Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ASSIGN (Get on top of your multimedia content)
Teaser
The innovation strategy of IN2 is built around offering its clients the very best tools for aggregating, searching, exploring, organising, interfacing and experiencing multimedia content. The impact of convergence on content has been identified as a key enabling opportunity...
Summary
The innovation strategy of IN2 is built around offering its clients the very best tools for aggregating, searching, exploring, organising, interfacing and experiencing multimedia content. The impact of convergence on content has been identified as a key enabling opportunity for our business, alongside the rise of the cross-platform applications.
In order to fully explore and take advantage of the new possibilities that the new forms of content presentation and delivery bring, it is necessary to create innovative tools for more efficiently working with videos and images. Extended content metadata, better search and easier management of audiovisual assets become thus key aspects of these tools.
Moreover, the amount of content and associated data that is produced and needs to be managed by organisations has grown exponentially. This variety of content and most importantly its data represents a huge opportunity (e.g. for better understanding the audience and customers) and organisations need now not only a new generation of tools that are capable of delivering analytical insights within useful time-horizons thanks to automatic indexing, semantic modelling, reasoning, aggregating and handling large amounts of data in real-time, but also visualisation interfaces that allow key decision makers to better understand the information they hold. It is often the case that valuable insights that are within the grasp are simply obfuscated by data noise.
With the ASSIGN project we aimed to fulfill the market needs for better, meaningful, flexible multimedia content management and publishing, thus helping our clients stay on top of their content and create additional value from it.
Work performed
In order to tackle the identified challenges, IN2 has recruited an Innovation Associate (IA), who is a full-stack information systems expert that has previously worked on transforming information systems into innovative products and services.
The Innovation Associate has worked on all three main aspects of the technical architecture: backend, processing and frontend. In total, four dedicated backend components have been developed together with basic services that power common operations. In terms of processing, the media processing components have been integrated into a new application workflow. Furthermore, the Innovation Associate developed a concept fusion layer to parse and combine processing results to improve the detection accuracy of segmentation and classification of multimedia content. Finally a bespoke frontend as an interactive and responsive web applications has been built as part of an integrated demonstrator.
An important focus of the work has been to assess the innovation and identify the most promising way in which the outcomes can be used by IN2. To this end, a new product, Havealook (https://havealook.me), a B2C web application for multimedia file sharing, has been conceptualised and an integrated demonstrator has been designed and implemented.
Final results
The Innovation Associate has successfully helped redesign the company’s platform media processing framework by making existing components available as services, developing APIs and interfaces to exchange data. Notably, the Innovation Associate implemented methods to scale media processing by handling and queueing media files as needed and improving the way the company platform handles multimedia files and extracts information from them. Thanks to this we managed to significantly reduce the server response times. Moreover, the Innovation Associate improved existing core components of the platform (e.g. faster indexing and search). Evaluations carried out have shown that these improvements have led to a 33% improvement in the average response time for queries.
Overall, the Innovation Associate was able to extend the company’s management and publishing platform with more automated tools for analysis, indexing and understanding of multimedia content and compile the developed innovations and functionality in a flexible way, creating a realistic business use case: Havealook. An initial analysis of Havealook shows a good market potential and IN2 is looking forward to the follow-up activities towards launching this new product to the market.
Website & more info
More info: https://havealook.me.