Current Projects

Preben Hansen currently participate in the following EU-project: MUMIA (COST-network 2011-2014) and PROMISE (2010-2013) and have been participating in the following EU-projects: ASSETS (2010-2012, WP leader), COMPANIONS (IST-034434); DELOS NoE 2 (WP-leader); CLARITY IST (2000-25310, WP-leader), DUMAS (IST - 2000 - 29452), SCHOLNET (IST-1999-20664) and DELOS-NoE (IST-1999-12262, WP-leader).

• Promise
  (2010-2013). Funded by EU.
  PROMISE: Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation Large-scale worldwide experimental evaluations provide fundamental contributions to the advancement of state-of-the-art techniques through common evaluation procedures, regular and systematic evaluation cycles, comparison and benchmarking of the adopted approaches, and spreading of knowledge. In the process, vast amounts of experimental data are generated that beg for analysis tools to enable interpretation and thereby facilitate scientific and technological progress. PROMISE will provide a virtual laboratory for conducting participative research and experimentation to carry out, advance and bring automation into the evaluation and benchmarking of such complex information systems, by facilitating management and offering access, curation, preservation, re-use, analysis, visualization, and mining of the collected experimental data.
  Europe is unique: a powerful economic community that politically and culturally strives for equality in its languages and an appreciation of diversity in its citizens. New Internet paradigms are continually extending the media and the task where multiple language based interaction must be supported. PROMISE will direct a world-wide research community to track these changes and deliver solutions so that Europe can achieve one of its most cherished goals.

• Assets
  (2010-2012). Funded by EU.
  ASSETS: Advanced Search Services and Enhanced Technological Solutions for the European Digital Library ASSETS aims to improve the usability of Europeana by developing, implementing and deploying large-scale services focusing on search, browsing and interfaces. These services are applicable to all digital libraries and include: Searching multimedia objects based on metadata and on content similarity; executable Ranking algorithm for improve results display; Browsing multimedia objects for rapid navigation through semantic cross-links; Interfaces especially designed for interacting with multimedia objects; planning digital preservation services; Ingestion of metadata requiring normalization, cleaning, knowledge extraction and mapping to a common structure. The main expected outcomes from ASSETS are: a) A set of value-added search, browsing and long-term access services to enhance the content accessibility and improve the usability of Europeana operational services. b) Making new multimedia digital content available to and accessible by Europeana portal, as delivered by those ASSETS content providers which so far did not take part in the Europeana service. c) A large-scale validated services in the real Europeana context of use. d) A set of recommendations, guidelines and best practices concerning the technology adaptation, and service rolling up, which strongly contributes to the promotion of the standards and specifications addressed in Europeana, and pave the way for an increased interoperability. The European-wide coverage of the ASSETS consortium, which includes 24 partners coming from 10 European countries and Japan, and its multi-disciplinary dimension, including all the significant stakeholders in the DL value chain (cultural institutions, research organisations, ICT players, content providers), and the strong involvement of the EDL Foundation (which is responsible for the overall strategy and policy for Europeana) will enable an effective and broader networking activities, and further promoting the adoption of the recommendations envisaged within the ASSETS project.

• Companions - Companions.
  (2007 - 2010) Funded by EU.
  

• PatPRC - Patent handling processes
  (2009). Funded by Vinnova and SICS. Partners: Uppdragshuset AB
  

• CRIS-CIR - Crisis management and Collaborative Information Retrieval
  (2009). Funded by MSB - The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. Partners: SICS
  

• NetCor - National Network for Crisis Management
  (2007-08). Funded by MSB - The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency
  

• PIR - Patent Information Seeking and Retrieval
  A project in collaboration with the Swedish Patent and Registration Office - PRV

• PARPUB - Domain modeling of rights and conditions for parallel publishing of scientific articles
  (2008-09). Funded by MSB - KTH. Partners: SICS and KTH
  

• Human Grid - Human Grid
  (2006-07)
  A project to represent, mine, present, and utilise the collective knowledge of people

• ERG - ERG - medveten styrning av en framtida energivardag
  (2007) Funded by the Swedish Energy Agency.
  

• TEAM - TEAM and Sensemaking in Command and Control.
  (2006) Funded by FMV.
  Swedish Defence Materiel Administration and Swedish National Defence College and SICS.

• INFO - Information Access and Handling in Networked and Distributed Environments.
  (2005) Funded by FMV.
  Swedish Defence Materiel Administration and SICS.

• Colia - Collaborative Information Access.
  (2005)
  Technologies that support collaboration and cooperative management of shared information spaces are assumed to be of great practical and strategic importance within different domains. From an organisational point of view, it is important to have access to the collective knowledge aggregated within an organisation.
  The goal with the project is to investigate the relationship between different types of Information Seeking and Retrieval (IS&R) processes and manifestations of collaborative activities within different professional work domains. Different levels of tasks and the task performance process will be investigated in order to understand the relationship between work-tasks and collaborative information seeking and retrieval.

• ENCORE - Explaining and Combining Recommender Algorithms for Decentralized Architectures
  Funded by Vinnova).
  (2004-2006)
  Collaborative filtering is a new method for retrieving information. Instead of basing the search on the content in the information units, a collaborative filter or recommender system uses databases of user ratings as a basis for predictions. From our user studies we see that collaborative filtering can be of great help to users when they search for information. In order to be truly useful collaborative filtering needs more research. Specifically, we have seen that it can be improved by exploring new ways of explaining to users why they get a particular recommendation. Secondly, for some application scenarios, collaborative filtering has to work in networks where there is no central server Ð thus requiring a decentralized recommender model. Finally, it is necessary to find ways of combining traditional content-based methods for information filtering with collaborative information to improve the filtering process and solve some of the problems with collaborative filtering.

  ENCORE aims to tackle these three problem areas and package the resulting solutions in a general-purpose recommender platform. The platform will be applied in two very different applications to investigate its feasibility and integration qualities in different domains and for different tasks. Together with IFS AB (Industrial and Financial Systems AB) we will integrate the platform in their main product IFS Applications, which is a professional system for customer management and resource planning. The second application is a research prototype for position-based mobile information filtering. In both cases, the applications will be evaluated with end users.

• CLARITY - Cross Language Information Retrieval and Organisation of Text and Audio Documents
  (Funded by EU. IST-2000-25310).
  (2001-2004)
  CLARITY is funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme with the aim to provide a cross language information retrieval system for text and audio documents.
  1. Develop Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) techniques which will work with minimal translation resources such as language models to reduce ambiguity introduced during translation, methods to translate words without standard translation information, and a means of translating from one language to another via an intermediate language.
  2. Create retrieval methods that handle mixed collections of spoken and different language documents.
  3. Investigate a number of techniques that will enable users to better interact with the system and that better present and organise cross-language and spoken documents. The techniques will be a document organisation tool based on concept hierarchies, a method for identifying document style and a document gisting method, to translate small summaries.
  4. To conduct extensive user tests on the final system.

• The DELOS - Network of Excellence (NoE) for Digital Libraries
  (Funded by EU. IST-1999-12262).
  (2004-2006)
  DELOS is funded by the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 6th Framework Programme.
  Digital Libraries (DL) have been made possible through the integration and use of a number of IC technologies, the availability of digital content on a global scale and a strong demand for users who are now online.
  The DELOS network intends to conduct a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research activities of the major European teams working in Digital Library - related areas with the goal of developing the next generation Digital Library technologies. The objective is to:
  - define unifying and comprehensive theories and frameworks over the life-cycle of Digital Library information,
  - build interoperable multimodal/multilingual services and integrated content management ranging from the personal to the global for the specialist and the general population. The Network aims at developing generic Digital Library technology to be incorporated into industrial-strength Digital Library Management Systems (DLMSs), offering advanced functionality through reliable and extensible services.

• DUMAS - Dynamic Universal Mobility for Adaptive Speech Interfaces
  /Funded by EU, IST - 2000 - 29452 (2001-2004
  The main ambitious goal in the DUMAS project is to furnish electronic systems with intelligent spoken interaction capabilities. Especially, we will investigate adaptive multilingual interaction techniques to handle both spoken and text input and to provide coordinated linguistic responses to the user. Moreover, future communication with electronic systems requires dynamic and adaptive capabilities: systems that can learn through interaction and adapt their behaviour to different users and different situations, as opposed to the current state of affairs where the systems require the user’s adaptation to the system.

• SCHOLNET
  (Funded by the EU, IST-1999-20664)
  (2000 - 2003)
  SCHOLNET aims at developing a digital library infrastructure to support the communication and the collaboration within networked scholarly communities. The digital library will provide traditional digital library services in addition to support for non-textual data types, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalized information dissemination. This testbed will be used to demonstrate how an enhanced digital library can enable members of a networked scholarly community to learn from, contribute to, and collectively build upon the community's discipline-oriented digital collections.
  SCHOLNET will be built as an extension of the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL)

• The DELOS - Network of Excellence (NoE) for Digital Libraries
  (Funded by EU. IST-1999-12262).
  (2000-2002)
  is funded by the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme. The aim of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries (DLs) is to provide an open context in which an international research agenda for future research activities in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated. The Network will constitute a reference point for all DL projects funded by the 5th FP-IST, stimulating the exchange of experiences and know-how in this multidisciplinary domain, and will also establish close contacts with relevant application communities. It will make testbeds available, facilitate their interoperability, and provide mechanisms for the evaluation of models, techniques, and approaches, and the exchange of open-source software components. It will also contribute to the definition of relevant standards. Appropriate take-up models will be studied and tested to facilitate the exploitation of new DL technologies in the industrial/commercial environment. A dense network of links with the international DL research community will be created.

• AGORA
  (Funded by IRECO).
  (2000-2001)
  

• The Nordic Metadata II Project.: Cataloguing, Indexing and Retrieval of Network Documents
  (Funded by NORDINFO 1998-2000)
  The Nordic Metadata II Project is a follow-up project on the first Nordic Metadata Project between 1996-1998. The results from the first project are documented in the Nordic Metadata Project: Final Report The second project will continue including the following tasks: Enhancement of the existing Dublin Core specification; Improvement of the Dublin Core to MARC converter; Dublin Core User support and tools evaluation; and Maintenance and development of metadata tools The following organizations participate in the project: Bibsys, Norway, Danish Library Center, Denmark, Helsinki University Library, Finland, Lund University Library, NetLab, Sweden, The National and University Library of Iceland, and Swedish Institute of Computer Science. My part of the project will involve the development of user guidelines, a usability test, and user interface issues.

• Nya tider, nya medier, nya format.
  (Funded by NUTEK 1998-2000).
  A cooperation between Bra Böcker (Swedish Publishing company), The Swedish National Encyclopedia, Malmö College (department for Art, Culture and Communication), Linköping University, and SICS.

• DELOS
  (Funded by EU, LTR No. 21057).
  (1996-1999)
  A working group, DELOS, funded by the ESPRIT long term research programme (LTR No. 21057), has been set-up. The main objective of DELOS is to contribute to the advancement of digital library construction. The intention is to promote research into the further development of digital technologies.

• SICS Digital Library Initiative

• The Nordic Metadata Project.
  (Funded by NORDINFO 1996-1998)
  Nordic Metadata Project will create a Nordic Metadata production, indexing and retrieval environment. This system is not intended for test use only, but also for production purposes. The following organizations participate in the project: Bibsys, Norway, Helsinki University Library, Finland, Lund University Library, NetLab, Sweden, Munksgaard, Denmark, The National and University Library of Iceland, Swedish Institute of Computer Science. My part of the project will involve the development of user guidelines, a usability test, and user interface issues.
• Web-Eval
  (Funded by SICS in cooperation with Nomos Management AB and Telia Research AB.
  (1996-1997)
  The project develops a tool for logging users' actions on the web. The purpose is to move the usability laboratory onto the web. The project is a cooperation with Nomos Management AB and Telia Research AB. (1996)
  Within this project, I am finalizing my MSc Thesis.
  
• WEBDIG (Funded by KTH 1997)
  Jussi Karlgren and Preben Hansen, SICS, wrote a preliminary report in the area of Information Digitalization, information retrieval techniques and interface models within the "Digital Library" area.
• EB-WEB II. (Funded by KTHB 1995-1996)
  Development of The Electrum Library and The Studsvik Library Web, including databases
  
• EB-WEB. (Funded by KTHB 1994-1995-1996)
  Development of The Electrum Library Web
• DDS - Den Digitala Salongen. (Compl. 1995)