With the start of JPA3 the Network is entering the second half of its lifecycle it therefore becomes increasingly more important to engage outside parties, industry in particular. To this end it is clearly helpful to take advantage of a number of EC-backed initiatives currently underway aimed at drawing in more substantial involvement and commitment from commercial partners. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is the Networked and Electronic Media Platform (NEM, www.nem-initiative.org) which has been set up by the European Commission and brings together most of Europe's main industrial stakeholders in ICT and consumer electronics. Of the five priority areas, at least two are of particular interest to the Muscle Consortium:

• Content: Adaptation, personalisation, context awareness, ambient intelligence, content summarising and indexation, semantic searching for content;
• Enabling Technologies:Metadata, multimedia search engines, natural and multimodal user interfaces, human language technologies, multimedia analysis and computer vision (object recognition and tracking, data fusion).

It goes without saying that this sort of industry-driven technology pull offers the MUSCLE consortium a timely and welcome opportunity to intensify its knowledge transfer and forge new research partnerships in anticipation of emerging FP7 opportunities. The Steering Committee has therefore decided that the best way to engage the industry's interest is to create a number of showcases centered around the Grand Challenges to be used as proof of concept. Ideally, these showcases should be at the level of systems, rather than components, and as a consequence involve middle-sized groups of contributors (e.g. E-teams). It is felt that although a number of components ( typically created by single-lab teams) are already available, the integration into more complex systems that transcend individual efforts is still largely lacking. Furthermore, stimulating cross-lab integration of software components will undoubtedly result in closer ties between the partners with exchange visits and transfer of expertise and software.

Information about Workpackages: here