Kick-off for the first personnel secondments within the LIFTGATE project

Marcos Álvarez | European Projects Manager

The LIFTGATE project (Litfting Up the Research Potential of the Galician Telecomms Center) continues to generate activity within Gradiant. Funded by the European Commission through the action REGPOT belonging to the Seventh Framework Programme-Capacities, LIFTGATE aims to improve Gradiant’s research and innovation as a way to raise the center’s competitiveness at European Research Area (ERA) level in a number of ICT topics, such as multimedia security and satellite communications.

One of the actions planned under LIFTGATE is the secondment of research staff between Gradiant and a number of major institutions throughout the ERA. The first two such secondments have started during this October. First, the researcher Jorge Muñoz, from Gradiant’s Networks and Applications Area, has started 1.5 months stay at the Microwaves Department of Telecom Bretagne, in the city of Toulouse, France. Jorge Muñoz will work in close cooperation with Professor Laurent Franck, a recognized expert in emergency communications through satellite systems. This secondment will be focused mainly on the acquisition of knowledge related to the application of cellular technologies in the field of emergency communications.

In parallel, Gradiant will be hosting researcher Marco Fontani from the Information Engineering Department of the University of Siena, Italy. Marco Fontani will spend the next four months at Gradiant developing knowledge exchange actions with Gradiant’s researchers in his research field, multimedia forensics. In a first exchange session this week, Fontani has given an introductory seminar on multimedia forensics before the vast majority of Center´s research staff.

Fontani has motivated the growing importance of this scientific branch, with major implications at societal level. Fontani has offered an overview of the state of the art of multimedia forensics technologies, focusing on his main research lines, namely multi-clue analysis, counter-forensics, and video forensics.