The Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4) is a leading Italian research center focusing on information and computational technologies and on their application to a broad range of important areas, including biomedicine and biotechnology, information society, energy and environment, and cultural heritage. The center, that started its operations in 1990 under the direction of Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia, is located in the Science and Technology Park of Sardinia and has a staff of about 180 people. CRS4 is equipped with high-end technological platforms, which include one of the major Italian HPC centers (over 47 Tflops of computing power and 5 Pbytes of storage capacity) directly linked to the first massive DNA Sequencing platform in Italy and a state-of-the-art Visual Computing Lab. CRS4 has participated in more than 30 research projects funded by the European Commission, more than 70 research projects funded by National/Regional Research Programmes and a large number of research and technology transfer contracts with the Public and Private Sector (mostly Oil&Gas and IT Industry). CRS4 attracts an average income of 5M€ per year from competitive R&D projects. For the last 10 years, the publication record of CRS4 includes more than 320 scientific publications in international journals, more than 450 publications in conference proceedings and 32 books and book chapters.

The Scan4Repo project will be managed and developed within the Visual Computing program. Founded in 1996, the Visual Computing program and has gradually become one of the leading Italian research programs in the domain. Research activities span many areas of computer graphics and computer vision, the primary focus being the study and development of scalable technology for acquiring, creating, distributing and exploring massive models, as well as for integrating them in real-time interactive visual simulations and virtual environments, both in local and distributed settings. The group has remarkable experience in international co-operative research (e.g., 13 EU and 4 US funded projects), its dissemination (about 200 refereed publications), and its exploitation. Many of the technologies developed by the group have been the focus of technology transfer activities. These include industrialization of systems for scanning and museum presentation in the cultural heritage domain, large-scale internet geoviewers for Italian Regions (Sardegna and Emilia-Romagna), surgical simulation systems for medical training in ophthalmology, and massive point-cloud management and rendering systems for the industry.