Library of Congres started a pilot on Flickr

1. Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber, Tennessee, 2. At the Vermont state fair, Rutland, 3. Retiring a locomotive driver wheel in the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway locomotive shops, Shopton, near Fort Madison, Iowa. The tire is heated by means of gas until it can be slipped over the wheel. Contraction on cooling will hold it firmly in p, 4. Shepherd with his horse and dog on Gravelly Range, Madison County, Montana, 5. Parris Island, S.C., barrage balloon, 6. House, Houston, Texas, 7. Southeastern Georgia?, 8. Typical southeastern Georgia farm with newly harvested field of oats, 9. Southern U.S., 10. Typical southeastern Georgia farm with newly harvested field of oats, 11. Georgia oat field? Southern U.S., 12. Harvesting oats, southeastern Georgia?, 13. Cabin in southern U.S., 14. Cabin in Southern U.S., 15. Cabin in Southern U.S., 16. House in southern U.S., 17. Spreading fertilizer from 4-mule team wagon, Georgia, 18. Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass., 19. Factory buildings in Lowell, Mass.?, 20. Brockton, Mass., Dec. 1940, second-hand plumbing store, 21. Headlines posted in street-corner window of newspaper off[ice] (Brockton Enterprise) ... Brockton, Mass., 22. Children in the tenement district, Brockton, Mass., 23. Detail of industrial building in Massachusetts, 24. Street in industrial town in Massachusettsz, 25. Lowell, Mass., street, 26. Railroad cars and factory buildings in Lawrence, Mass., 27. Detail of industrial building in Mass., 28. Street scene, possibly in Brockton, Mass., 29. [Children with adult in the tenement district, Brockton, Massachusetts], 30. Industrial buildings and a town in Mass., possibly Brockton, 31. [Train and several sets of railroad tracks in the snow, Massachusetts], 32. Massachusetts farm, possibly around Brockton, Mass., 33. Skating, vicinity of Brockton, Mass., 34. Near the waterfront, New Bedford, Mass., 35. Street corner, Brockton, Mass., 36. Industrial area in Massachusetts, possibly around New Bedford

CIVR2007

Quaero: full stop

Quaero, the french/german R&D collaboration came to an end even before results were visible for public. Both countries' spokesmen stated that goals conflicted and further collaboration was not useful any more. Next to conflicts between goals, there were also technological difficulties. The idea was to build a web search engine for multimedia. Probably the idea will come to an implementation as many other research projects are taking place, e.g. Multimatch as well as commercial projects. The German partners of Quaero will commence by a project called Theseus. The French will also proceed so they say. A Thomson (France) spokeswoman said:

"The two projects were never one."

Jim Egan wrote on diplomatic traffic:

Quaero is an outgrowth of the “1791 Drill Regulations” mentality Napoleon tried to eradicate. Amazingly, this multimedia vacuum cleaner still cannot organize and index what little it lifts from the cultural carpet. In contrast, Blinkx (“the world’s largest video search engine”) trumpets that it now has over 6 million hours of searchable TV and viral video content. Competitors such as the long-toothed T. rexes MSN, Yahoo and Google, plus aspiring adolescents Ask.com and Accoona, are no doubt thankful the distracted French government expensively sired such a transparent, predictable and beatable foe. Designed to fight the last war, Quaero will not become a step-change and thus ensures U.S. internet search hegemony for years to come. Unless, that is, France’s elected leader finds inspiration and creatively disrupts the nature and cadence of competitive EU digital initiatives. To begin with, President Chirac should correct an out-of-step viewpoint revealed at an Elysée Palace speech last January. There he stated “Tomorrow, that which is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world.” Unfortunately, this is already the case for what exists online. Despite years of effort, search engines reach only 2% of the internet’s vast, growing and largely unexplored data jungle.

Peter Sayer published on Techworld:

Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of the executive board of the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII), said the consortium ran into a problem with technology, and must now reshape the project. The French company leading the Quaero project, Thomson, wanted to concentrate on managing multimedia resources, while the leading German partner, Empolis, is focused on knowledge management, said Robert Havas, director of AII.

Furthermore Havas said:

Although France and Germany failed to agree on a focus for their work on search technologies, "co-operation between France and Germany is working well" in other research areas.

Thanks for sharing that thought with us Robert, that's really comforting.

iPOD hifi hi-end

Having an iPOD is quite common these days, many people walk 'round with these Apple music players. Not too many have hi-end hifi iPODs. This one I found absolutely looks the business!

Grand Opening as a finale of a grand project: Sound and Vision

From the archives, presentation for FIAT/IFTA

I know, I know, 2004 is some time ago, but I just got hold of the picture taken that day. I gave a speech on searching and navigation in television archives for the international federation of television archives.

New book on AudioVisual Archives

Available from: SAP Publishing Chapter 3: Catalogues

• Arnold W.M Smeulders, Franciska de Jong en Marcel Worring, Multimedia information technology and the annotation of video
• Timo Kouwenhoven, Zoeken + Navigeren = Vinden! Over zoekers, zoekgedrag, zoekmachines en hun interfaces bij het zoeken naar audiovisuele content.
• Arjo van Loo, iMMix: multimediacatalogus

Browsing through multimedia

Johan Oomen and I published our learnings in a magazine for Information Professionals. Johan being the projectleader at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and I being the information strategy consultant have been the tandem carrying out the project for the last 2 years. The article is in Dutch, so is the magazine, but for the english readers we are aiming at presenting the story at the European Streaming Media conference in London on Octobre 12th-13nd.

Quaero's 'stunningly ambitious' technological goals

That’s what The Economist wrote on March 9, 2006 in an article heading:” Search technology: Can an ambitious new European search engine, backed by the governments of France and Germany, challenge Google?” On various blogs people discuss Quaero, so do I. A great many of them state that the way Quaero will compete (as if) with Google and Yahoo! is unfair, since the French and German governments are pumping enormous funds into the collaborative economic effort in the image of the success of Airbus. Well, so what! Isn’t the American software industry built upon the previous investments of its governmental projects like DARPA and NASA? Google being a private company today, doesn’t mean it did ever profit from governmental funds, didn’t Page and Brin study at Stanford, and doesn’t Stanford still hold the patents on the ranking mechanism… I rest my case. Far more interesting than French/German – American competition, is the scientific side of Quaero, that is: investing in building a new body of knowledge about multimedia retrieval. Really pushing the envelope of information retrieval by developing new technology to be able to incorporate other than text-based search mechanisms. Searching by example, with an image as example! One of the french project partners called LTU Technology is already working on it quite some time, now they have the opportunity to get to the next level. And so does the German research team at the university of Karlsruhe, working on speech-based algorithms. The latter are focussed on speech-based retrieval. Furthermore, think of the massive impact on the multiliguality of the web by propagating keywords. Say two images match based on image properties, the one has english metadata the other french metadata, through propagation of these metadata onto eachother (in the index) both pictures will become retrievable in both languages. That’s kick-ass innovation. Let’s give Quaero a chance. Luckily Mrs. Merkell backs the initiative of her predecessor Schroeder, so politics didn’t get in the way during the german government’s transition. Let the researchers do their work, don’t let Quaero get in harms way before something is actually built. It’s not about competing, it’s about a next leap in retrieval, multi media retrieval! PS Quaero has one advantage on Google and alike, it doesn’t have difficult business models underneath, just like Google when it was still a project at Stanford some ten years ago being nurtured by ambitious students called Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Filed in: Quaero, Multimedia Retrieval, Google, Europe.