Universitat Pompeu Fabra
UPF is the Lead Partner and was established in 1990 as a public university with a strong dedication to excellence in research and teaching. It is the one of the few Spanish university in the world Top 200 (Times Higher Education ranking 2015), among the first 15 under 50 years (THE2015) and 5th among young universities in the world that progress most quickly (THE2015, Young Universities Summit). UPF is also ranked 9th in Europe (Multirank 2015) and 1st in Spain in teaching and research performance (U-Ranking, BBVA Foundation & Ivie, 2016); in quality output (excellence rate), normalized impact and percentage of collaborative papers with foreign institutions (Scimago 2014).
In SAUCE, UPF participates through the IP4EC and GTI of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC). This ICT department of the UPF has an important track record of active participation and in EU projects, including coordination (a total of 66 FP7 projects and 10 other projects in non-FP7 program such as CIP, Ambient Assisted Living and the Lifelong Learning Program, and, up to now 24 H2020 projects). DTIC is the Spanish university department with the largest number of ERC grants (15), and is part of the FET Flagship initiative The Human Brain Project. It is the only Spanish ICT department that has been awarded the Maria de Maeztu excellence by the Spanish government for the quality and relevance of its pioneering scientific research, and as the top IT research concentration in Spain. The DTIC, which has over 60% of international researchers from 48 different countries, is located in the Barcelona 22@ technology district which includes high-tech companies, other universities, technology centres and public administrations, creating an outstanding area for RTD projects. DTIC is active in Research for SMEs, with an active role at a national level; has got close ties and agreements with large companies (Yamaha, Philips, IBM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) and SMEs.
The ICT-20 call is about novel technologies for creative industries. We at UPF consider ourselves to be key players in media technology, and specifically the two research groups involved, IP4EC and GTI, who have a long term collaboration with media industries. In the IP4EC lab, research is oriented towards vision-based methods for cinema and broadcast, with a significant publication output.
The research team, with four post-docs, is international and multi-disciplinary, with a compound expertise covering image processing, computer vision, mathematics, neuroscience, visual perception and filmmaking. The proficiency of the IP4EC lab on psychophysical research and assessment, that will be provided for SAUCE, comes from years of experience of the lab's PI and three of its post-doctoral researchers on successful development and testing of image processing algorithms for cinema applications. The IP leader has been awarded two prestigious European Research Council grants, both dealing with HDR imaging, securing close to 2 million EUR in research funding in the past 5 years.
The lab is currently collaborating with companies that cover the full cinema pipeline: ARRI (camera makers), Deluxe (movie postproduction), Barco (cinema projectors). The graphics section of the GTI research group, has coordinated and contributed to major European projects in digital cinema, involving industry leaders, Speed-FX, IP-RACINE, iMP, and IMP·ART; and contributed in other major projects where convergence was key, such as SEMEDIA, SALERO, 2020 3DMedia, among others. We lead the web-based 3D graphics for media innovative research approach, especially suitable for personalization, and democratizing AR/VR. GTI and IP4EC are currently collaborating, in the framework of the Maria de Maeztu Excellence in Research grant, creating a large database of synthetic HDR images generated through high quality rendering.