The main purpose of the project
VideoLectures.Net is to provide free and open access of a high quality video lectures presented by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to a scientific community but also to a general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users' comments.
The training materials are being developed within the FP5, FP6, and FP7 European Framework Programs, where the web based portal Videolectures.Net is being used as an educational platform for several EU funded research projects such as PASCAL NoE, ECOLEAD NoE, SEKT IP and different organizations, among others Xerox Parc, British Telecom, Max Planck, Fraunhofer Institute, Australian National University and Carnegie Mellon. The range of countries involved and languages used varies from Europe, USA, Taiwan, Australia, Ukraine, Russia and Brazil.
The project Videolectures.Net has started at Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia, Europe in early 2002 in synergy with the global trends and more formal efforts by the European Union in creating a Knowledge Economy and Information Society. The pilot project was started by our group where the main idea was to record and provide online a weekly section of lectures entitled "Solomon's seminars", these same lectures are being held until present time at the Department of Knowledge Technologies, JSI. Currently the portal includes mainly the contents from Information and communication technologies in particular fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Semantic Web and Data and Text Mining.
The portal is becoming a major reference video training material repository and dissemination channel for academic researchers all around the world. Following the ideas to network with other similar initiatives, new frameworks and plans are being prepared aiming at boosting up an e-science video reference network combining universities and research institutes that provides a qualitative stream of scientific and training programs.