The MLLP is a partner in the new EU innovation project X5gon (2017–2020), which was approved with top marks by the European Commission earlier this year. MLLP members were present at the X5gon kick-off meeting in Ljubljana on 20–21 September.
“X5gon: Cross Modal, Cross Cultural, Cross Lingual, Cross Domain, and Cross Site Global OER Network” (2017–2020, project ID 761758) is the title of a new 3-year EU innovation project, approved with top marks by the European Commission on March within the Horizon 2020 topic “ICT-19-2017 – Media and content convergence“. The project is coordinated by Prof. John Shawe-Taylor of University College London (UCL, UK), with a consortium that also includes Institut Jožef Stefan (IJS, Slovenia), the Knowledge 4 All Foundation (K4A, UK), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV, Spain), Université de Nantes (France), Universität Osnabrück (UOS, Germany), the Post of Slovenia (PS) and the Ministry of Education of Slovenia (MIZS).
The X5gon proposal stands for innovative technology elements converging currently scattered Open Educational Resources (OER) available in various modalities across Europe and the globe. X5gon combines content understanding, user modelling and quality assurance methods and tools to boost a homogeneous network of (OER) sites and provides users (teachers, learners) with a common learning experience. X5gon deploys open technologies for recommendation, learning analytics and learning personalisation services that work across various OER sites, independent of languages, modalities, scientific domains, and socio-cultural contexts.
Universitat Politècnica de València is represented as a partner in X5gon by the Machine Learning and Language Processing research group (MLLP) and the UPV Media Services. The UPV will contribute their expertise in language technologies (speech recognition, machine translation), and also one of the main project pilots, the Media UPV educational repository.
X5gon began formally on 1 September, and the MLLP was present at the project’s kick-off meeting, hosted by the Post of Slovenia in Ljubljana on 20–21 September. In this 2-day meeting, representatives from all project partners discussed the project details in order to make clear the project’s long-term goals and also the first steps to be taken in the next few months. The Project Officer from the European Commission (EC) also participated to provide his input on the EC’s expectations and recommendations for this project. A follow-up X5gon technical meeting will take place in Ljubljana at the end of November to set us all in synchronised motion for the first year of the project.
We at the MLLP are proud to participate in X5gon and to add it our current projects, and we look forward to a successful collaboration with our project partners.