The ten projects from AI4Media’s second funding program are introducing fresh AI research and innovation for the media industry

The objective of AI4Media – Open Call #2, much like the first open call, was to engage companies and researchers in developing new research and applications for AI and media, thus contributing to the enrichment of the technological tools developed within the AI4Media network. Applicants were required to address specific challenges outlined by AI4Media partners, all of which are aligned with the Roadmap on AI technologies and applications for the Media Industry. 

Out of a total of 95 submissions received from 24 countries during the competitive open call, 10 projects were selected. The open call ran from September 29 to November 30, 2022. Eligible submissions underwent external evaluation by independent experts, and a selected group of proposals advanced to the interview stage. Each project has been awarded a grant of up to €50,000 to implement their work plan.

Throughout the remainder of the funding program, AI4Media will provide beneficiaries with tailored coaching, business support, and external visibility. Additionally, a boot camp featuring various workshops will be conducted later in 2023.

Here’s a brief overview of the funded projects and their objectives:

APPLICATION projects:

1. JECT-CLONE (JECT.AI Limited, SME from the UK): Delivering new computational creativity capabilities as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that autonomously generates novel themes, angles, and voices for stories, sending them regularly to subscribed journalists and editors through existing channels.
2. VIREO (Human Opsis, SME from Greece): Recommending images to professionals in the News and Media industry using AI techniques, enhancing the creation of visually compelling articles and improving the reading experience for media consumers.
3. NLMIE (Kaspar Aps, SME from Denmark): Combining Natural Language Processing with Computer Vision to modernize audiovisual archives.
4. MBD (Tech Wave Development Srl, SME from Romania): Uniting artists, journalists, and programmers against misinformation by providing ways to visualize the hidden structures of fake information, making it meaningful for both journalists and the general public.
5. magnet (inknow solutions, lda, SME from Portugal): Offering a tool to support journalists in the early phases of article production by automatically resurfacing relevant content from previous activities.

RESEARCH projects:

1. CAMOUFLAGE (Politecnico di Torino, Higher Education institution from Italy): Developing diffusion models for extreme image anonymization in social media.
2. ELMER (University of Surrey, Higher Education institution from the UK): Creating an efficient system for content retrieval capable of handling multi-modal audio, image, text, and video data, particularly for footage longer than 10 seconds.
3. HoloNeXT (Fundació i2CAT, Research organization from Spain): Developing a novel XR media production tool integrating two volumetric/XR technologies: Neural Radiance Field scene modeling and holographic real-time video volumetric transmission.
4. CLIP LENS (CENTIC, Research organization from Spain): Enhancing AI-based systems like image classifiers and search engines through generative data augmentation and CLIP.
5. VolEvol (“Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Higher Education institution from Romania): Facilitating the rendering of images from volume data using evolutionary algorithms to search for rendering parameters based on quality and diversity-oriented optimization objectives.

Authors: Samuel Almeida, Ellie Shtereva, and Catarina Reis (F6S)