The main R&D activities with the associated expertise and the core infrastructures are mostly supported by the Laboratories of Media Informatics and Electronic Media, as well as of all the collaborating AUTH research units located in other departments.
The Media Informatics Lab was founded at the beginning of 2002, but it has been operational on an informal basis since 1996. The lab serves educational and research needs in the following knowledge fields: Media technology, Desktop Publishing (DTP), Internet services, Web publishing, Data Journalism, Verification of User Generated Content, multimedia applications, and distance-learning. The lab is responsible for the teaching of various courses in the undergraduate curriculum as well as in three master’s curriculums in which the School of Journalism & Mass Communications participates. The above courses are mainly laboratorial.
MIL contains multi-platform equipment (i.e. Windows, MacOS, Linux) for serving the needs of Media Informatics, Web and Data Journalism, Data Visualization, Human-Computer Communication, Cross Media Publishing and other. Digital media suites and associated mobile equipment are also available for the needs of new media productions and broadcasting, in both education and R&D multidisciplinary collaboration tasks. Two computer rooms are available that can serve the needs of education, training and/or evaluation of related ICT technologies. A fully-equipped multi-purpose room is available that can serve teaching and seminar activities, ICT-workshops, video-conferencing presentations and meetings. As previous experience showed, the exploitation of the above facilities makes a perfect match of the training, conferencing, dissemination and evaluation needs of the current proposal, thus introducing the new services into the worlds of journalists, media organizations and freelancers.
The Laboratory of Electronic Media was officially established in 2002 but it has been operational on an informal basis since 1997. Its main activities range in the fields of electronic Media, mainly Radio and TV broadcasting, including all the associated audiovisual technologies that are deployed in the areas of Journalism and Mass Communications. The Lab is properly equipped and has dedicated infrastructures for supporting all modern aspects of audiovisual production technology, interactive multimedia and non-linear storytelling, Web-Radio/-TV, live-streaming, etc. Contemporary R&D topics in media technology are also among the fields of expertise, such as audiovisual networking services and applications, multimodal mediated communication and e-learning, Quality of Experience models, content description-documentation, media assets management, multimedia semantics and media authentication.
The main activities of eMedia Lab range in the fields of electronic Media, mainly Radio and TV broadcasting. The workspace of the Laboratory comprises of a Radio Recording Studio, a TV Studio, a Control Room, which unites the aforementioned and an editing suite, portable outdoor production equipment and live-streaming stations for both audio and video. A complete installation of television lighting, systems of linear and non-linear computer editing, graphics and character generator as well as units of sound and visual effects are included. New digital media technologies such as Digital Radio and TV production, media authoring and interactive platforms, Web-Radio/-TV, tape-less systems, audiovisual networking services and other applications can also be supported within the available infrastructures.
Overall, the aforementioned audiovisual infrastructures can be exploited in various R&D projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Among the listed use cases one should mention the implementation of various pilots, the organization and conduction of evaluation sessions and testing of the associated techniques, with the involvement of representative targeted users, and others.
