinary centre which provides a meeting point for the fields of engineering, science, design, computing and communication. The Department and the Institut run a PhD programme on “Informàtica i Comunicació Digital” attracting over 70 students from all over the world.

UPF and the private company Mediacomplex (an initiative of the MediaPro group and the Barcelona Council) have promoted the Parc Barcelona Media project in the core of the 22@ BCN district. Parc Barcelona Media, a model facility of more than 60,000 sq m, is being launched in within 2005 to improve the international standing of the audiovisual/media industry in terms of production, culture and research.

The Interactive Technology Rsearch Group (GTI) focuses on human aspects and technology: current work includes advanced computer graphics, cooperative environments, intelligent web portals, educational telematics, geographical information systems, and computational toys. Recent European research projects include IST SPEED-FX, about very high resolution real-time image and graphic interaction, one of whose products has got an IST 2004 prize; IST Link3D aimed at developing a collaborative real-time interactive environment for professionals in the field of molecular discovery; eContent SCOPE, Structuring Content for Online Publishing Environments, also coordinated by UPF. A byproduct of Link3D is OpenMOIV, an opensource package currently being used by several drug discovery companies.

Current projects include IST IP-RACINE (co-ordinated by UPF) for Digital Cinema; the FP6 coordination action in advanced eLearning standards UNFOLD, coordinated by UPF; eContent eTITLE for multilingual semiautomatic subtitling for media industries; Eureka TIFANIS for teleimmersive applications; the eLearning project SIGOSSEE (Special Interest Group in Open Source Software for Education); and an automatic virtual presenter program generator Personatges Virtuals developed together with the Catalan broadcasting corporation.

FBM-UPF will provide 52 person months of RTD effort for its activities in ICING. These include the work in two type of fields: the one related to the research into eCommunity and usability of eGovernment and the part of multimodal interfaces and the definition of an urban gateway approach.

www.upf.es
www.upf.es/ec (Fundació)
www.upf.es/gti (Interactive Technology Research Group)