2 Foundation Meeting: Introduction John Shawe-Taylor

2 Overview  Context for the Establishment  PASCAL Network of Excellence Aim of the network Some organisational details Historical context of videolectures.net Achievements  Ingredients of new Foundation

Overview of the Network of Excellence 2

2 Mission statement The objective is to build a Europe-wide Distributed Institute, which will pioneer principled methods of pattern analysis, statistical modeling, and computational learning as core enabling technologies for that are capable of natural and seamless interaction with and among individual human users. multimodal interfaces

2 Some highlights from the network  Infrastructure of the Network A comprehensive web site that enables the managing of its activities through a set of programmes covering activities from Workshop organization to Curriculum development (see A system for recording events and a repository of the state-of-the-art presentations on research topics covered by the network that currently contains 60 complete events totalling 1253 lectures (see A repository of research papers and technical reports with over 3000 entries produced during the project A computing cluster for large scale computing work by network participants

2 Some highlights of the Network  25 Challenges, some with high impact: RTE (Recognising Textual Entailment) now adopted by NIST Visual Object Categorisation – de facto standard in computer vision Trading exploration and exploitation – led to development of MoGo, world champion Go playing program  18 Pump priming projects funding mini collaborative research initiatives,  6 mini projects for making visible and promoting PASCAL output to a wider audience

2 Demo Sites

2 PASCAL2 - Statistics  Currently 53 Sites in the Network 17 Beneficiaries 36 non-beneficiary members  5 year project: Mar 08 – Feb 13  Funding €6M  Dual-band funding model  Activity in line with PASCAL1  Intention to establish a permanent successor organisation

2 Management Structure  Strategic Advisory Council – Sue Becker, Mike Mozer, Helge Ritter, Satinder Singh and Sebastian Thrun  Steering Committee – executive body meeting twice yearly – coordinators, programme managers, gender issues rep, finance and executive officers (~20 people).  Executive Committee – Executive Officer (UCL), Finance Officer (Soton), Coordinators, Web Manager (Soton)  Individual Programme Committees/Managers  Assembly – one representative from each site

2 Implementation - Portal

2 Request page

2 Programme Requests Researcher Programme Manager Reviewer Coordinator Administrator Request Accept Reviewers Reject Itemised Billing Final Report Accept 8 8 Completed 7 7 Approve Site Manager/ Site Administrator Site Manager/ Site Administrator

2 Summary  PASCAL established a stable method of prioritising activities funded by modest funds through an internet based proactive funding model  Perhaps one of the most successful outcomes was videolectures.net  Agreement to fund a Charity Foundation to promote/develop this activity with a grant of £5000/year for four years  Potential to inherit the funding model and web portal from PASCAL

2 Proposal  Establish UK Charity with subsidiary in Slovenia  Organisation would mimic PASCAL: Steering committee overseeing activities organised in Programmes with funding through calls Institutions as members with some voting rights Directors carrying overall responsibility for day-to-day operations and financial reporting

2 Activities  The Foundation enables the provision of online academic videos, papers, technical reports, software and other materials, and actively promotes their free availability  Through its activities the foundation will promote the spread of knowledge and rigorous academic debate to anyone with access to the internet anywhere in the world  It also aims to develop more widespread interest in such material and such debate

2 Mission statement  Promotion of the use of open access in new and innovative ways that enhance the distribution, accessibility and availability of scientific and academic content  Promotion of widespread adoption of open access for academic material  Supporting the development of enabling technologies for recording, production, accessing, presentation and/or storage of academic materials  Promotion of academic debate concerning the ethical issues arising as a result of scientific knowledge and its relation with belief systems of all types  Promotion of equal access to academic material independent of race, nationality or gender

2 XGO Foundation  Idea is to create a focussed organisation with a particular role  Potential for significant impact in an exciting field  Still in planning stages so very open to ideas  Approved by PASCAL steering committee and European Commission project officer and reviewers

2 Conclusions  XGO has potential to become the major player in an exciting new domain  PASCAL has established an efficient way of promoting and funding scientific enabling activities  Opportunity to create new Foundation specifically promoting and developing the scope and impact of videolectures, but potentially extending this remit  Currently in the process of defining the rules of operation of the Foundation