MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The MTA SZTAKI (Hungary) is a research institute, governed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Upon the charge by the Secretary-general of the Academy, the supervision of the scientific activity pursued at the Institute is provided by the Board of the Institute.

MTA SZTAKI is the Hungarian acronym for "The Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences". It is situated in Budapest, in Hungary.

The Institute was founded in 1964. Its staff consists of more than 300 full-time employees, more than 200 with university diploma and more than 70 with scientific degrees.

The fundamental task of the Institute is to perform basic and application-oriented research in an interdisciplinary setting in the fields of computer science, engineering, information technology, intelligent systems, process control, wide-area networking and multimedia.

Contract-based target research, development, training and expert support for domestic and foreign industrial, governmental and other partners are important activities at the Institute.

Description of the E-learning department

MTA SZTAKI has become a key player of the domestic eLearning market in recent years profiting from its multimedia technology experiences on different areas of eLearning including research, expertise, product and content development. According to its active participations on different forums, the eLearning standards nowadays are already widely applied in Hungary supporting the free transfer of contents.

Its homepage is http://www.sztaki.hu/?en

The Department works on four main areas:

• Applied research, professional consultancy

Research includes several topics such as adaptive multimedia contents, which can be successfully applied in eLearning environment as well. In the area of the research of Adaptive Multimedia Technologies, they joined program "Adaptive Distributed Multimedia Server” (ADMS) of the University of Klagenfurt who are considered as one of the leading research groups of Europe in the area of multimedia. Under the leadership of Prof. László Böszörményi, the Information Technology Department of the University is developing an architecture for the distribution of video streams over wide area networks, an architecture that is able to install individual proxy components to new network nodes in the case of network or node overload. Several valuable domestic and international publications were created in this topic. Within the framework of the four-years long Mobile Innovation Centre (MIK) project, we work on creating an adaptive content development architecture which is able to store eLearning materials independently from the platform and it provides them in the appropriate time and place for the clients having different platforms. The colleagues of our department work in several domestic and international committees examining different aspects of eLearning. We founded the already mentioned eLearning Forum conference series in 2002 and later we participated in it as co-organisers.

• Software development

We developed several software products in the last years that became widely known and they are used in different eLearning applications. SZTAKI SCORM eLibrary training material repository: It is used for managing standardised SCORM-compliant training material packages. SZTAKI SCORM Viewer 2.1: An application enabling to view packages off-line in SCORM format. SZTAKI SSS ® Technology (Synchron Slide and Stream): Comparing to several products available on the market, it is a really platform independent solution for synchronising video streams, slides and animations.

• Development of training materials

We develop specific or generic training materials very efficiently for the satisfaction of our clients due to the experiences collected for several years. Our colleagues have experiences in development of several thousands multimedia elements. Our products are developed in harmonised teamwork and the results are always standardised training material packages, their local installations and configurations. We gained experiences with several eLearning Learning Management Systems LMSs available in our country which helps us in fine tuning the eLearning materials.

• Complex domestic and EU projects

We participate in realisations of several domestic and international projects. They are focused on the application of multimedia and the ubiquitous learning. We are interested in areas beyond the traditional TCP/IP technology, e.g. we apply the results of interactive digital television iDTV. Another important area is the determining the position of the client since the accurate coordinates and intelligently collected further information can make the life-long learning more comfortable.

Some additional information available here: https://www.sztaki.hu/fileadmin/department/Elearning.pdf

---

> Hungary