The researchers from the Campus Gandia of the UPV that belong to the Immersive and Interactive Media (IIM) R&D Group, Fernando Boronat and Mario Montagud, along with Pablo Cesar (CWI, Amsterdam) and Hans Stokking (TNO, Delft, Netherlands), co-organized the third edition of the International Workshop on Media Synchronization (MediaSync) 2015 in Brussels (Belgium) which brought together more than 20 recognized researchers in this field. The Workshop was held jointly with the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (ACM TVX2015), the most relevent conference in this area of research.The workshops are focused on building and consolidating an active community of international researchers in the area of multimedia synchronization. The goal is to ultimately provide a forum where international researchers can participate and debate over specific challenges, share ideas, establish collaborations and offer new solutions to the industry. The aim is also to set the research agenda on media synchronization for the coming years.
The event kicked off with a keynote talk by Matt Hammond (BBC R&D, London) about the potential of media synchronization for connected TVs and secondary devices. The workshop then continued with 8 interactive presentations by the selected participants.
After lunch, the participants were divided into three subgroups to discuss the pending challenges on key research areas: standardization, theoretical frameworks, technological aspects, evaluation methodologies, and current interactive TV solutions.
The findings of the subgroups were used to elaborate a poster on their work, which were then used as input for a group-wide discussion about the immediate future of research in the area of multimedia synchronization. The workshop concluded with an interactive session with 8 demos, during which most of the participants showcased the prototypes developed in their research projects.
In addition to organizing the event, the IIM group, to which the UPV Gandia researchers belong, also contributed to the workshop with a paper on basic research and two technological demos co-authored by Fernando Boronat, Mario Montagud, Marc Martinez, Jordi Belda, Zuzanna Parcheta and Javier Pastor. They also presented another demo at the general conference.
Finally, we would like to announce wonderful news about our university; the IIM R&D Group from Campus Gandia will co-organize the VI International Conference on Interactive Digital Television (CTVDI 2015), which will be held at the University of the Balearic Islands (Mallorca) in October This conference will be held in conjunction with jAUTI2015 (IV Iberoamerican Conference on Applications and Usability of Interactive Digital TV).