MULTIDRONE aims to develop an innovative, intelligent, multi-drone platform for media production to cover outdoor events, which are typically held over wide areas (at stadium/city level). The 4-10 drone team, to be managed by the production director and crew, will have: a) increased decisional autonomy, by minimizing production crew load and interventions and b) improved robustness, security and safety mechanisms (e.g., embedded flight regulation compliance, enhanced crowd avoidance, autonomous emergency landing, communications security), enabling it to carry out its mission even against adverse conditions or crew inaction and to handle emergencies. Such robustness is particularly important, as the drone team has to operate close to crowds and may face an unexpected course of events and/or environmental hazards. Therefore, it must be contextually aware and adaptive with improved perception of crowds, individual people and other hazards. As this multi-actor system will be heterogeneous, consisting of multiple drones and the production crew, serious human-in-the-loop issues will be addressed to avoid operator overload, with the goal of maximizing shooting creativity and productivity, whilst minimizing production costs. Overall, MULTIDRONE will boost research on multiple-actor systems by proposing novel multiple-actor functionalities and performance metrics. Furthermore, the overall multidrone system will be built to serve identified end user needs. Specifically, innovative, safe and fast multidrone audiovisual shooting will provide a novel multidrone cinematographic shooting genre and new media production techniques that will have a large impact on the financially important EU broadcasting/media industry. It will boost production creativity by allowing the creation of rich/novel media output formats, improving event coverage, adapting to event dynamics and offering rapid reaction speed to unexpected events.

Motivated by the challenges, risks and opportunities that the wide use of AI brings to media, society and politics, AI4Media aspires to become a centre of excellence and a wide network of researchers across Europe and beyond, with a focus on delivering the next generation of core AI advances to serve the key sector of Media, to make sure that the European values of ethical and trustworthy AI are embedded in future AI deployments, and to reimagine AI as a crucial beneficial enabling technology in the service of Society and Media. The AI4Media consortium, comprising 30 leading partners in the areas of AI and media (9 universities, 9 research centres, 12 industrial partners) and 35 associate members, will establish the networking infrastructure to bring together the currently fragmented European AI landscape in the field of media, and foster deeper and long-running interactions between academia and industry, including Digital Innovation Hubs. It will also shape a research agenda for media AI research, and implement research and innovation both with respect to cutting-edge technologies at the core of AI research, and within specific fields of media-related AI. AI4Media will provide a targeted funding framework through open calls, to speed up the uptake of innovations developed within the network. A PhD programme will further enhance links to the industry and the fostering and exchange of talent, while providing motivation to prevent brain drain, and a set of use cases will be developed by the network to demonstrate the impact of the achieved advances in the media sector. The Excellence Centre that is established during the AI4Media project, and the ecosystem that will grow around it, will provide a long-term basis for the support of AI excellence in Europe, long after the project end, with the aim of ensuring that Ethical AI guided by European values assumes a global leading role in the field of Media.

Delivering on the 5G promise of increased data rates, and ubiquitous coverages, poses stringent requirements on traditional vertically integrated operators. In particular, telecom operators are expected to massively roll out Small Cells, which requires finding appropriate urban spaces with both backhaul and energy availability. Network sharing becomes essential to unlock those commercial massive deployments. The open access model, or neutral host, will come to play a key role on the deployment of 5G networks, especially in urban scenarios where very dense Small Cell deploymens are required. In parallel recent trends are paving the way towards the development of new, heterogeneous and distributed cloud paradigms that significantly differ from today’s established cloud model: with edge computing, cloud architectures are pushed all the way to the edge of the network, close to the devices that produce and act on data. We posit that there are two sets of players perfectly poised to take advantage of both trends since they already own the infrastructure needed to build edge deployments: telecommunication providers and municipalities. 5GCity focuses on how common smart city infrastructure (i.e.,small cells and processing power at the very edge of networks) can bring benefit to both players based on resource sharing and end-to-end virtualization, pushing the cloud model to the extreme edge. 5GCity will design, develop, deploy and demonstrate a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts. 5GCity’s main aim is to build and deploy a common, multi-tenant, open platform that extends the (centralized) cloud model to the extreme edge of the network, with a demonstration in three different cities (Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca). 5GCity will directly impact a large and varied range of actors: (i) telecom providers; (ii) municipalities; and (iii) a number of different vertical sectors utilizing the city infrastructure

5G-RECORDS aims to explore the opportunities which new 5G technology components bring to the professional audio-visual content production. 5G-RECORDS targets the development, integration, validation and demonstration of 5G components for professional media content production, as part of an overall ecosystem representing a subset of 5G network functions. The project will take a business-to-business (B2B) perspective, where 5G becomes part of the audio-visual (AV) infrastructure backbone. The challenge is to use 5G components from previous 5G-PPP projects and earlier R&D investments and further develop them. These components will be evaluated in specific end-to-end 5G infrastructures. In particular, the project will provide three end-to-end 5G infrastructures. This includes the core network (5GC), radio access network (RAN) and end devices. The project aims to use of non-public networks (NPNs) as a way to bring these new components to emerging markets and new market actors. NPNs can be deployed as independent and standalone 5G networks or in conjunction with a public network. To ensure the successful demonstration of these use cases, the project brings together a set of experienced partners whose expertise covers both 5G and content production value chains. Most of the 5G components will be developed and implemented by a specific key partner, being mostly innovative SMEs. The presence of SMEs is particularly strong in the consortium, since they represent the 44.5%. The 5G-RECORDS implemented technologies will be based on existing 3GPP Rel-15 and Rel-16 specifications, while also prototyping some emerging Rel-17 capabilities. All technology components are expected to reach by the end of the project a minimum Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 7. 5G-RECORDS has considered 3 use cases to embrace some of the most challenging scenarios in the framework of professional content production: live audio production, a multi-camera wireless studio and live immersive media production.