Project Proposal (PDF) - Oxford Brookes University

FP7-ICT-2011-9 STREP proposal
18/01/12 v1 [Dynact]
bodies, security agencies (HMGCC is just an example), and utility/transportation providers (such as BAA in
the UK) will be interested in testing the effectiveness of our techniques in improving the security levels of
their countries or facilities.
Given the more challenging nature of surveillance applications which are the focus of the interest of public
bodies and authorities, we plan to engage them towards the very end of the project, in case the results
strongly support the feasibility of an outdoor deployment of activity recognition systems or gait-based
identification prototypes. As a first step, national governments could be invited to sponsor a prototype to be
thoroughly tested on the field. We will arrange preliminary meetings with these public or semi-public entities
in the last six months of the project, in which we will display the performance and robustness of our
prototype.
Engaging intermediate regional or national bodies. Actions will also be taken through intermediate bodies
such as, for instance, the Enterprise Europe Network (www.enterpriseeuropesw.org.uk), an organisation
promoting contact opportunities for business partners and supporting intellectual property management and
access to European funding. The Coordinator has indeed recently attended an ICT info day at HP Labs in
Bristol in April 2010, and established there links with potential partners, which could be useful to kickstart
follow up projects. Another organisation we plan to actively involve is the Knowledge Transfer Network
(https://ktn.innovateuk.org/), a platform set up by the UK Technology Strategy Board which “provides an
effective and powerful way for you to collaborate online, network and share knowledge with other
innovators”.
Exploiting the partners' academic links to kickstart follow-up projects at national or European level.
STREPs, by definition, are small scale projects designed to focus on specific, well defined problems.
Clearly, though, the topics addressed by this project, both on the theoretical side (the formalisation and
consolidation of inference techniques for dynamical models which handle uncertainty via sets of probability
disctributions, and the formulation of discriminative models which incorporate dynamics) and on the side of
applications (action, gesture, activity, or identity recognition from motion) are at the cutting edge of current
research in the area, and their study will necessarily proceed far beyond the lifespan of any project. Indeed,
the Coordinator is seeking UK EPSRC funding on discriminative modelling and manifold learning for
dynamical models on a separate three-year project [16], and has been awarded funds by EPSRC for a two
year project on gait identification. It makes therefore sense to plan, towards the end of the project, a number
of subsequent initiatives at both national and, possibly, European level.
The existing consortium enjoys a large network of contacts throughout the European continent, including:
INRIA (France), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), EPFL and IDIAP (Switzerland), Politecnico di Milano
(Italy) and others, that can and will be exploited in this sense. For instance, Barcelona’s CILAB
(http://cilab2.upf.edu/index2.html), a partner of OBU in a separate upcoming FP7 FET proposal on large
scale manifold learning and shape analysis, is active in blood vessel and heart simulation via bilinear
modelling, and enjoys intensive collaborations with several hospitals. Oxford University's professor Thomas
Lukasiewicz is working with the Coordinator on a Google Research Award on video retrieval under
uncertainty that could lead to further research on the automatic description of videos for browsing purposes.
A three-year national French project FUI-11 OSEO / DGCIS on cloning has started in January 2012. We
have no doubts that the company involved in this project (Agence de Doublure Numérique) will be really
interested by the results of Dynact.
Web site. Besides seminars targeting audiences such as companies and other organisations, we attribute
great importance to the dissemination of our results through a web site dedicated to the project, which will be
designed in order to attract not only academic interest, but also knowledge transfer partners and will be
publicised accordingly. The web site will serve several purposes:
distribute the data and algorithms collected/generated by each individual partner to all the others,
through a secure server;
disseminate the scientific results to the wider academic community (with a focus on the communities
of imprecise probabilities, machine learning, action and gesture recognition, and gait identification)
using a different channel than that of publication on journals and conferences: this could also
improve the scientific impact in terms of (Google Scholar) citations;
make the final libraries of algorithms for imprecise model identification and classification,
classification via dynamic discriminative models, and feature extraction publicly available, again to
Proposal Part B: page [59] of [67]