At the end of two and a half years, the EU project CHORUS concluded its work at a conference in Brussels recently. The conference focused on status and challenges of multi media search engine technology, but also addressed the challenges, gaps, commonalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impacts and success criteria related to search initiatives.

CHORUS has been a European Coordination Action which aims at creating the conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives have also been included.

The conference was accompanied and animated by a stand exhibition of 11 research projects participating in the CHORUS cluster and two external research projects (all in the domain of multi media search engines). The complete list of projects can be found at the end of this report or on the Conference Web site.

All Powerpoint presentations from the conference are available, as well as video of of the talks.

The conference was attended by more than 120 people from a wide range of professional backgrounds, covering private and public research institutes (various universities, INRIA, IFAAR, IDIAP, CERTH, Fraunhofer), industry (Nokia, Yahoo, Exalead, Thomson), public bodies (The European Commission, German Ministry of Economy) and national initiatives such as THESEUS and QUAERO.

photo credit: david.nikonvscanon