26 May 2005

57 research institutes work together on ground-breaking research via the Internet

Researchers and PhD students from 57 locations in Europe, Israel and Australia are using desktop video conferencing for ground-breaking research into artificial intelligence which could have a wide reaching impact on society.

Specialists in optimization, statistics and computational learning are using Marratech desktop conferencing to meet and work across the Internet with experts in computer vision, speech recognition and information retrieval to develop software to automatically perform sophisticated tasks.

According to Nicola Cancedda, researcher at the Xerox Research Centre Europe and PASCAL infrastructure programme manager: "Given the distributed nature of our network, identifying appropriate tools for virtual meetings has been a priority since the beginning. After an extensive comparative study among commercial and public-domain tools, Marratech was selected for its very good performance, the integration of many functionalities, the great simplicity of installation and use, its reasonable price and capability of running on all the operating systems through all the firewalls in the network."

As part of its activities PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning) which is financed by the European Commission, funds innovative, inter-disciplinary, and often small research projects that would not be able to obtain support from national and international funding agencies due to the high uncertainty of their results.

The desktop conferencing system is located on the network's Linux Debian main server at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany with a second node at INRIA, the French national institute for research in computer science and control, to take advantage of Marratech¹s flexible node configurations which optimises bandwidth usage between the 57 centres.

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