A CFI grant was awarded to Prof. Cheriet as Project Leader of SynchroMedia Consortium, under a unified international research initiative.
SynchroMedia is a pan-Canadian collaborative effort which is active in the emerging field of IST technologies, and, more specifically, in Intelligent Distributed Cooperative Environments in Telepresence, which constitutes the timely Canadian high priority of increasing knowledge advances and productivity in various critical sectors, including Intelligent Interfaces (handwritten annotations, image enhancement, visualization, indexing, and retrieval), Intelligent Cooperative Systems (distributed knowledge mining and learning) for various applications: eHealth, eDiagnostics, eLearning, eDesign, etc.
The aim of SynchroMedia’s research program is to build a sustainable collaborative research and work environment, by means of an advanced network architecture based on the P2P computing paradigm, the integration of various perceptual modes of information, which enables remote access and the sharing of objects in a synchronous/asynchronous manner between geographically dispersed team members. Recently, SynchroMedia acquired some infrastructure for CAN $3.7 million, which was granted by the CFI. This research infrastructure is currently shared by the University of Quebec network, Concordia University, and Waterloo University via RISQ (the Quebec POP) and CA*net4. Currently, SynchroMedia is interested in benchmarking with similar foreign platforms. Furthermore, the SynchroMedia consortium is a partner in the European project, PanLab. This is a specific research project that is part of a larger set of European activities: the PanLab (Pan European Laboratory) for Next Generation Networks and Services research project. This research project is part of the CELTIC (EUREKA ICT cluster for end-to-end telecommunications systems), which in turn is part of the Sixth Framework Programme (PF6). We have since been invited to participate as a partner in the implementation of the PanLab project, PII, recently funded by FP7.
