Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), formerly known as Istituto Trentino di Cultura (was created in 1962 by the Autonomous Province of Trento) and strives for scientific excellence, innovation and technology transfer to companies and public services. FBK collaborates with the main actors of Worldwide research and its activities are in line with European Union Programmes. The foundation's primary activities are centered around advanced computer science, microelectronics, physics, mathematical sciences and human science. FBK-irst, the Centre for Scientific and Technological Research, is a visible point of reference for the international scientific community and, at the same time, a hub for the development of technologies and applications with social and economical impact. The research staff at Irst consist of around 90 people on a permanent basis, and 150 people on soft money. Altogether Irst's budget amounts to about 20 MEuro. So far over 70 European contracts of diverse kinds have been carried on by ITC-irst. A substantial portion of our activities are in information technology (mostly in user-friendly and intelligent systems) with all activities being organized into two macro-areas: Information Technology (IT) and Materials and Micro-systems (MM).

Relevant research activities of FBK

The research unit involved in this project is the Technologies of Vision (TeV) group, whose everyday research is focuses upon two themes: namely, image understanding of dynamic populated scenes (tracking multiple objects such as people or vehicles), and semantic image labeling for document analysis and indexing by content for applications such as environmental monitoring. Other research activities in the IT macro-area include: spoken language technology for translation, broadcast news and conversational speech transcription, spoken document indexation and access, telephone-based applications, acoustic scene analysis, automatic learning, intelligent interfaces and interaction, embedded systems, service-oriented architecture and software engineering.