News from MTA SZTAKI

Sztakipédia

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:39:00 +0200

Sztakipedia is an experimental editing assistant for Wikipedia (and for other web-based systems). The project focuses on enabling everyday users to create documents with the help of text mining, intelligent search, linked data and machine learning. There are many Applications of Sztakipedia but the public one is Wikipedia editing. It is done by the help of a toolbar you can install into your wiki account. For details, see the project website or the book chapter written about Sztakipedia in the book titled "Semantic Mashups" published by Springer.

Summer School on Grid and Cloud Workflows and Gateways

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:16:00 +0200

The Summer School on Grid and Cloud Workflows and Gateways that will be held at Budapest, 1-6 July 2013 at Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems.

The main goal of this year’s Summer School is to give answers about how to exploit grid and cloud infrastructures in Europe, how to port and develop application for these infrastructures and how to extend their user communities. The Summer School offers a good opportunity to promote best practice examples for potential application developers and users of e-science infrastructures.
Everyone is welcome to join! More information and registration here.

The European Future Technologies (FET) 2011

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:53:00 +0200

The VirCA platform which is developed under the leadership of the 3DICC laboratory of MTA SZTAKI has been exhibited in several distinguished international forums among which the Taipei International Robot Show (TIROS) 2010 – organized parallel to the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots – and The European Future Technologies (FET) 2011 Conference and Exhibition are worth mentioning. At the latter one, MTA SZTAKI has won the exhibit third prize based on the visitors votes.

CogInfoCom conference series

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:13:00 +0200

In recognition of the accelerating merging process between the cognitive sciences and infocommunications technologies, the CogInfoCom (Cognitive Infocommunications) conference series was initiated in 2012 by MTA SZTAKI and BME TMIT, and was established with the participation of an international group of leading researchers. The members of the startup committee of the conference are from 9 different countries, and have backgrounds in a variety of engineering and cognition-related fields.

The 2nd International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications was held in Budapest in 2011. Altogether, there were 81 papers presented at the conference. 10% of all papers presented were co-authored by area chairs from at least two different fields, while 40% of were co-authored by researchers from different fields. For example, there were papers co-authored by well-known professors from control theory, informatics and ethology. Similarly, there were papers co-authored by professors representing ergonomics and control theory. These figures demonstrated well the interdisciplinary nature of CogInfoCom, and how much the newly established conference series could encourage synergy between fields that were previously regarded as entirely distinct from each other.

The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, held in Kosice in 2012, saw an even greater number of guests than the conference of the previous year. Altogether, there were 165 presentations at the conference along with 23 demonstrations of practical results. Several demonstrations were centered around the VirCA system – which is a uniquely extensible 3D augmented/virtual collaboration platform developed at MTA SZTAKI. The fact that 331 authors contributed to the conference from 100 institutions and 28 countries demonstrates the increasing impact of the conference.

3D Virtual Reality Room

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:53:00 +0200

Our CAVE-like 3D immersive Virtual Reality Room has three special walls that allow images to be projected on them, surrounding the people using it and creating the illusion of being inside the virtual environment. The walls of the VR Room are made up of rear-projection screens, and high-end projectors display images on each of the screens. The user inside the VR Room wears special glasses and can see 3D images of objects in the virtual scene projected on the walls. The proper view of what the object would look like when the user walks around it is controlled by his or her physical movements using a head tracking sensor. People using the VR Room can actually see objects floating in the air, can walk around them, and can look inside them. The user can also use his or her hands to interact or touch the 3D objects in the virtual world by using a hand tracking sensor. More sophisticated interaction is also possible by various kind of human interfaces, like the Measurand Motion Capture Suit, Microsoft Kinect, Nintendo WII controller and speech recognition. In order to have more complex interaction we perform research on the filed of cognitive infocommunication. How it works? The 3D VR Room at MTA-SZTAKI is a 3-walled immersive virtual reality environment. The three screens are projected by 6 Infitec projectors. The stereoscopic 3D image is conveyed by passive stereo glasses with infitec filters. The 6 images per frame (one for each eye on the three walls) are calculated by a single, high-end workstation and two high performance GPU-s, directly connected to the projectors. This allows the full control of the VR Room from one computer, without the need for a computer cluster keeping the system architecture simple but powerful. The calculation of the projected images takes into account the position and orientation information obtained from the head tracking sensor mounted on the user's glasses. The result is a perfect 3D percept on all the screens, in corners and at any head orientation.

VirCA – Virtual Collaboration Arena

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:50:00 +0200

The VirCA (Virtual Collaboration Arena) platform was developed with the leading support of MTA SZTAKI. From a global perspective, VirCA is the first platform capable of integrating knowledge components (e.g., speech centers, image processing capabilities, controller modules, etc.) already implemented in laboratories around the world with both real objects (e.g., robots, airplanes etc.) and virtual objects. VirCA achieves this through an innovation store (available through the Internet to all VirCA instances) that is capable of storing existing components, in order to promote fast knowledge transfer for research, development and innovation. Further, VirCA enables researchers who are not necessarily in the same location, or even on the same continent to design, develop and integrate solutions together in a common virtual space. In summary, VirCA is a pilot solution which highlights one possible aspect of the EU trend of Future Internet, and as such provides very effective means of collaborative R&D in a single virtual space. The arguably novel philosophy behind the platform was recognized through an award received at the FET'11 international forum.

Spin-off Model of Smart Frame

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:40:00 +0200

SMART FRAME is a project that creates a dynamic network by connecting partners from
several European countries. It focuses among others on the successful generation of spinoffs
and spin-outs by creating a win-win situation for all involved parties. Two handbooks have been elaborated within the frame of the SMART FRAME project. These handbooks contain ideas for cooperation, critical aspects regarding spin-offs, models for running up business and national contact points. One handbook especially focuses on spinoff founders’ needs whereas the other aims at the needs of the managers of the mother companies. This very handbook aims at founder’s needs. It results from international best practices for spin-offs, contains know-how from regional intermediaries, experiences from universities, R&D institutions, literature and companies which already deal with spin-offs successfully. It shows how to create a win-win situation for the spin-off founders as well as for the mother company.

PANELOMAT

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:40:00 +0200

Market and opinion research is an important tool of the modern economy: you can use it to assess market response to a product in advance, and you can measure customer satisfaction afterwards. In this context the term “product” extends beyond the conventional concept of market products to planned decisions and actions. The quality of research is determined by the quality of the panel, the database containing the respondents’ i.e. the panelists’ data. The web-based Panelomat system – developed by MTA SZTAKI Internet Applications Department - enables you to manage your panels in a simple and efficient way. Panelomat offers a unique integrated system for all panel management functions. Panelomat is easy to use and its processes are clear and logically constructed, thanks to our experience in developing market research software over more than ten years.

Main features:

You can import your existing panelists or recruit new ones.
Panelists can log in to a portal to check for available surveys and their point balance, redeem their points and bring in new panelists.
You can define complex filters and multiple quotas based on panelist attributes
Panelists can be invited, reminded and re-invited even in a scheduled way.
Popular third party Query Designer and Survey Engine tools are already integrated part of Panelomat, but - thanks to the quite open architecture of Panelomat – any such tools can be integrated easily.
You can create sophisticated statistics about your panel based on the attributes of the panelists.

lod.sztaki.hu

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:38:00 +0200

The lod.sztaki.hu page is a full Linked Open Data (LOD) service equipped with a SPARQL endpoint, dereferencable URIs and a faceted data browser, operated by the Department of Distributed Systems. The dataset aims at publishing the contents of Hungarian archives as Linked Open Data based on the National Digital Data Archive of Hungary. The dataset contains information about books, movies, articles published in Hungary and some of its resources are linked to other datasets in the LOD cloud (see below). The majority of the data comes from our service nda.sztaki.hu, which is an OAI-PMH harvester of Hungarian archives and also offers a joint search service for the harvested data. The Dublin Core metadata harvested by nda.sztaki.hu was converted by our script to RDF. This process also included cleaning and unification of data. The resulting RDF dataset contains approximately 11 million triples with about 561,000 outlinks to external datasets (e.g. DBpedia, VIAF). Our resources are dereferencable and can be seen in XML, HTML, N3, JSON, TTL, etc. representations. The RDF schemas used in the datasets include DC, FOAF, schema.org and DBpedia.

Three Dimensional Web Development

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:29:00 +0200

The aim of the Computer Integrated Manufactoring Laboratory's work is to develop three-dimensional real space experience giving 3D websites. We have several options for the three-dimensional visualization that we have applied in our webpage. First we used the well-known anaglyph (in our case red-cyan) technique. Our website is unique, because it can display spatial effects of text and images. Another method that we applied was the side by side technique that technique requires special tools, but this method is the most effective for 3D immersion. The colour saturation is not reduced, the pictures are very realistic. In the next step we used 3D representations (animated GIF, autostereograms) that don’t require any special tool. Our further aim to develop special algorithms that can convert almost any two-dimensional webpage into three-dimensions. Another application of our result the 3D version of the webpage of MTA SZTAKI that will be available soon.