On June 26th, at Rai premises in Torino, the Open Innovation Day was carried out for the second time. The workshop was specially targeted to startups and small enterprises offering innovative solutions to technical and editorial problems in the area of media. Its goal was to improve mutual knowledge in areas of interest, creating a network of stakeholders aimed at collaborating, and contributing to innovation in the media industry. The event was organised in collaboration with ItaliaStartup, the not-for-profit association of Italian Startups, and I3P, the innovation accelerator of the Polytechnic of Turin, in synergy with the Italian Tech Week, a whole week of conferences and workshop focusing on innovation and technology in Torino.
During the early morning of the day, the innovation activities carried out by European broadcasters were outlined. After the welcome of Dr. Alberto Morello, director of Rai CRITS, Dr. Hans Hoffmann, in a keynote presented EBU’s innovation strategy, with current digital innovation trends and some key EBU developments. Ralf Neudel (IRT) then introduced the MediaRoad Project, with the “Sandbox” concept for media innovation acceleration, the long term vision for the media sector and the networking between players in the media sector required to foster collaboration and exchange of know-how. Rai’s Gino Alberico presented an overview of R&D activities, and gave examples from three research areas: personalized radio on voice-controlled devices (Dr. Paolo Casagranda), AI in media (Dr. Alberto Messina) and 5G networks for broadcast media (Vittoria Mignone). Then Dr. Adrian Woolard outlined BBC’s innovation strategy, the quantification of development impact on the economy, the publicly available BBC Taster (member of MediaRoad’s Sandbox Hub) and other highly impacting areas of innovation. Davide Filizola showed several innovative projects of Mediaset, a major Italian public media company, pointing out that collaborations with startups had been done and are possible in future. Mounir Krichane from EPFL then outlined the IMI initiative, a consortium of academic, public and private partners supporting and developing innovation in the media sector.
In the second part of the day, startups and scaleups presented relevant projects, development topics, solutions and prototypes related to subjects of interest to the world of media. A total of 11 startups and scaleups participated:
- AgileLab focuses on Machine Learning and AI based solutions, and presented semantic tagging for video. See https://www.agilelab.it/
- CELI, company specialized in language technologies and data science, presented its view on Voice-based technologies, offering speech analytics solutions. See https://www.celi.it/
- Mathesia is a collaborative network with 3000+ experts in Data Science and Mathematics. See https://mathesia.com/
- HyperTV develops Personalization in Digital Video advertising, AI-based automatic creation of personalized videos, and brand engagement. See https://www.hypertvx.com/
- Kineton, a company developing innovative solutions for Media and Telecommunications: DTT, SAT, OTT, IPTV, augmented reality and IoT. Kineton also works for the Automotive, Telco and ICT and collaborates with the academic world. See https://www.kineton.it/
- LittleSea automatically generates videos with a data-driven approach and can target users with personalized content. See https://www.littleseavideo.com/
- Radiosa has created a digital radio platform allowing content aggregation, interaction, profiled audio advertisements, audio on demand. See https://www.radiosa.biz/
- PubCoder, a company offering a publishing solution for authors, publishers, students. It has worked on interactive solutions for children with autism and dyslexia. See https://www.pubcoder.com/
- Streamix develops solutions for mobile streaming media, allowing multi-cameras, two-way communication and simple management. See https://streamix.live/
- Questit – a The Digital Box Company. This company focuses on using AI for entertainment: semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, text generation, fact-checking. See https://www.quest-it.com/
- Sbam helps building a data-driven strategy based on audience metrics https://sbam.io/
The workshop ended with demos from Mediaset, IRT and Rai. In total, 23 different companies from 4 different European countries and about 60 visitors attended to the 2nd edition of the Open Innovation Day.
Presentation slides are available here.