Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) – Information Technologies Institute (ITI)

CERTH, founded in 2000, is the only research centre in Northern Greece and one of the largest in the country. CERTH has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including: Energy, Environment, Industry, Mechatronics, Information & Communication, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, Safety & Security, as well as several cross-disciplinary scientific areas. Today CERTH includes the following five institutes with indicated major fields of research: (a) Chemical Process & Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), (b) Information Technologies Institute (ITI), (c) Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT), (d) Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB), (e) Institute for Research and Technology Thessaly (IRETETH). Out of those, CERTH participates in this project through ITI. The participating team, namely the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Data Analytics laboratory (MKLab), part of the ITI, has significant experience and scientific expertise on the technical aspects of the proposed project, namely the collection, indexing and mining of multimedia and social network data from heterogeneous Internet sources.

Role in the project: CERTH will coordinate the project and thus leading the management work package (WP6). CERTH will also lead the crawling of web sites and media content, the web-based variant of the MOVING platform (WP3) as well as the dissemination and communication task (WP5). Additionally, CERTH will participate in producing educational sequences and resources based on existing and reusable material.

Ernst & Young GmbH Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (EY)

EY (Ernst & Young) is one of the largest privately-held firms providing accounting, tax, transaction and advisory services. As one of the Big Four accounting firms, EY has more than 700 offices providing auditing and accounting services in 140 countries with worldwide 145.000 professionals (auditors, tax advisory professionals, transactions specialists and advisers). As one of the world’s largest tax practices, EY lays out comprehensive and developed tax strategies for its clients. EY refers to the global organization of member firms of EY Global Limited that are each a separate legal entity. EY Global Limited is headquartered in London, UK. Our 69,548 auditors in Assurance serve the public interest by providing assurance to investors and others regarding company’s’ financial statements and by providing robust and clear perspectives to audit committees as well as through forensic, sustainability and financial accounting advisory services that provide information for stakeholders. In Tax our 38,170 tax professionals help build a better working world by advising our clients on meeting their tax obligations and resolving tax controversy. We also foster open dialogue with tax administrators, government officials and other stakeholders about tax issues, the impact of policy decisions, and the contributions that companies and individuals make to society by paying the correct amount of a variety of taxes. Our 35.000 Advisory professionals help clients manage risk and improve performance to achieve measurable and sustainable results. From strategy formulation to purpose-driven transformation, we help corporates and governments anticipate and manage increasingly complex issues using the latest technologies.

Role in the project: EYs primarily role is in providing business cases and application scenarios for the MOVING platform (WP1). EYs expertise in different industries makes it possible to accompany the consortium on its way to a marketable solution and thus significantly contribute to dissemination and exploitation (WP5). EY may bring in clients and experts to participate in the development and the testing phases.

Technische Universität Dresden (TUD)

Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) – a leading university in Germany and beyond: TUD is one of eleven German universities that were identified as “University of Excellence” in 2012 – including only three Universities of Technology. TUD has about 37.000 students and 7,700 employees with almost 500 professors among them. Thus, it is the largest university in Saxony as well as the largest TU in the whole Germany today. Having been committed to sciences and engineering before the reunification of Germany in 1990, TUD now is a multi-discipline university, also offering humanities and social sciences as well as medicine. The Media Centre (MZ) lead by Prof. Köhler is a central scientific institute of TUD. The interdisciplinary team of MZ covers specialists for the areas of information and computer science, audio-visual media, didactics, psychology and business engineering with currently 50 FTE. MZ has a close relationship to all departments of TUD but is also linked with Dresden International University, the private education branch of TU Dresden. MZ is offering relevant services, including media research-relevant activities and media production on all formats. Our offers include achievements for cooperation within the ranges of the didactical and graphic design, consulting deployment scenarios and technologies of computer-aided applications of learning, prototype development, user training, networking, project acquisition under the frame of applied R&D and even a professional science video production. Additionally the MZ develops and implements evaluation strategies to measure appropriateness and effectiveness of new media and its usage, including online and automated scenarios for both qualitative and quantitative research.

Role in the project: TUD will lead the requirement analysis (WP1) and is responsible for use and application scenarios from the digital academic science field (Science 2.0), in particular the training of young researchers, their implementation and validation. TUD has overall responsibility for the didactic and curricula development (WP2) with special focus on the development and implementation of a qualification concept for open innovation leadership. Moreover TUD will provide the local eScience platform as a technological foundation for further development towards the MOVING platform. Here, TUD will work on the technical specification of the MOVING platform, the agile development and testing process as well as the integration of the training and data processing components (WP4). Finally, TUD will also drive the community building process for MOVING (WP5). As a well-connected player in the field of digital enhanced research and teaching (eScience), TUD will introduce the MOVING platform to the academic context (e.g. at relevant conferences) and promote its widespread use.

Kompetenzzentrum fur Wissensbasierte Anwendungen und Systeme Forschungs- und Entwicklungs Gmbh (KC)

The Know-Center is Austria’s competence centre for data-driven business and big data analytics, founded in 2001. As a connecting link between science and industry, the Know-Center conducts application-oriented research in cooperation with other academic institutions and with companies. It has thus 15 years of experience in creating usable and stable end user ready technology based on user-centred software design methods which stem from industry and end user oriented research projects. Two research groups participate in MOVING: First, the Ubiquitous Personal Computing group researches computer-supported working and workplace learning. Key assumptions are: i) many work activities are knowledge intensive, and learning is inseparably integrated with working – it is “part of the job”. ICT that supports working offers support for the task at hand, while ICT that supports workplace learning offers a longer-term perspective by supporting knowledge workers to continuously grow professionally. ii) Work and workplace learning support functionality will be mediated in the future via ubiquitous computing infrastructures. We will work and learn via smartphones, tablets, watches, glasses, intelligent objects etc. As methods, this group emphasises user-centred software design methods and evaluation methods in real working and learning situations (evaluations in the wild). Technologically, this group emphasises innovative end-user technology, such as mobile and ubiquitous technologies. Second, the Knowledge Visualization group develops visual analytics methods for exploration and interactive analysis of large repositories enabling users to gain insights into large data sets and the complex relationships therein. The centre is well-versed in devising interactive visual representations and interaction techniques, with know-how in the fields of scalable analytics methods, high-performance rendering and experience in usability engineering and evaluation. We bring together heterogeneous data and apply visualisations to promote visual thinking and guide the sense-making process. We integrate visual and automated methods by providing optimal visual means for acquiring knowledge during the analytical process and automatically initiating new analytical steps based on the user’s context and current needs. While developing new methods we build upon the Know-Center’s proven infrastructure including, for example, the Sensium mining and analysis platform, the KnowMiner framework which offers a rich set of knowledge discovery and visual analytics techniques, the nuGraph and WebGraph network exploration libraries.

Role in the project: Know-Center’s Ubiquitous Personal Computing group will work on the assessment of prior knowledge and learner guidance (WP2) and contribute to the implementation of the use cases or the MOVING platform (WP1), with a focus on integrating learned content into the working process. The Knowledge Visualisation group will work on data visualisation and contribute to the development of a dashboard for log data mining and analysis (WP3).

Institut Jozef Stefan(JSI)

JSI is the leading Slovenian scientific research institution covering a broad spectrum of basic and applied research. The staff of more than 930 specializes in natural sciences, life sciences and engineering. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, having 40 researchers, is one of the largest European research groups working in the areas of machine learning, data mining, language technologies, semantic technologies and sensor networks. The key research direction is combining modern statistical data analytic techniques with more semantic/logic-based knowledge representations and reasoning techniques with the purpose to progress in solving complex problems such as text understanding, large scale probabilistic reasoning, building broad coverage knowledge bases and dealing with scale. The members have developed several software tools for multimodal data analysis, among others: the Text-Garden suite of text mining tools, the OntoGen system for ontology learning, the Document-Atlas for complex visualisation, the AnswerArt system for semantic search over large textual databases, the Enrycher system for semantic enrichment of textual data, SearchPoint system for visual and contextualized Web browsing, XLing for cross-lingual matching and categorization across 100 languages and Event Registry for global real-time media observatory. Centre for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technologies has ten researchers and technical staff working in the areas of research results dissemination and eLearning. In particular, the centre is well known by portals: VideoLectures.NET with multimedia materials of numerous scientific events, online training materials, and collection of tutorials on different scientific fields, and ScienceAtlas.ijs.si and IST-World.Org for analysis and visualisation of large bibliographic and project databases. The centre is covering management, training and dissemination activities of several EU projects. For the MOVING project, particularly VideoLectures.NET plays a crucial role and provides its content to the project. JSI is also the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization represented by its Director-General, Ms Irina Bokova and Jožef Stefan Institute represented by its Director, Professor Jadran Lenarč signed a contract for establishing a Chair. The purpose of the Chair is to promote an integrated system of research, training, information and documentation on online learning for Open Educational Resources (OER) and open learning. As UNESCO is the creator of the concept of OER (2002), this function facilitates collaboration between high-level, internationally-recognized researchers and teaching staff globally as well as elsewhere in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and in other regions of the world. The Chair is Mitja Jermol, the Head of Centre for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technologies.

Role in the project: JSI’s role for the MOVING project is providing video lectures and accompanying materials of lectures through its platform VideoLectures.NET (WP2). Moreover, JSI will be significant in the dissemination and exploitation activities (WP5).

Deutsche Zentralbibliothek fuer Wirtschaftswissenschaften – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft (ZBW)

The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (short: ZBW) is a public research institute. It is member of the extra-university research organisation Leibniz Association and associated with Kiel University. Research and higher education has a long history in Kiel. The university was founded in 1665 by Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, as one of the first in Germany. The computer science department has 18 professors and covers research in different areas of computer science as well as algorithm engineering and numerical mathematics. As such, ZBW is part of a prospering and active research environment. ZBW is a high-tech information infrastructure conducting research in computer science and related areas and develops technologies for operating the IT infrastructure for its own library, which is the world’s largest specialist library for economics. The research group Science 2.0 of ZBW comprises three professors on Knowledge Discovery (Prof. Scherp), Web Science (Prof. Peters) and Media Informatics (Prof. Tochtermann) and focuses its research on Big Data and Science 2.0. The group currently has twelve PhD students and post-doctoral students conducting research on methods and applications in data mining, machine learning, entity resolution and deep search. A team of 15 computer scientists develops the technologies to operate the IT infrastructure of the specialist library and maintains ZBW’s core services, namely the literature research portal EconBiz and the publication service EconStor. Based on close collaboration between the research group and the development team, the research results are transferred by the development team to improve the information infrastructure and services. ZBW is an active partner in several national and international research projects and cooperation, e. g. with Austria, Malaysia, Macedonia, Albania, Turkey or the Network of European Economists Online (NEEO) and the EU project EEXCESS for providing access to and interlinking cultural and scientific information. It is also involved in national research projects such as LibRank developing ranking algorithms and metrics of scholarly data funded by the DFG. ZBW also initiated and coordinates the Leibniz Research Alliance on Science 2.0. The Knowledge Discovery group conducts research on novel methods and applications in data mining and machine learning for very large, distributed corpora of documents and data on the web, so-called Linked Open Data. The group strongly collaborates with domain experts at ZBW on automated text classification and indexing as well as on usability questions when applying such data analysis techniques.

Role in the project: The Knowledge Discovery group will work on Data Processing and Data Visualisation Technology (WP3) and significantly contribute on user profiling and assessing prior-knowledge (WP2) as well as on the integration of the WP3 components with the MOVING platform and the responsive design of the MOVING platform for mobile devices, particularly for Android OS (WP4).

The University of Manchester (UMAN)

The University of Manchester is the largest single-site university in the UK, with the biggest student community. In total, 25 Nobel Prize winners have worked or studied here. It is ranked 38th in the world, seventh in Europe and fifth in the UK in the 2014 Shanghai Jiao Tong World Ranking. The Bio-Health Informatics Group at the School of Computer Science carries out research on the development and application of complex artefacts such as ontologies for the health and life sciences. Analysis and modelling of the interaction with large domain-specific artefacts such as the MOVING platform has become a strategic priority for the group (e.g. medical dashboards), which is reinforced by the appointment of Dr. Markel Vigo as a lecturer in Health Informatics and Human-Computer Interaction.

Role in the project: The University of Manchester brings its knowledge in (i) instrumenting software for the analysis of interaction data with complex domain-specific artefacts, (ii) carrying out usability walkthroughs by experts and running studies either on-site or remotely and (iii) mining and analysing interaction data to find interaction workflows. In the context of MOVING, the aforementioned are necessary in order to assess the validity and reliability of the outputs of the MOVING platform, to identify whether the interaction workflows conform to those identified in the requirements gathering task and to run longitudinal studies in order to find behavioural correlates between interaction traces and knowledge acquisition (WP1). To do so, the MOVING platform will be instrumented (WP4) in order to generate log files that will be analysed remotely through a dashboard developed (WP3).

Gesis-Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften e.v. (GESIS)

As the largest German infrastructure institute for the social sciences, GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, with its expertise and services, stands ready to advise researchers at all levels to answer socially relevant questions on the basis of the newest scientific methods, high quality data and research information. GESIS does this with essential research-based services and consulting, covering all levels of the scientific processes. The work of GESIS is characterized by its independence, long-term sustainability, quality and competence. GESIS is divided in five scientific departments. In the MOVING project, the department on Knowledge technologies for the Social Sciences will participate. GESIS is a research based social science infrastructure institution which conducts its own continuing and interdisciplinary research in three large areas of research. The results of this research serve not solely to obtain scientific results, but equally the permanent improvement of what GESIS offers to social science as a whole. The GESIS department Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences (WTS) is focused on advancing and improving digital services for the Social Sciences on the basis of novel knowledge technologies. To ensure a high quality of GESIS services WTS is carrying out research in applied Computer Science, in particular in the fields Web Science, Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and Information Retrieval. The department is closely linked with the Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST) of the University of Koblenz-Landau. The department WTS is currently focused on the following areas: Scholarly information portals for the Social Science community (sowiport, SSOAR, da|ra, MISSY, Effektiv!, DFG-Instrumentenkasten, CEWS-Transfer, LeibnizOpen-2),tools for collection and archiving research data (da|ra, datorium, GESIS Panel), linking publications and research data (InFoLis), domain-specific search services (IRM, IRM II, Kompetenzzentrum Bibliometrie), linking GESIS data to external data sources on the Web (LOD), new dialogue models in the Social Web in support of eGovernment and eDemocracy (WeGov, SENSE4US), coupling of GESIS services with online social networks (ScholarLib), user-generated content applications (SOFISwiki), tools for monitoring Social Sciences (MoBi), virtual Research Environments for the Social Sciences (VFUsoeb),information extraction from Social Sciences full texts and web sources (eTraces, Smart Harvesting). Among these infrastructures is the Sowiport portal for literature search in the social sciences and the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) for Social Science Open Access full texts.

Role in the project: The GESIS department WTS will support on the requirements and use case development (WP1) and on iterative MOVING Platform development (WP4) and will significantly contribute on processing documents and metadata and conducting entity resolution (WP3).

Fundacja Progress and Business (PBF)

PBF was founded in 1991 by eight partners from government, academia and industry, a.o. AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Danish Technological Institute, Taastrup, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Republic of Poland and three others. PBF is an independent research institution and technology transfer centre, free of any political or ideological influence and a leader in implementing best research and consultancy practices in Poland. The PBF’s supervising body is the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Advanced applied scientific research and the development of the cooperation between the science and technology sectors in Poland have been two core goals of the Foundation since it was established. The International Centre for Decision Sciences and Forecasting (ICDSF) is a specialised unit of the PBF that organises and carries out research on the foundations of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive sciences, decision support systems, multicriteria decision analysis, information retrieval and data mining for forecasting and foresight and discrete-event systems. It was founded in 2002 as a unit that coordinated PBF’s membership in the European Science and Technology Observatory maintained by the DG JRC-IPTS. Since then the ICDSF conducted over 80 projects from the above mentioned areas, including 5th FP (e.g. FISTERA – Foresight of the Information Society Technologies in the European Research Area, Crescendo Network, ESTO), 6th FP (RuralWings, Shield), Leonardo da Vinci (five projects), Interreg IIIB CADSES and LifeLong Learning Programme Grundtvig. The PBF was a leader of the ERDF-POIG (Innovative Economy Operational Programme) ICT foresight project SCETIST (2010-2013) and took part in three other ERDF ICT-related projects. It has also conducted two projects within the Innovation Creator Programme of the Polish Ministry of Science, evaluating over 200 ICT innovations. The PBF’s experience relevant to the MOVING project includes the Phare SciTech Program: Technology Consultancies and Transfer (1996-1997), Preparatory Study and Pilot Implementation of Centres of Excellence in Poland, Phare SCI-TECH II PL9611/03.01, which resulted i.a. in creation of the Center of Excellence (CoE) in Telemedicine in Kraków, one of the first five Polish CoEs selected and supported in 2000, the membership in European Science and Technology Observatory (since May 2002), research done for the European Commission such as: a) Evaluation of the utility and impact of S&T Research Mapping: Support Action to the DirectorateDG Research B “Open Co-ordination of Research Policies” by JRC/IPTS & ESTO (2003), b) Research Investment Policy Watch (RIPWATCH) project, whereas one of the PBF experts has been a member of an ESTO senior experts group, consisting of five outstanding European specialists providing consulting support to the DG Research on the realisation of the Lisbon and Barcelona Agendas by the ERA member countries (2004). c) Regional Innovation Study for DG Regio, performed together with U. Maastricht as a lead partner (2009-2010). PBF experts had also lead relevant visual content analysis tasks in 7th FP INDECT (2010-2014).

Role in the project: The PBF will be responsible for dissemination and the exploitation of the project (WP5). Specifically, the PBF will deliver the MOVING exploitation strategy assuring the sustainability of project results (WP5). It will also strongly engage a) in the requirements and implementation of the use cases of the project (WP1)  and b) in harvesting and processing of documents and metadata (WP3), together with other partners.