University of Sheffield

University of Sheffield

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The University of Sheffield is participating with two groups belonging to two departments: The Web Intelligence Technology Group (WiT) in the Department of Computer Science, and the Information Retrieval Group in the Department of Information Studies. The two groups, together with the Natural Language Processing Group (to which the WiT group formally belongs to), form one of the largest language technology and information science clusters in the UK with approximately 70 researchers, including six professors, two readers, one senior lecturer and two lecturers. Since 2001, the two groups have secured external funding for over 40 research and application contracts totalling more than £12M from British Research Councils (EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC, AHRB), the European Commission, and a variety of industrial and government sources. They have published over 300 research papers.

The groups have an outstanding record in transferring technology to and consulting for companies. They have produced software and methodologies that are being used in many research laboratories and companies in the UK, EU and US. They have relevant industrial background having worked for companies in the UK, US, Canada and Europe such as Fiat, Reuters, AT&T, HP, Lockheed Martin, Lotus, and IBM. The “Web Intelligence Technology” Group (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/wig/) specializes in research and application of Language Based Technologies for the Semantic Web, with a particular focus on the application to Knowledge Management. Their tools for knowledge acquisition (Amilcare, TRex, Armadillo, X-Search) and sharing/reuse (Melita, AktveMedia) have currently hundreds of industrial and academic users (see http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/wig/tools.html), including Rolls Royce, Kodak, Merck, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, etc. Current industrial projects involve companies to the tune of Rolls Royce, Kodak and the UK Environmental Agency.

Seventh Framework Programme