| University of Sheffield, UK |
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STI Sheffield The University of Sheffield has been described by The Times as one of the powerhouses of British higher education. The University is a member of the Russell Group, the twenty universities who receive two-thirds of universities' research grant and contract funding in the United Kingdom. It is a major contributor to research, being the sixth most highly rated research university in the UK. In the latest round of Teaching Quality Assessments (TQA 1993-2001) Sheffield ranked third in the UK for the highest number of "Excellent" rated subject areas. Nearly 75% of all teaching subjects achieved a 24/24 (Excellent) score. The University of Sheffield is participating with two groups in STI: The Natural Language Processing Group in the Department of Computer Science, and the Information Retrieval Group in the Department of Information Studies. The two groups form one of the largest language technology and information science clusters in the UK with approximately 70 researchers, including six full professors, two readers, one senior lecturer and two lecturers.
Contacts: Professor Dr Fabio Ciravegna Professor of Language and Knowledge Technologies Web Intelligence Technologies Lab Natural Language Processing Group Department of Computer Science http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~fabio fabio AT dcs DOT shef DOT ac DOT uk
Links: Department of Computer Science Natural Language Processing Group Department of Information Studies
Projects: X-Media (http://www.x-media-project.org/, FP6-26978) addresses the issue of knowledge management in complex distributed environments. It studies, develops and implements large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media (images, documents and data) and repositories (data bases, knowledge bases, document repositories, etc.). The project is lead by Prof. Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, started in March 2006 and will last for 4 years. It has a budget topping Euro 13.5M. 15 partners Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Greece and Norway. WeKnowIt (http://www.weknowit.eu/) is a European Integrated Project on Collective Intelligence funded under FP7. The main objective of WeKnowIt is to develop novel techniques for exploiting multiple layers of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together constitute Collective Intelligence, a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition among many individuals, and that seemingly has a mind of its own. Companions (http://www.companions-project.org/) is a European Integrated Project which aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'. The project is lead by professor Yorick Wilks , University of Sheffield, and consists of a consortium of 14 partners from across Europe and the US. The European Commission is funding the project as part of its 6th Research Framework, specifically as part of its focus on Information Society Technologies. TAO is a Step project coordinated by Dr Kalina Botcheva, , University of Sheffield. TAO is about how existing ‘legacy’ applications can migrate to open, semantics-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). We will create an open source infrastructure to aid transitioning of legacy applications to SOA, via ontologies and refactoring into SWS. This will enable a much larger group of companies to exploit semantics without having to re-implement their applications. The results will be validated in two high-profile case studies: a comprehensive open source platform (with thousands of users) and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business). |