Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra is a research centre created to foster the competitiveness of the Catalan media and communication industry through innovative research activities and projects. BM promotes technology generation and development; research and creativity; transfer of research results to industry; promotion of the research results to society at large; training in all areas of communication; and social awareness of the communication industry in a culture of innovation. BM originated at the Communication Station, a project set up by Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2001. BM is currently a member of the Catalan and Spanish network of Technology Centres with a board of trustees from the Media Industry, Catalan Government, Barcelona City and four universities. In 2008 BM moved to the IMAGINA building in the 22@ technological district, consolidating its position as the only Technology Centre devoted to the Media sector. BM has a strong record in European collaborative research projects, both as partner and co-ordinator. BM is currently involved in 10 EU funded research projects. BM is coordinator of 2 FP7 projects: APIDIS (Autonomous Production of Images based on Distributed Sensing) and 2020 3D Media: Spatial Sound and Vision (IP).
Yahoo! Research started a research lab in Barcelona in collaboration with the Foundation Barcelona Media in 2006. Yahoo! Research focuses on a number of research areas, including Web search, data mining, distributed systems, and social media. BM has coordinated the FP6 SMEDIA project and is currently partner of the FP7 Living Knowledge and COAST projects. In this current project, BM leverages its experience with Web search engines and cloud-based systems to design and implement novel, efficient distributed data collection techniques for the LEADS platform.
Key personnel
Dr. Xiao Bai received her PhD degree in Computer Science from the INSA de Rennes, France, in 2010. She is currently working as a research scientist at Yahoo Labs Barcelona. She has worked in the Gossple project, founded by the European Research Council, as well as in the COAST project, funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Program. Her research interests include Web search, distributed computing and social data mining.
Dr. Hossein (Puya) Vahabi is a researcher at Yahoo Labs, where he is working on computational advertising (search and native ads), social media (Tumblr) and stream data. Before joining Yahoo, he was working on his own co-founded network of websites with more than 3 million visitors per month (2007 to 2013). He has been a research associate of the National Research Council of Italy for many years. He hold a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates (VP of Research of Yahoo Labs) and Dr. Fabrizio Silvestri (Senior Researcher at Yahoo Labs).
