| IT's Monday News 455 21 May 2001 |
CAMPUS COMPANY AIMS FOR FISCHLAR WITHOUT WIRES |
| by Cormac Sheridan |
|
Aliope, a new start-up established by four researchers at Dublin
City University to develop digital video technology for mobile
networks, has attracted seed funding from a high-profile source.
Larry Quinn, the chief executive officer of Logica's mobile
networks division, has led a group of private investors in backing
the firm. Quinn, who is also a member of Logica's board, is the
acting chairman of Aliope. The company's four principals are Alan Smeaton, who is head of DCU's school of computer science applications, Noel Murphy, Noel O'Connor and Sean Marlow. The latter three are all members of the university's electronic engineering department. All of the founders plan to retain their academic posts, according to Smeaton. The company, whose shareholders also include a number of research students, is in the process of recruiting a chief executive officer. Aliope will be based in a new campus incubator at DCU, dubbed Invent, which is due to open at the end of next month. It plans to re-engineer digital video technology developed at DCU's centre for digital video processing to enable it to run over mobile telecommunications networks. Alan Smeaton and his colleagues have been involved in the Fischlar digital video archiving and indexing project since 1997 (see IM- 366). This has grown into a campus-wide video-on-demand service that can stream content to over 200 concurrent users in the university's student residences, library and laboratories. The buildings in DCU are attached to a Gigabit Ethernet backbone, with Fast Ethernet connections to desktop PCs. The service platform Smeaton and his colleagues have built - on Sun hardware - is currently capturing and indexing up to 20 hours of programming per day. Users can browse and play back the stored content. The next phase of this research, which is funded under Enterprise Ireland's informatics research initiative, will have sophisticated search, alert, summarization and filtering capabilities. These will enable users to request, for example, a three-minute summary of a soap opera episode or all the clips associated with a particular politician. This work is being undertaken jointly with Barry Smyth's intelligent multimedia research group at UCD. Aliope, however, has a separate mission. According to Alan Smeaton, the company would be playing 'catch-up' on other players if it attempted to commercialize the Fischlar system. Players such as Tivo are already strong in this space. 'The next big thing, so to speak, is to be able to do Fischlar-type things on the move,' he says. According to Smeaton, the competitive landscape in which the new company will operate is still not clear. 'The kind of niche we are pitching at - it is on the horizon. What it will look like is still fuzzy.' He envisages phased implementations to take account of the gradual evolution of next generation mobile networks. Initially, he reckons, the service will consist of streaming audio synchronized with 'stepped' video frames. Full-motion video will be possible once 3G infrastructure is in place. His team has conducted preliminary work using iPaq handheld devices operating across wireless LAN interfaces. The company aims to build relationships with carriers and content providers. In addition to its seed funding, it has received a grant from Enterprise Ireland's Cord scheme to support its technology transfer efforts. |