Creating a public digital space where European citizens may access information available in different languages and cultures, in order to allow greater integration and inclusion among the various populations. This is what the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), the most important and widespread alliance of public television worldwide, aims to reach in the near future by winning back the ‘digital leadership’ it is losing to the giants of the web. The EBU has 703 active members in 56 countries throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, who operate in 96 languages with an audience of more than a billion people.
It is with this prospect in mind that the collaboration agreement signed by the University of Pisa was conceived. Through the work of the university’s researchers, the convention aims to contribute to the development of the EuroVOX platform which will make any content produced by European televisions and public media available in all languages. In this way, it will be possible for Italians, for example, to follow German, French, Turkish… news broadcasts directly in Italian.
The agreement was presented on Wednesday 19 February in the University Administrative Offices in the presence of the Rector of the University of Pisa, Paolo Mancarella, the Vice Rector for Information Technology Paolo Ferragina, the CTO of the EBU, Antonio Arcidiacono, and the CTO RAI, Stefano Ciccotti. The collaboration agreement will last for three years and the initial phase involves the creation of three two-year research contracts to be awarded to young students from the University of Pisa who will work alongside members of the EBU T&I team in a new model of integrated development which includes regular periods of training in the Geneva headquarters. With this operation, the EBU wishes to make the public service a centre of learning and sharing of news, documentaries and information which are authoritative, objective and of a high standard and make them available to EU citizens.
“This is an enormous project,” commented Paolo Mancarella, rector of the University of Pisa. “Linguistic diversity is a heritage which must be safeguarded, but it is also a barrier which denies millions of people access to news and information. It is a great honour for our university to play a key role in overcoming this obstacle and is proof of our excellence at international level with regard to research on algorithms and artificial intelligence applied to Big data.”
The project will also be valuable in terms of spreading culture, as it will ‘open up’ the vast documentary heritage of the European public media to spectators throughout Europe and beyond. “In fact, in the world of information production, distribution and fruition, the digital platforms used by citizens, authorities and institutes are increasingly private platforms and often not even European. They are ‘hazy’ in their choice of algorithms that select one piece of news over another, or personalize the visualization of certain contents rather than others, and they are led by the logics of the ‘market’,” explains Professor Paolo Ferragina. “In this project the university will develop algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques which will be of public domain and which will offer translations which are as accurate as possible, a balanced selection of contents guaranteeing the diversity of opinions, mechanisms of transparent customization, as well as the means to identify fake news.”
“With the launch of this collaboration agreement with the University of Pisa,” says engineer Antonio Arcidiacono, CTO of the EBU, “we aim to create a new reference model for the research and development of new ideas and new technology in Europe. The idea is to promote the great expertise that the best universities are able to provide, starting with the areas of artificial intelligence and data science, and structuring them to the needs of the industrial sectors and public services, initially the field of the media where the EBU represents public broadcasters. The development in the field of the EuroVox project is only the first of a series of collaborations with the University of Pisa which could spread to other sectors from telecommunications engineering to social science.”
Stefano Ciccotti, CTO RAI, underlines how the RAI interprets the role of public service as the mainstay of innovation, fully integrated in the circles of research and development and an integral part of the technological-industrial system of the country: “Big data and artificial intelligence are now at the centre of a transformation of the media which creates intelligent digital ecosystems. A connection with the universities is essential to the implementation of this vision of the future: the link between research, development and industry must be strengthened in order to reach a continuous synergy, maximize the use of resources and guarantee prospects to the many fields of excellence our country boasts, especially among young people.”