AI4Media’s integration with the European AI-on-demand platform

Author: Andreas Steenpaß (FRAUNHOFER IAIS)

The European AI-on-demand platform is a one-stop shop for anyone looking for AI knowledge, technology, tools, services and experts. The aim of this platform, which has been initiated by the AI4EU project, is to bring together the AI community while promoting European values and to facilitate technology transfer from research to industry. As a follow-up project of AI4EU, AI4Media is collaborating closely with the AI4EU platform by integrating the project’s outputs such as modules, services and algorithms into it as well as by organizing web cafés for community building. Due to these activities, AI4Media is one of the pillars for ensuring the sustainability of the AI-on-demand platform over the years to come.

In January 2019, the AI4EU consortium was established to build the first European artificial intelligence on-demand platform and ecosystem with the support of the European Commission under the H2020 program. As more and more features are integrated, the AI4EU platform serves as a catalyst to aid AI-based innovation, resulting in new products, services and solutions to benefit European industry, commerce and society. By bringing people together, the platform counterbalances the fragmentation of the European AI landscape.

Since the end of the year 2021 also marks the official end of the AI4EU project, it is now the task and the responsibility of the follow-up projects within the funding initiatives ICT-48 and ICT-49 to continuously animate the AI-on-demand platform by integrating new assets and features. The integration of AI4Media with the platform covers a wide spectrum of aspects which are reflected by the different sub-activities:

First, AI4Media ensures the publication of the AI resources developed within the project to the AI-on-demand platform. There is a large variety of types of resources such as service, dataset, docker container, library, or tutorial. All of them will be published online in the AI Catalogue. The high quality of the uploaded assets is guaranteed by the publication process, and each entry contains detailed information about the respective resource including a textual description, relevant documents, the license, and the GDPR requirements.

Second, AI4Media supports the community-building activities of the AI-on-demand platform by offering a series of live web cafés on AI. The goal of these sessions is to gain insights into the international AI scene, to share knowledge and experiences, and to meet stakeholders from various areas of AI research and application. The live web cafés regularly reach a very wide audience, while recordings of past web cafés are available on GoToStage. So far, there have been six sessions with contributions from AI4Media members and this exceptionally successful format will surely be continued.

Third, a selection of the resources published in the AI Catalogue is also technically integrated into AI4EU Experiments, an open-source platform for the development, training, sharing and deployment of AI models which constitutes the technical part of the AI-on-demand platform. Of course, this only applies to resources of those types where a technical integration is reasonable such as datasets and docker containers, but no tutorials. The selection is made based on the requirements of AI4Media’s use cases and on the impact of the relevant research.

Going beyond the publication and technical integration of AI resources, AI4Media will also provide showcases for the interoperability of AI4EU Experiments with other media platforms, which is a major success factor for wider dissemination on both sides. For example, it is foreseen to provide adapters for making modules from other platforms available in AI4EU Experiments.

Finally, the project also conducts in-depth research on the shifting approach from platform liability to platform responsibility for third-party infringing and/or illegal content. For this task, the focus lies on specific guidelines and recommendations regarding the impact of legal regulations on the AI-on-demand platform. It is worth emphasizing that some activities of the AI4EU project will continue under the umbrella of AI4Media, such as the very successful web cafés and the further development of AI4EU Experiments. Some of the aspects outlined above have also been discussed in much greater detail at the AI4Media workshop on the European AI-on-demand platform which took place on 11 November 2021 (Available on YouTube). Once again, the workshop has illustrated that the integration of AI4Media with this platform is a continuous process for the benefit of both projects.