Institute for Language and Speech Processing

The Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) was founded in Athens (Greece) in 1991 under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of the Ministry of Development. ILSP began its activities in May 1992. The goal of ILSP is to support the growth of Language Technology in Greece. For this purpose it has brought together a team of experts and has created the necessary technical infrastructure in accordance with the EC policy towards safeguarding the European cultural heritage through technology. ILSP aims to be a pole of attraction for the language industry, which will grow both in Greece and in the rest of Europe, thus contributing to the expansion of activities in this particularly important area of modern IT. The industrial direction which it maintains, the experience of its researchers and the close relations, which it keeps with key research centres in other European countries, are the three basic elements of ILSP profile. ILSP carries out applied research in Speech Processing, Text Processing and Language Learning Technologies. Expertise used by the Institute includes basic fields as NLP, DSP and Pattern Recognition. Its mission is mainly to support basic research, promoting on the other hand the development of new products in the form of laboratory prototypes.

The Institute pushes the technologies developed in the framework of projects until the phase of industrial prototypes and products, using the full cycle of industrial development including quality control.

Additionally, ILSP has participated and currently is involved in many National and European projects in topics of language learning, web based learning, content management, video indexing, speech enhancement, technology-enhanced music tuition and others.

Role in VEMUS: ILSP has been the coordinator of the successful IMUTUS project that delivered an efficient Interactive Music Tuition System. Except from the administrative and technical coordination, the role of ILSP in the VEMUS project is to lead the dissemination, the technical specification and the integration of overall VEMUS system. ILSP will also lead research and development work to further enhance score following/matching technology, to perform music signal analysis and feature extraction, to elaborate and extend the distance learning technology developed in the framework of IMUTUS, and to develop the VEMUS intra-networking basis for supporting collaborative features in the classroom.

GRAME

Grame is a National Center for Music Creation supported by the French Ministery of Culture, the Rhone-Alpes region and the City of Lyon. The main mission of the center is to encourage and promote contemporary music creation associating artistical and scientific activities. The activities of Grame are organized in four main departments: music creation, concert and festival organisation, music education and research in computer music. Grame is strongly involved in international music and research activities and provides many opportunities for composers, performers and researchers to collaborate. The areas of expertise of Grame in computer music research are: real time and distributed systems, music operating systems, composition environments and music programming languages. GRAME has been a key partner in the IMUTUS project.

Role in VEMUS: Except contributing to the design and specification of the overall VEMUS system, GRAME will be leading the exploration, research, and development of advanced feedback and interactivity features to be provided by VEMUS. Moreover, it will be driving the development of innovative teaching tools will be introduced to the classroom environment by VEMUS. GRAME will also be actively participating to supportive activities of the project such as validation and requirements acquisition.

KTH

KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) is the largest technical university in Sweden with about 13.000 students and over 3.000 in faculty and staff. The Dept. of Speech Music and Hearing - a division of the School of Computer Science and Communication - teaches and conducts research in the areas of speech communication, speech technology, music acoustics and music technology, and hearing technology. With a faculty of 50 researchers and PhD students and a turnover of about 3,500,000 €, the department represents a competitive partner in major branches of speech and music research. The department has been engaged in 12 projects in EU Fifth Framework Programme (FP5), some of them as coordinator, as well as being a Marie Curie Training Site. Presently, the department is active in two IPs and a NoE in FP6.

The Music Acoustics Group within the department is active in research on music performance, the physics and acoustics of musical instruments, and singing. While running in parallel for periods, the research areas often merge and interact. An example is the physical modelling of instruments and voice where the group has devoted particular interest to the study of the control systems used in actual performances, for example breathing behaviour in singers and wind instrumentalists, bow movement in string playing, and pianists/ touch control. The prevailing lack of thorough knowledge of such control systems is a bottle-neck in the exploiting of physical models for commercial synthesizers. In the recently finished IMUTUS project (Interactive Music Tuition System IST- 2001-32270) the group took a prominent part, being responsible for the central performance evaluation, as well as the validation in cooperation with music schools.

Research at KTH on musical performance by computer modelling has been a long-term project, dating back to the 70/s. The KTH generative music performance grammar Director Musices has been well-known in research laboratories for more than a decade. In addition, thousands of music-interested people all over the world have down-loaded this music interpretation program since it was made accessible on the internet in 1997. More recently, models for the synthesis of emotional expression in music performance have been developed and made available on the internet http://www.speech.kth.se/music.

The KTH research team has a strong tradition in publishing in peer reviewed scientific journals, as well as in diffusing research results to the general public in form of seminars, multimedia, interactive software, and information on the Internet.

Role in VEMUS: The role of KTH in the VEMUS project will be to further enhance the effective automatic performance evaluation technology it has developed in the context of IMUTUS and also to extend it in order to cover all the additional instruments addressed by VEMUS. In parallel, a major task of KTH will also be to thoroughly validate the VEMUS self-practicing environment based on sound methodologies, extending, consolidating and scaling-up the efforts that begun in the context of IMUTUS and aiming to arrive at coherent and statistically meaningful conclusions.

EA

Ellinogermaniki Agogi is an educational organization of private law, officially recognized by the state. It is an institutional member of EDEN (European Distance Education Network) and of STEDE (Science Teacher Education Development in Europe) network. Ellinogermaniki Agogi was the national representative of the Greek Ministry of Education in the International exhibition "Salon de l' education" that was held in November 2000 in Paris in the framework of the e-Learning Initiative of the European Commission.

Ellinogermaniki Agogi was the first Greek educational organization, which applied ODL in secondary level education in the year of 1993. Since 1995, the organization has established a devoted department, the Research and Development Department for the design, development and implementation of the research activities in education, expanding the collaboration with Universities and pedagogical Institutions across Europe, as it provides the best test bed for research applications. The research work of the department focuses on the following areas:

1. the development of methodologies and empirical research to investigate processes of learning and knowledge acquisition in various subject-matter areas (physics, mathematics, biology, history, etc)
2. the collaboration with computer science departments and artificial intelligence labs for the development of computational models and Ambient Intelligence systems (wearable computers, embedded devices);
3. the collaboration with Universities and private companies for the development and testing of educational software; and
4. the design of technology-supported learning environments. The Department employs 20 persons (10 PhD level, 10 MSc). During the last years the Research and Development Department of Ellinogermaniki Agogi has coordinated and supported the participation of the organization in many European and National projects (more than 30 RTD projects), in the following fields:

• R&D projects in educational technology
• Pilot applications of ICT at school environments
• Development of advanced language learning tools

The Ellinogermaniniki Agogi school covers every degree of education from nursery to upper secondary being a pilot school emphasizing in foreign languages teaching, application of new technologies, extensive use of the laboratory in natural sciences teaching and research in education. EA school teaches the English and German languages intensively from nursery school. Operating for 39 years in the educational sector, with 1800 students and personnel of 300 people (205 scientific and 95 administrative), it is one of the greatest educational institutions in Greece. It owns two fully equipped school campuses, with special classrooms for information technology, music, painting, physics, chemistry, biology, a library, projection room, theatre, sports hall and an indoor swimming pool. Through these means and facilities, the school provides its students the opportunity to get involved in various civil and social activities, reinforcing the level of education they get. In 1993 EA started a program to create the first Internet web site of a Greek school as well as a dial-up centre, providing students and teachers the opportunity to cooperate with schools from many different countries abroad by direct communication from school or even from home, through their modem devices.

Role in VEMUS: EA will be leading the VEMUS user-centered activities. It will coordinate the user groups in the different countries with the help of the respective VEMUS partners. EA will lead the user requirements acquisition and will concertate the validation activities in the different countries. It will organize and assist in the organization of workshops, open days and other event. It will manage and facilitate e-twinning initiatives in the context of the project.

UAB "Balteck"

Balteck, UAB is Lithuanian IT company founded in 2004. Company is located in Kaunas. Balteck activities are focused on the development of advanced and competitive IST technologies and products.

The key areas of expertise of Balteck are related to music and speech recognition. Other areas of expertise of Balteck include development of enterprise systems, e-commerce, e-business solutions, information management and education systems, IT consulting.

Balteck personnel consists of nearly 10 developers, researchers and administration employees. Balteck closely cooperates with the public universities on particular scientific projects. In addition, the company is constantly hiring freelancers to satisfy project development needs.

The baseline technology at Balteck in relation to VEMUS proposal includes Solo MFX 2.2 and the Solo Explorer 1.0. Solo MFX 2.2 is a dynamic link library (DLL) encompassing the technology for recognition of monophonic music. The set of functions of Solo MFX 2.2 includes pitch tracking, note onset detection, rhythm recognition, and tonal quantisation. Solo MFX 2.2 is based on state-of-the-art digital signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques. It is designed to be used for rapid development of Windows-based applications requiring off-line music recognition functionality.

Role in VEMUS: The role of Balteck in the VEMUS project will be to provide enhanced and noise-tolerant real-time and off-line audio recognition modules for each of the instruments that will be supported by project. Balteck will also develop a real-time tempo-tracker that will enable the system to provide automatic accompaniment while practicing. Being a commercial partner, Balteck will be actively involved in market research and exploitation planning.

NAKAS

The company established in 1937 by Philippos Nakas. The main activities of Ph. Nakas S.A. are:

• Import and distribution of all king of musical instruments, consumer electronics, professional audio, and multimedia
• Publication, import and distribution of all kind of music books.
• Music Education through the "Philippos Nakas" conservatory.

Sales Network: The sales network includes 40 self-owned and 24 franchising shops all over Greece, with numerous dealers.

Music Education: The "Philippos Nakas" conservatory is a department of Philippos Nakas S.A. since 1989 and it is officially authorized by the Ministry of Education. The central building is located in Athens and also 8 subsidiaries of the conservatory are in operation in various areas of Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Ioannina and Corfu island.

It has 200 faculty members and 2500 students and offers a range of courses also including courses on instrumental performance studies (piano, strings, woodwind, brass, timpani and percussion) and music technology.

The Philippos Nakas Conservatory is a founding member of the Berklee International Network. Apart from the clearly educational character, the conservatory organizes annually a significant number (about 150) of recitals, master classes, seminars, competitions and other cultural events.

Role in VEMUS: The role of Nakas in VEMUS will be to participate in user requirements elicitation and in testing and validation schedules involving students and teachers. Having a strong commercial profile and wide awareness of the music market, Nakas will be leading the market research, market analysis and exploitation planning for the VEMUS project.

Miksike

Miksike LearningFolders (LeFo) - "open source" educational publishing and online support for regular schools since 1994. LeFo gives away more than 25 000 worksheets in HTML eWorksheets and offers a variety of collaborative learning services to facilitate learners in learning how to learn and constructing their knowledge.

History, fame, awards: Miksike development started 1994 in the non-profit organization "Miks ja Milleparast", which works successfully till today with projects with small rural schools and Russian speaking minorities in the Baltics and other projects. OU Miksike grew out from NGO "Miks ja Milleparast" in 1998.

Miksike has organized over years nearly a hundred online learning collaborative events/activities in Estonia and also internationally. Bigger international projects organized by Miksike are: in 1998 The Dino contest, 1999/2002 Environment and in 2002 Adjective contest and TQ Quiz Cup and MentalMath e-Xcitement 2003. Participants from more then 70 countries have participated in these activities. Since 2002 MentalMath eXcitement competition is organized, which is now developed further. Autumn 2004 language learning project InEx started.

Miksike has got several international and national awards and recognitions including the winner of the Stockholm Challenge Award 2000, Sweden; Best Practices in Education, USA; Conexiones, Colombia 2000, nominated to the World Summit Award 2003. In 2002 Miksike was awarded European Language Label for successful language learning practices.

European cooperation: 2002-2004 Miksike coordinated the Socrates/Minerva project number 100152 - LearningFolders, which created current LeFo software platform.

LeFo is used by the University of Bremen; EGO-Creanet - University of Florence; schools in Goteborg region; in Austria; Slovenia, and Estonia. By January 2005 LeFo had over 35000 registered users.

At least 4 new soltions are built on LeFo. LeFo will serve as a platform for:

• the "Cinema and Science" project coordinated by the Vienna University of Technology
• Rgames project, which produces 3D learning materials. Coordinator: University of Ljubljana
• eXcitment project which deals with cooperative math/science learning. Coordinators: Laagna Gymnasium and Estonian SchoolHeads Association
• InEx, which deals with language learning. Coordinator: NGO Miks ja Milleparast

Miksike LearningFolders is involved with several other European projects: LinguaNet, FEEL, ASSIPA, VENOSCES. Since 2002 Miksike also offers consultancy and expert services to different institutions (European Commission, Ministry of Minances of Estonia).

Miksike is used each day by more then 25.000 learners (teachers/pupils).

Role in VEMUS: The role of Miksike in VEMUS is to be a local validation and dissemination center for the project. Miksike establish a network of user groups in the wider area of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania building on existing links. This network will be exploited by VEMUS for the elicitation of requirements and for organizing and carrying out validation activities and workshops in those areas. The network will also be used as a main dissemination vehicle for those countries. Miksike will also undertake the task of translating the VEMUS front-end environment to those three languages.

TEHNE

http://www.tehne.ro

Bd. Timisoara 37, T10-Ap. 78
061311 Bucharest
ROMANIA

Contact person:
Alina Borcos

Tel: +40 21 3313 353
Fax: +40 21 4024676
Email: alina.borcos@tehne.ro

TEHNE is a non-profit organization, aiming to support educational initiatives through projects and programs covering areas of technology enhanced learning, non-formal education, formal curriculum development, education on human rights and active citizenship, career and guidance for pupils and young people, lifelong learning, teacher training etc. As a non-governmental organisation, without political purposes, TEHNE promotes the European principles and values in the field of education through innovative approaches and technologies. The expertise of TEHNE as an active Romanian NGO in the field of education is built through the experience of experts' boards, involved by TEHNE in its educational programs: researchers, academics, practitioners, combining different types of expertise: from grass-root level to decision-making.

TEHNE is a member of SEE-ECN, supporting the network in local research and projects. SEE ECN (South East Europe Education Cooperation Network) is developed by Centre for Educational Policy Studies (Slovenia) and KulturKontakt (Austria), within the framework of the Stability Pact for South-East Europe.

TEHNE is a partener of EULLearN (European University Lifelong Learning Network) a Socrates Erasmus Thematic Network aimed at identifying coherent strategies and practical measures to foster university lifelong learning. This Thematic Network supports the exchange of good practices and experiences and the identification of common problems, ideas and priorities.

Miksike has got several international and national awards and recognitions including the winner of the Stockholm Challenge Award 2000, Sweden; Best Practices in Education, USA; Conexiones, Colombia 2000, nominated to the World Summit Award 2003. In 2002 Miksike was awarded European Language Label for successful language learning practices.

Civica-Online is a project developed by the Institute for Educational Sciences in partnership with TEHNE. The website http://www.civica-online.ro provides a comprehensive information tool for teachers and NGO's members involved in formal and non-formal civic education. The long-term objective of the project is to support the process of social changes and the reform of civic education. In this respect, it facilitates access to information and promotes education changes in a bottom-up approach.

1educat.ro consists in an online tool used to provide continuous support for teaching and training staff, along with counselling and guidance for graduated students in accessing labour market and further education programmes. Within the project, TEHNE is developing the "Resources for Teaching and Training" section, collaborating with trainers in continuous training programmes and teachers in formal education all over the country.

The added value of ICT in education, also in formal and non-formal education in Romania, is promoted and monitored by TEHNE through various instruments - from field action-research to advanced web-based tools - in projects as: eLiT Education (Excellence in Learning through Innovative Technologies in Education), 1educat.ro (resource-website for teachers and educational portal for continuous education), Romanian eLearning Fora (www.elearning-forum.ro - information, tools, references and discussion-boards for elearning practitioners), RE2U (Romanian-European eUniversity).

eLiT Education is a project initiated and supported by British Council Romania, aiming to create a community of practice, whose members share different professions, but mutual interests and similar competency patrimonies, in order to start a continuous exchange of ideas and experiences among the involved actors in Romania and the UK. TEHNE is an active partner within the eLiT Network, carrying out the "Impact of ICTs in education" component.

Romanian eLearning Fora (eLearning REF.) gathers practitioners and researchers in eLearning area. The exchange of information, best practices and ideas between the opinion-leaders involved shapes the theoretical and practical domain of using ICTs for teaching and learning at an Internet distance. A web-based platform for communication, including relevant documents and references, articles and studies, was set up by TEHNE - the initiator of the project - on http://www.elearning-forum.ro domain.

EU funded projects:

• EULLEARN - The European Lifelong Learning Network, (109783-CP-1-2003-1-LT-ERASMUS-TN), Socrates Erasmus TN, DG EAC, 2003-2006.
• SMEs COUNSELLING: Development of a "front-line" advice - guidance - counselling scheme for SMEs employees - (RO/03/B/F/PP-175017), Leonardo Da Vinci, DG EAC, 2004-2006.
• VALUE-SCOUT - Value Schools and Citizenship Observatory for Culture and Sport, (2004-2503/001-001 SO-61OBGE), Socrates Action 6.1&6.2, DG EAC, 2004-2006.
• TAKE PART TOO - Active Global-Citizens Simulation, (113938-CP-1-2004-1-UK-MINERVA-M), Socrates Minerva, DG EAC, 2004-2006.

Role in VEMUS: The role of TEHNE in VEMUS is to be a local validation and dissemination center for the project, establishing a network of user groups in Romania. This network will be exploited by VEMUS for the elicitation of requirements and for organizing and carrying out validation activities and workshops in those areas. The network will also be used as a main dissemination vehicle for Romania. TEHNE will also undertake the task of translating the VEMUS front-end environment to Romanian.