Background and Motivation

The synergy between Big Data technologies and the media is one of the most promising dimensions of ICT applications. Big Data technologies enable Media companies to develop new customer strategies based on audience, build journalistic stories from public and private databases tools, manage relevant content from user generated contributions in social media, develop targeted advertising, etc.
While the huge potential of Big Data and Media integration is uncontested, Media&Content industries in Europe seem to be lagging behind in terms of Big Data competencies and technology adoption.
The impact and potential of an already strong European media sector would be multiplied if it embraced big data technologies. Moreover, good Big Data management would accompany the media sector in its ongoing transformation.  Therefore, it is of paramount importance to bring together European Big Data and Media stakeholders to develop new strategies able to convert the challenges of this transformation into new opportunities.
In order to facilitate this bridging,  the Converging Media and Content Unit will be holding a workshop on Big Data and Media&Content on the 24th of September 2015. This workshop will provide an effective opportunity for European stakeholders to contribute to this topic, to discuss with key speakers and to influence the future activity in the European scenario.
 

Scope

The aim of this workshop is the analysis and the identification of current and future challenges for Big Data and Media&Content industries to be tackled in future European Innovation initiatives. Real examples of the potential, challenges and complexities of using big data in this domain will be discussed, together with an innovative business and investor perspective. The workshop will target the facilitation of data usage in media companies' strategies and the use of media data for cross-domain applications taking into consideration all research and innovation aspects. For this reason, technological and big data experts, policy makers, investors, legal researchers with experience in the digital sector and economic and business experts in the digital economy will be invited. The outcome of the workshop will be used as starting point for a more active presence of data driven digital media innovation in Horizon 2020.

Workshop organization

The organization of the workshop will foresee two separate sessions:

First Session (Morning)
The objective of the first session is to set the state of play and identify the key necessary steps to better involve Media&Content companies in Big Data initiatives. With Media&Content companies we refer to a full range of industries active in the Media Market: national and regional broadcasters, newspapers, content producers, SMEs, news companies, advertising companies, etc.. Moreover, new actors, such as Data Journalists and organizations that are active in a wide range of societal and innovation issues relevant to Media will provide input to the discussion form different points of view.
The expected outcome will be to expand the already existing Big Data communities to the Media&Content industries and to promote discussion and cooperation between interdisciplinary actors, active in convergence media and social networks. The workshop will encourage a discussion among the major players in the field, and a better promotion on how to build a bridge between technical players, business actors and investors, specifically with SMEs in Media sector. The discussion will be organized in the form of work cafés.

Second session (Afternoon)
The participants will be invited to prepare a sort of manifesto and roadmap for better synergies between Media&Content industries and Big Data.  To do so facilitators (experts) will run open spaces and collect the participants' opinions. Each open space will correspond to a specific topic of interest (pillar) and host a deep discussion around the key aspects identified in the first session within each pillar.

Potential discussion tables (one per topic of interest)

• News verification and news recommendation
• Data Journalism
• Media data for cross domains (fashion, politics, participatory media, social innovation, etc)
• Analytics for Media
• Targeted advertising
• Audience analysis
• Data Science Specific skills and competences for Media

REGISTRATION are closed.

The morning session will be webstreamed and accessible via the following link:

https://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/workshop-on-big-data

The documents summarizing the outcome of the discussions held during the workshop are available here:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/events/cf/big-data-and-media-content-workshop/item-display.cfm?id=17436                

Please note that the page offers also the possibility to exchange views and add comments.

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