Inria and the Ministry of Culture and Communication sign a new agreement
Date:
Changed on 16/04/2020
The cross-disciplinary challenges are numerous, from development of digital cultural resources and usages, to the digital preservation, digitisation and dissemination of the cultural heritage, to musical and artistic production, to interactive visits of real or virtual museums and to promotion of the influence of French. The Ministry of Culture and Communication and Inria thus decided to sign a new partnership agreement to develop and enhance SemanticPedia, a collaborative venture created in 2012 around the “DBpédia in French” project.
Common objectives
This agreement aims more specifically to set up cultural research and development projects, drawing on the expertise of Inria, and to organise meetings between cultural players and researchers.
The main objectives will be to:
- promote reciprocal contacts between players in the fields of culture and the digital sciences and technologies;
- make cultural players more aware of the issues of R&D as applied to digital sciences and technologies;
- promote the emergence of R&D projects at the crossroads between the digital sciences and technologies and cultural usages and resources;
- drive digital projects with a nationwide impact on the dissemination and promotion of cultural and linguistic data and usages;
- promote a more professional approach to managing R&D projects among the cultural players;
- pool R&D efforts, know-how and resources among the cultural players;
- collate data sets, usage types and motivating scenarios to identify the expectations of the cultural players and Inria, along with the development possibilities;
- promote technology transfer from the Inria research teams to the cultural players;
- ensure long-term dissemination of R&D results among the cultural players.
Digital technology working for culture
The technological innovations concerned by the cooperation agreement cover Inria’s field of activity, which includes the following main disciplines: applied mathematics, calculation and simulation; algorithms, programming, software and architectures; networks, systems and services, distributed computing; perception, cognition, interaction.
This latter field is more particularly concerned with applications in multimedia vision, perception and interpretation; interaction and visualisation; the representation and processing of data and knowledge; robotics and intelligent environments; language, speech and audio.
The oversight and coordination of this cooperation are entrusted to a standing experts group, comprising representatives of the Ministry of Culture and Communication and of Inria, more specifically tasked with analysing and evaluating the R&D project proposals submitted to it by the cultural players and with encouraging the sharing of human, technical and financial resources, by whenever possible supporting the amalgamation of various project proposals.
Promoting the emergence of new topics
This cooperation will help stimulate the creative interaction between cultural project sponsors, experts and researchers in the digital sciences and technologies and encourage the emergence of new interdisciplinary R&D topics. It will also help overcome the technological obstacles identified in the field of cultural and linguistic applications and/or enable the testing of new usages and innovative concepts, which have both an impact in the cultural sector and are of interest for the digital sciences.
Digital Sciences and the service of Culture at Inria
3D reconstitutions of the ancient Syrian heritage, threatened by war, are now available in the Syrian Heritage online database.
Virtual assembling is sometines the only solution to study and preserve damaged objects of our heritage. The Manao team-project is working with archeologists on SeARCH to recreate the colossus of Alexandria Lighthouse.
A visualization scenario of the full 3D model of this world heritage archaeological site as well as an interactive virtual navigation experience.. This great step forward is the fruit of an exemplar collaboration between academic, public and private organizations: Microsoft Research and Inria, through their joint research center in Paris, and the French startups Iconem and Cintoo3D. The broader ambition of this project is to propose a new approach to 3D cartography of cities and major urban centers.
With its official status as an ERIC, DARIAH aims to use digital sciences in the interests of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The consortium’s Director is Laurent Romary, an Inria Research Director.
Can a machine listen to and enter into dialogue with a musician in real time when he is playing a piece of music? Arshia Cont, research director of an Inria/CNRS/Ircam team has taken up the challenge by created the start-up Antescofo, who use a software developed with the MuTant research team and which combines real musical instruments with electronic sound production devices.
The Mint project team from Inria Lille - Nord Europe has had the crazy idea of producing a digital book that reproduces touch sensations. For its design, the team is turning to a participative method - calling upon the imagination of elementary and high school children.