Partners
Key to The MILE Project's work is the strength of its partnership, which assembles the expertise and experience of leading European figures in the picture library industry. MILE brings together skilled and experienced professionals within the following sectors:
The MILE Project's partners are:
Xavier Castell, Jaume Oriol, Clara Riera, Eva Arricivita
AISA-BCN (AIS)
Barcelona, Spain
www.photoaisa.com
Aisas photographic archive is one of the most prestigious in the world, holding more than 2 million images on different subjects. The top quality of PhotoAisas originals and their digitization process allows them to participate in the execution of any type of work, from exhibition catalogues to multimedia products. They have developed their own documentation system which combines the latest standards in information systems, allowing for a specific and effective search of any of their content. Aisa is constantly researching and developing all the technologies of their picture archives. Specifically, Aisas R & D department develops innovative projects in information technologies. Their main interests are ontology analysis and improvement, semantic web, multilingual databases, as well as content management, transformation and distribution systems online.
Andrea de Polo, Sam Minelli
FRATELLI ALINARI ISTITUTO DI EDIZIONI ARTISTICHE (ALI)
Florence, Italy
www.alinari.com/default_en.asp
Fratelli Alinari Istituto di Edizioni Artistiche (Alinari IDEA) is a leader in tradition and multimedia photographic publishing. Alinari's history means that the activity of a dynasty of Alinari photographers has established a great archive. The unique heritage of the Alinari collections makes it one of the largest international centres of photographic and iconographic documentation, with over 3.5 million vintage images from the 19th and 20th centuries from all over the world. Alinari has taken part in several EC projects including Aquarelle, SCHEMA, MINERVA and aceMedia. Their main concern with these projects has been watermarking and IP rights, cultural heritage matters, content provider, security and user authentication, ecommerce solution, data compression and picture retrieval. Alinari represents an irreplaceable landmark for preserving, cataloguing and publishing.
George Kordelis, Michael Pramateftakis
ARCHETYPON S.A. (ARC)
Athens, Greece
www.archetypon.gr/index.html
Archetypon operates in the Information and Communication Technology sectors, the high quality of services provided by the company being clearly reflected by the names of its international partners-customers, such as Microsoft, IBM and the European Commission. Archetypon is an established international player in the Software Globalisation sector where it constantly improves and upgrades its services in order to meet the requirements of its international partners and achieve complete customer satisfaction. Building on accumulated knowledge and technical background Archetypon's services are distinguished for their added value at all levels and customer requirements from consulting, to final product delivery and quality assurance.
Archetypons objective and scope, as an established ICT company, is to share its invaluable experience on digital content management, participate in seminars on metadata search & retrieval and investigate search and on-line translation systems as well as to participate in IPR seminars to discuss the technological procedures of managing and protecting digital content. Effective Digital Content Management is an emerging sector that has many important applications; such as the Digitisation of Museums and Libraries at a National level, the structured organisation and retrieval, under a unified web-based Information System, of all important cultural content that exist in different heterogeneous sources and the most important thing would be the integration and use of the above digital content for the preparation and delivery of pan-European e-learning courses, having cultural objective. Todays learning environment is in many ways very different from the one of just a decade ago. Greater efforts are made towards the new type of learning process with the use of effective ICT platforms that manage structured digital content. The use of digital content makes life-long learning more effective by encouraging learners to gain the digital literacy and competences they will need throughout their lives. The use of online digital environment, well structured and easily retrieved by using metadata, allows even better interaction between learners and teachers. Multimedia digital content is wide-used in order to increase learning effectiveness.
Staffan Teste
BILDOMBUDSMANNEN AB (BIL)
Stockholm, Sweden
www.bildombudsmannen.se/english
Staffan Teste has been working in the media since early 1960. Today he works as juridical advisor for BLF (Bildleverantrernas Frening), the second largest picture agency organisation in Europe after BAPLA. He is a board member of Cepic, the European picture agency organisation which counts 1,000 agencies from 17 countries as members. Teste also represents Cepic within IPTC and works in IPTC to create new photo metadata standards.
Teste has a broad knowledge of the picture business. He started his career as a journalist, and in 1983 was appointed Production Director of Dagens Nyheter, a position he held for 8 years. During that time, he worked in the administrative board of the paper, helping Dagens Nyheter to set up printing the newspaper in three cities around Sweden, buying the first PC-system for newspaper production in the world, and building up a new repro department with commercial repro production. Teste was later Managing Director for Pressens Bild, which at the time was the largest picture agency in Nordic countries.
After that Teste started his own company of limited shares and worked as a consultant on many projects, one of which was constructing what was at the time the largest digital picture archive for Pressens Bild. Today, as well as further ongoing juridical studies, Teste helps copyright owners with stolen pictures or similar issues within Swedish courts. He and his wife have a picture agency together.
Harriet Bridgeman, Paul King, Steffen Wedepohl and Jessica Tier
THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY (BAL)
London, UK
Annette Godefroid
BRIDGEMAN BERLIN
Berlin, Germany
www.bridgeman.co.uk
Established in 1972, The Bridgeman Art Library represents museums, art collections and artists throughout the world by providing a central source for fine art images. BAL holds some 250,000 images from 8,000 locations. As a result of this, BAL has invested much time and effort into raising its standards in order to produce high quality, reliable metadata to accompany its images. BAL also represents over 500 individual artists, collecting resale rights on their behalf, as well as operating a copyright advisory service for artists, rights holders, image users and education. This ensures BALs relevant experience in all of the areas addressed within the MILE project.
Catherine Draycott, Linda Royles, Sarah Saunders
BAPLA (THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF PICTURE LIBRARIES AND AGENCIES) (BAP)
London, UK
www.bapla.org
The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) is the UK trade association for picture libraries, and the largest organisation of its kind in the world. With over 495 member cultural heritage companies, it represents the vast majority of commercial picture libraries and agencies in the UK. BAPLA is steered by an elected voluntary Executive Committee of 10 officers, and addresses issues of interest to its members on a local, national and international level, working to ensure that picture library users and suppliers enjoy an efficient service of the highest standard. BAPLA is dedicated to fostering the picture library industry through promoting industry standards, providing information, representing and raising the profile of the picture library industry and representing its members interest through lobbying to other organisations.
Bruno Duval, Abdelghani Chibani, Gian Piero Zarri
CITYPASSENGER (CTP)
Paris, France
www.citypassenger.com
CityPassenger is a global developer of multi-channel customer interaction management software that allows IT corporate networks to automate every aspect of their remote business communications. From the field-worker's perspective, CityPassenger brings reliable solutions to provide freedom from mobility constraints such as proximity to wireless hot spots, speed, data integrity, and robustness to high number of transactions. Following customer demand, CityPassenger are now entering new domains such as the semantic Web and the processing of content of multimedia documents.
Ali Paczensky, Agnes Folaji
FOTOFINDER (FOT)
Berlin, Germany
www.fotofinder.com
Fotofinder is a digital picture platform presenting diverse photographers and agencies on the web. Founded in 1999 in Berlin by Ali Paczensky, Fotofinder has developed its own software to serve the picture market with distribution and marketing solutions. The underlying concept is to offer a network solution which enables independent picture libraries to survive in a global digital market. Fotofinder GmbH therefore is constantly developing IT-based solutions to build a multinational picture network, bringing together all competing content providers onto one address. The main enterprise is their internet picture portal, www.fotofinder.com, which offers all the functions of a one-stop-shopping mega agency. This gateway represents more than 200 content providers within a one shop-solution, providing all the features of an agency website whilst leaving the individual brand of its content providers untouched.
Today, Fotofinder is the best known online picture source for small and medium agencies, libraries and individual photographers in Germany. Since summer 2006, Fotofinder has also been running a subsidiary in France.
Nick Poole
MDA (MUSEUM DOCUMENTATION ASSOCIATION) (MDA)
Cambridge, UK
http://www.mda.org.uk/index.htm
MDA is the UK's lead organisation on documentation and information management for museums. It provides advice, support and guidance to museum professionals to help them achieve national standards in the management of their collections. It is a registered charity, funded by a grant from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). The initials 'MDA' formerly stood for 'Museum Documentation Association'. MDA's work is driven by the idea that professional standards in the management of collections are the key to delivering better public services in museums, galleries and heritage sites. A full description of its work plan for the next three years is provided in the various sections of its website.
Part of MDA's core role is to develop and maintain professional standards in trust on behalf of the museums sector. Its work in standards goes back over 25 years, and for the past 10 years it has been responsible for maintaining SPECTRUM, the UK Documentation Standard for museums. SPECTRUM is recognised both nationally and internationally as the industry standard for museum documentation. Now in its 3rd, revised edition, SPECTRUM has been developed in partnership with over 100 museum professionals. MDA has recently launched SPECTRUM Terminology, a new online service supporting knowledge sharing in the heritage sector. It enables users to learn about, create and find standard terminologies.
Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Axel Ermert
STIFTUNG PREUISCHER KULTURBESITZ (SPK)
Berlin, Germany
www.hv.spk-berlin.de/english/index.php
SMB constitutes a Universal Museum for the preservation, research and mediation of treasures of art and culture of the entire history of humanity. Their collections embrace the areas of European and extra-European art, archaeology and ethnology. Supported collectively by the German government and the federal states, the National Museums in Berlin regard themselves as a national institution of cultural federalism in Berlin. The National Museums in Berlin, the origins of which lie in the foundation of the Royal Museum through Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, belong to the Stiftung Preuischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage). SPK also houses Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, a picture archive established in 1966. Today BPK owns about 12 million pictures covering the themes Fine Arts, Culture and History. The archive houses estates, archives and portfolios of many famous photographers. For a large section of these photographs the agency holds the exclusive copyright, so that publication rights for these photographs may only be obtained by BPK. The worldwide customers of BPK can already access more than 60,000 digital images in the online database www.bpk-images.de . Each month about 2,000 to 3,000 new images are added to this database. The highly qualified staff members of BPK may be contacted by customers for research support and for the acquisition of reproduction rights.
Mike Coyne, Graham Howard
SYSTEM SIMULATION LTD (SSL)
London, UK
www.ssl.co.uk
System Simulation is a 23 person software engineering company based in London's Covent Garden. Founded in 1970, it is one of the longest established software companies and has recently developed a specialism in the provision of software to the cultural heritage and education sectors. SSL have developed a powerful software toolset based on a text orientated database system called Index+, clients of which include the British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum. SSL also provide a wide range of web and local kiosk public access applications including SCRAN, the 24 Hour Museum and the higher education visual arts data service, VADS. Private sector clients include the Hulton Archive and Getty Images. SSL maintains a strong Research & Development orientation and has collaborated on a range of EU framework 4 & 5 programme projects which enable them to keep their software at the leading edge and to provide consultancy services to clients on future opportunities and knowledge management strategies. The next phase of SSLs business development strategy is to build exploitation partnerships with its client base and discussions are under way with potential partners. Thus from SSLs point of view, and for several of its clients, the MILE project is timely and will provide a wider framework within which SSL can explore business strategies with its clients.
Frank Boland, Anil Kokoram, Niamh Brennan
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN (TCD)
Dublin, Ireland
www.tcd.ie
Trinity College Dublin's department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering is, under Professor Boland, working in the research field of future generation communication systems networks. This research focuses particularly on signal processing, with principle strands being still and video image processing, Bayesian signal and system identification, and adaptive signal procession, amongst other fields. Specific projects include watermarking and compression of still images amongst many others.
Janusz Kolczynski, Ewelina Sliwinska
WARDYNSKI & PARTNERS (WAR)
Warsaw, Poland
www.wardynski.com.pl
Wardynski & Partners is one of the largest genuinely Polish independent law firms. Its 19 partners and 82 associates have expertise and experience in providing comprehensive legal advice to international and domestic clients in all aspects of commercial law.
The firm provides legal services in many legal areas, such as banking and project finance, M&A, real estate and construction law, corporate law, tax and tax litigation, competition law, life science and regulatory law, maritime law, employment and labour law, infrastructure projects and PPP, energy law, environmental law, dispute resolution and arbitration, capital markets, TMT, insolvency and bankruptcy, intellectual property, internet law, and media and EU law.
The firm is based in Warsaw, with a regional office in Pozna, and an office in Brussels.
Janusz Kolczynski is a legal adviser associated with Wardynski & Partners, a member of the firms Intellectual Property and Media Practice. Janusz's main field of expertise encompasses copyrights, media law, IT and telecommunication law and EU law. He was educated in Poland and Germany, and after graduating from Gdansk University completed his postgraduate studies on European Integration at the European Institute at the Saarland University in Germany, and also on copyright and press law at the Institute for Intellectual Property Law at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. He received a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft at the Max Planck Institute, Munich, for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, where he examined issues of copyright law, international copyright law and new technology law under the guidance of Professor Adolf Dietz. Janusz has been with Wardynski & Partners since April 2005. Previously he was chief editor of Edukacja Prawnicza (Legal Education) and a senior specialist in the Law Harmonization Department of the European Integration Committee, responsible for harmonizing media, IT, copyright and competition and consumer law. He obtained a distinction for his knowledge of copyright law in the Polish nationwide competition PINkubator Biznesu 2003, organized jointly by the National Chamber of Commerce, Radio PIN and the monthly magazine Finansista. He is the author of several articles and interpretations, and also gives lectures. In his private advisory practice he has advised media and technology companies and represented clients in court disputes. Janusz is a member of the National Council of Legal Advisers in Warsaw.
Ewelina Sliwinska works in the Copyrights and Media Law Department of Wardynski & Partners. She is an LL.M. graduate lawyer of the University of Gdansk in Poland and has recently completed postgraduate studies in the University in Dsseldorf, Germany. Her academic background is in Polish and German law on copyright and Internet law. Ewelina wrote her Polish Master's thesis on e-commerce and her Master's thesis in Germany on copyright in the information society. Before being employed by Wardynski & Partners, she worked in the legal services section of the European Central Bank, where she also gained experience in copyright. She is at present part of Wardynski & Partners Intellectual Property team, and deals daily in IP matters.
- Picture archives;
- IPR lawyers;
- Trade associations;
- Information technology providers.
The MILE Project's partners are:
Xavier Castell, Jaume Oriol, Clara Riera, Eva Arricivita
AISA-BCN (AIS)
Barcelona, Spain
www.photoaisa.com
Aisas photographic archive is one of the most prestigious in the world, holding more than 2 million images on different subjects. The top quality of PhotoAisas originals and their digitization process allows them to participate in the execution of any type of work, from exhibition catalogues to multimedia products. They have developed their own documentation system which combines the latest standards in information systems, allowing for a specific and effective search of any of their content. Aisa is constantly researching and developing all the technologies of their picture archives. Specifically, Aisas R & D department develops innovative projects in information technologies. Their main interests are ontology analysis and improvement, semantic web, multilingual databases, as well as content management, transformation and distribution systems online.
Andrea de Polo, Sam Minelli
FRATELLI ALINARI ISTITUTO DI EDIZIONI ARTISTICHE (ALI)
Florence, Italy
www.alinari.com/default_en.asp
Fratelli Alinari Istituto di Edizioni Artistiche (Alinari IDEA) is a leader in tradition and multimedia photographic publishing. Alinari's history means that the activity of a dynasty of Alinari photographers has established a great archive. The unique heritage of the Alinari collections makes it one of the largest international centres of photographic and iconographic documentation, with over 3.5 million vintage images from the 19th and 20th centuries from all over the world. Alinari has taken part in several EC projects including Aquarelle, SCHEMA, MINERVA and aceMedia. Their main concern with these projects has been watermarking and IP rights, cultural heritage matters, content provider, security and user authentication, ecommerce solution, data compression and picture retrieval. Alinari represents an irreplaceable landmark for preserving, cataloguing and publishing.
George Kordelis, Michael Pramateftakis
ARCHETYPON S.A. (ARC)
Athens, Greece
www.archetypon.gr/index.html
Archetypon operates in the Information and Communication Technology sectors, the high quality of services provided by the company being clearly reflected by the names of its international partners-customers, such as Microsoft, IBM and the European Commission. Archetypon is an established international player in the Software Globalisation sector where it constantly improves and upgrades its services in order to meet the requirements of its international partners and achieve complete customer satisfaction. Building on accumulated knowledge and technical background Archetypon's services are distinguished for their added value at all levels and customer requirements from consulting, to final product delivery and quality assurance.
Archetypons objective and scope, as an established ICT company, is to share its invaluable experience on digital content management, participate in seminars on metadata search & retrieval and investigate search and on-line translation systems as well as to participate in IPR seminars to discuss the technological procedures of managing and protecting digital content. Effective Digital Content Management is an emerging sector that has many important applications; such as the Digitisation of Museums and Libraries at a National level, the structured organisation and retrieval, under a unified web-based Information System, of all important cultural content that exist in different heterogeneous sources and the most important thing would be the integration and use of the above digital content for the preparation and delivery of pan-European e-learning courses, having cultural objective. Todays learning environment is in many ways very different from the one of just a decade ago. Greater efforts are made towards the new type of learning process with the use of effective ICT platforms that manage structured digital content. The use of digital content makes life-long learning more effective by encouraging learners to gain the digital literacy and competences they will need throughout their lives. The use of online digital environment, well structured and easily retrieved by using metadata, allows even better interaction between learners and teachers. Multimedia digital content is wide-used in order to increase learning effectiveness.
Staffan Teste
BILDOMBUDSMANNEN AB (BIL)
Stockholm, Sweden
www.bildombudsmannen.se/english
Staffan Teste has been working in the media since early 1960. Today he works as juridical advisor for BLF (Bildleverantrernas Frening), the second largest picture agency organisation in Europe after BAPLA. He is a board member of Cepic, the European picture agency organisation which counts 1,000 agencies from 17 countries as members. Teste also represents Cepic within IPTC and works in IPTC to create new photo metadata standards.
Teste has a broad knowledge of the picture business. He started his career as a journalist, and in 1983 was appointed Production Director of Dagens Nyheter, a position he held for 8 years. During that time, he worked in the administrative board of the paper, helping Dagens Nyheter to set up printing the newspaper in three cities around Sweden, buying the first PC-system for newspaper production in the world, and building up a new repro department with commercial repro production. Teste was later Managing Director for Pressens Bild, which at the time was the largest picture agency in Nordic countries.
After that Teste started his own company of limited shares and worked as a consultant on many projects, one of which was constructing what was at the time the largest digital picture archive for Pressens Bild. Today, as well as further ongoing juridical studies, Teste helps copyright owners with stolen pictures or similar issues within Swedish courts. He and his wife have a picture agency together.
Harriet Bridgeman, Paul King, Steffen Wedepohl and Jessica Tier
THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY (BAL)
London, UK
Annette Godefroid
BRIDGEMAN BERLIN
Berlin, Germany
www.bridgeman.co.uk
Established in 1972, The Bridgeman Art Library represents museums, art collections and artists throughout the world by providing a central source for fine art images. BAL holds some 250,000 images from 8,000 locations. As a result of this, BAL has invested much time and effort into raising its standards in order to produce high quality, reliable metadata to accompany its images. BAL also represents over 500 individual artists, collecting resale rights on their behalf, as well as operating a copyright advisory service for artists, rights holders, image users and education. This ensures BALs relevant experience in all of the areas addressed within the MILE project.
Catherine Draycott, Linda Royles, Sarah Saunders
BAPLA (THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF PICTURE LIBRARIES AND AGENCIES) (BAP)
London, UK
www.bapla.org
The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) is the UK trade association for picture libraries, and the largest organisation of its kind in the world. With over 495 member cultural heritage companies, it represents the vast majority of commercial picture libraries and agencies in the UK. BAPLA is steered by an elected voluntary Executive Committee of 10 officers, and addresses issues of interest to its members on a local, national and international level, working to ensure that picture library users and suppliers enjoy an efficient service of the highest standard. BAPLA is dedicated to fostering the picture library industry through promoting industry standards, providing information, representing and raising the profile of the picture library industry and representing its members interest through lobbying to other organisations.
Bruno Duval, Abdelghani Chibani, Gian Piero Zarri
CITYPASSENGER (CTP)
Paris, France
www.citypassenger.com
CityPassenger is a global developer of multi-channel customer interaction management software that allows IT corporate networks to automate every aspect of their remote business communications. From the field-worker's perspective, CityPassenger brings reliable solutions to provide freedom from mobility constraints such as proximity to wireless hot spots, speed, data integrity, and robustness to high number of transactions. Following customer demand, CityPassenger are now entering new domains such as the semantic Web and the processing of content of multimedia documents.
Ali Paczensky, Agnes Folaji
FOTOFINDER (FOT)
Berlin, Germany
www.fotofinder.com
Fotofinder is a digital picture platform presenting diverse photographers and agencies on the web. Founded in 1999 in Berlin by Ali Paczensky, Fotofinder has developed its own software to serve the picture market with distribution and marketing solutions. The underlying concept is to offer a network solution which enables independent picture libraries to survive in a global digital market. Fotofinder GmbH therefore is constantly developing IT-based solutions to build a multinational picture network, bringing together all competing content providers onto one address. The main enterprise is their internet picture portal, www.fotofinder.com, which offers all the functions of a one-stop-shopping mega agency. This gateway represents more than 200 content providers within a one shop-solution, providing all the features of an agency website whilst leaving the individual brand of its content providers untouched.
Today, Fotofinder is the best known online picture source for small and medium agencies, libraries and individual photographers in Germany. Since summer 2006, Fotofinder has also been running a subsidiary in France.
Nick Poole
MDA (MUSEUM DOCUMENTATION ASSOCIATION) (MDA)
Cambridge, UK
http://www.mda.org.uk/index.htm
MDA is the UK's lead organisation on documentation and information management for museums. It provides advice, support and guidance to museum professionals to help them achieve national standards in the management of their collections. It is a registered charity, funded by a grant from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). The initials 'MDA' formerly stood for 'Museum Documentation Association'. MDA's work is driven by the idea that professional standards in the management of collections are the key to delivering better public services in museums, galleries and heritage sites. A full description of its work plan for the next three years is provided in the various sections of its website.
Part of MDA's core role is to develop and maintain professional standards in trust on behalf of the museums sector. Its work in standards goes back over 25 years, and for the past 10 years it has been responsible for maintaining SPECTRUM, the UK Documentation Standard for museums. SPECTRUM is recognised both nationally and internationally as the industry standard for museum documentation. Now in its 3rd, revised edition, SPECTRUM has been developed in partnership with over 100 museum professionals. MDA has recently launched SPECTRUM Terminology, a new online service supporting knowledge sharing in the heritage sector. It enables users to learn about, create and find standard terminologies.
Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Axel Ermert
STIFTUNG PREUISCHER KULTURBESITZ (SPK)
Berlin, Germany
www.hv.spk-berlin.de/english/index.php
SMB constitutes a Universal Museum for the preservation, research and mediation of treasures of art and culture of the entire history of humanity. Their collections embrace the areas of European and extra-European art, archaeology and ethnology. Supported collectively by the German government and the federal states, the National Museums in Berlin regard themselves as a national institution of cultural federalism in Berlin. The National Museums in Berlin, the origins of which lie in the foundation of the Royal Museum through Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, belong to the Stiftung Preuischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage). SPK also houses Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, a picture archive established in 1966. Today BPK owns about 12 million pictures covering the themes Fine Arts, Culture and History. The archive houses estates, archives and portfolios of many famous photographers. For a large section of these photographs the agency holds the exclusive copyright, so that publication rights for these photographs may only be obtained by BPK. The worldwide customers of BPK can already access more than 60,000 digital images in the online database www.bpk-images.de . Each month about 2,000 to 3,000 new images are added to this database. The highly qualified staff members of BPK may be contacted by customers for research support and for the acquisition of reproduction rights.
Mike Coyne, Graham Howard
SYSTEM SIMULATION LTD (SSL)
London, UK
www.ssl.co.uk
System Simulation is a 23 person software engineering company based in London's Covent Garden. Founded in 1970, it is one of the longest established software companies and has recently developed a specialism in the provision of software to the cultural heritage and education sectors. SSL have developed a powerful software toolset based on a text orientated database system called Index+, clients of which include the British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum. SSL also provide a wide range of web and local kiosk public access applications including SCRAN, the 24 Hour Museum and the higher education visual arts data service, VADS. Private sector clients include the Hulton Archive and Getty Images. SSL maintains a strong Research & Development orientation and has collaborated on a range of EU framework 4 & 5 programme projects which enable them to keep their software at the leading edge and to provide consultancy services to clients on future opportunities and knowledge management strategies. The next phase of SSLs business development strategy is to build exploitation partnerships with its client base and discussions are under way with potential partners. Thus from SSLs point of view, and for several of its clients, the MILE project is timely and will provide a wider framework within which SSL can explore business strategies with its clients.
Frank Boland, Anil Kokoram, Niamh Brennan
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN (TCD)
Dublin, Ireland
www.tcd.ie
Trinity College Dublin's department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering is, under Professor Boland, working in the research field of future generation communication systems networks. This research focuses particularly on signal processing, with principle strands being still and video image processing, Bayesian signal and system identification, and adaptive signal procession, amongst other fields. Specific projects include watermarking and compression of still images amongst many others.
Janusz Kolczynski, Ewelina Sliwinska
WARDYNSKI & PARTNERS (WAR)
Warsaw, Poland
www.wardynski.com.pl
Wardynski & Partners is one of the largest genuinely Polish independent law firms. Its 19 partners and 82 associates have expertise and experience in providing comprehensive legal advice to international and domestic clients in all aspects of commercial law.
The firm provides legal services in many legal areas, such as banking and project finance, M&A, real estate and construction law, corporate law, tax and tax litigation, competition law, life science and regulatory law, maritime law, employment and labour law, infrastructure projects and PPP, energy law, environmental law, dispute resolution and arbitration, capital markets, TMT, insolvency and bankruptcy, intellectual property, internet law, and media and EU law.
The firm is based in Warsaw, with a regional office in Pozna, and an office in Brussels.
Janusz Kolczynski is a legal adviser associated with Wardynski & Partners, a member of the firms Intellectual Property and Media Practice. Janusz's main field of expertise encompasses copyrights, media law, IT and telecommunication law and EU law. He was educated in Poland and Germany, and after graduating from Gdansk University completed his postgraduate studies on European Integration at the European Institute at the Saarland University in Germany, and also on copyright and press law at the Institute for Intellectual Property Law at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. He received a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft at the Max Planck Institute, Munich, for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, where he examined issues of copyright law, international copyright law and new technology law under the guidance of Professor Adolf Dietz. Janusz has been with Wardynski & Partners since April 2005. Previously he was chief editor of Edukacja Prawnicza (Legal Education) and a senior specialist in the Law Harmonization Department of the European Integration Committee, responsible for harmonizing media, IT, copyright and competition and consumer law. He obtained a distinction for his knowledge of copyright law in the Polish nationwide competition PINkubator Biznesu 2003, organized jointly by the National Chamber of Commerce, Radio PIN and the monthly magazine Finansista. He is the author of several articles and interpretations, and also gives lectures. In his private advisory practice he has advised media and technology companies and represented clients in court disputes. Janusz is a member of the National Council of Legal Advisers in Warsaw.
Ewelina Sliwinska works in the Copyrights and Media Law Department of Wardynski & Partners. She is an LL.M. graduate lawyer of the University of Gdansk in Poland and has recently completed postgraduate studies in the University in Dsseldorf, Germany. Her academic background is in Polish and German law on copyright and Internet law. Ewelina wrote her Polish Master's thesis on e-commerce and her Master's thesis in Germany on copyright in the information society. Before being employed by Wardynski & Partners, she worked in the legal services section of the European Central Bank, where she also gained experience in copyright. She is at present part of Wardynski & Partners Intellectual Property team, and deals daily in IP matters.