- Date:
- 2004-
- Funding:
- EMRS DTC
Primary investigator
Associated research group
- Optoelectronics Research Centre
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Funding:
- Self funded - no external funds requested
Low Noise Phase Locked Loops
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- lk05r
Associated research groups
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2006-2007
- Themes:
- ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Learning Technologies, Reusable Learning Objects
- Funding:
- Eduserv Foundation
The MURLLO project will address some key issues that have been identified (see the eLanguages L20 project) as critical success factors for effectively managing, using and re-purposing re-usable learning objects (RLOs):
- The need to add context-rich metadata to assist in resource discovery and material selection
- The need for streamlining the processes involved in the selection, export and licensing of resources
- The ease by which resources can be re-used or their ability to be re-purposed
MURLLO will test models for collecting context-rich metadata, for IPR management of online resources and for identifying suitable business models for licensing content. These will inform the development and testing of 'open source' tools. Innovative development will allow practitioners to use a Wiki-type tool for editing and storing revised content and an 'online shopping trolley'-type tool for selection and export of collections of RLOs.
Primary investigators
- Kate Dickens
- hcd
Partner
- e-languages at Southampton
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Knowledge Technologies, Semantic Web, Web Science, Trust and Provenance, e-Defence
- Funding:
- Ministry of Defence
The MIMEX initiative is a Data and Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre (DIF DTC) cluster project comprising two academic partners (Cardiff University and the University of Southampton) and one industrial partner (General Dynamics UK Ltd). MIMEX aims to investigate some of the key challenges confronting military agencies in an era of effects-based operations and network-enabled capabilities. These challenges include the need to integrate information from physically disparate and semantically heterogeneous information repositories, the need to coordinate response outcomes with bodies of socio-cultural and psychological information, and the need to cope with hostile agencies that may deliberately attempt to subvert or disrupt coalition decision making. To address these challenges MIMEX countenances a solution strategy that embraces semantic integration techniques, human factors analysis, trust evaluation and cultural modelling. The operational focus area for MIMEX is the domain of stability and support operations, specifically information operations (IO). IO forms part of a spectrum of military operations which entail the exploitation of open source intelligence (OSINT), often focused on the civil, rather than the military, domain. Not only are these operations a central element of notions such as effects-based operations, they also reflect much of the operational reality of current military engagements by British Armed Forces. While traditional warfighting operations typically target effects against an enemyââ¬â¢s ability to fight, operations such as IO often attempt to achieve regional stability by targeting the ââ¬Ëhearts and mindsââ¬â¢ of relevant social groups (i.e. those groups with sufficient power and influence to instigate or control negative events). This focuses attention on the need for enhanced cultural awareness, which is a key aspect of the ontology engineering effort for MIMEX. The aim is to develop ontologies that support culture-sensitive decision-making and enhance cultural awareness by enabling the task-specific retrieval and visualization of culture-relevant information.
Another aspect of the MIMEX research agenda concerns the development of solutions for improved situation awareness. This research aims to explore a variety of issues including knowledge-based support for task-relevant information aggregation, the use of semantic technologies to enable information fusion, and the contribution of human factors interventions to cognitively-optimal modes of information processing.
The MIMEX project also aims to undertake research to support human and machine agents with respect to information quality assessments. It is notable that information content often varies with respect to quality criteria (e.g. accuracy, relevance, usability, etc.), and this is especially the case in competitive decision-making contexts (corporate or military) where there is a strong possibility of adversarial agencies disseminating false or misleading information (not all information providers are qualified to provide information; neither are their information offerings always benign). These issues are being explored in MIMEX by investigating techniques for probabilistic and trust-based reasoning in the context of the Semantic Web.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- ps02v
- tdh
Partners
- General Dynamics UK Limited
- University of Cardiff
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2006-
- Theme:
- Accessible Technologies
- Funding:
- Self funded - no external funds requested
OSCA (On-Screen Communication Access) provides the means to give information and ask questions of deaf detainees who use Sign Language. This undergraduate project was undertaken in collaboration with Glen Barham of Hampshire Constabulary by Tom Lewis and supervised by Dr Mike Wald
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Thomas Lewis
- Glen Barham
Partner
- Hampshire Constabulary
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2006-2009
- Themes:
- Machine Translation, Machine Learning
- Funding:
- EU
More than half of the EU citizens are not able to hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue, let alone to conduct a negotiation, or interpret a law. In a time of wide availability of communication technologies, language barriers are a serious bottleneck to European integration and to economic and cultural exchanges in general. More effective tools to overcome such barriers, in the form of software for machine translation and other cross-lingual textual information access tasks, are in strong demand.
Statistical methods are promising, in that they achieve performances equivalent or superior to those of rule-based systems, at a fraction of the development effort. There are, however, some identified shortcomings in these methods, preventing their broad diffusion. As an example, even though lexical choice is usually more accurate with Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems than with their rule-based counterparts, the text they produce tends to be less fluent. As a second example, SMT systems are trained in batch mode and do not adapt by taking user feedback into account. Finally, in Cross-Language Information Retrieval tasks, query words are most often translated independent of one another, thus giving up possibly relevant contextual clues.
SMART is an attempt to address these and other shortcomings by the methods of modern Statistical Learning. The scientific focus is on developing new and more effective statistical approaches while ensuring that existing know-how is duly taken into account. By bringing together leading research institutions in Statistical Learning, Machine Translation and Textual Information Access, the SMART consortium is well positioned to achieve this goal.
Thorough field evaluation on three user scenarios, involving user groups from innovation-oriented SMEs, and extensive exploitation and dissemination activities will ensure that advances make their way out of the laboratories, in the form of both significant and measurable improvements over existing technologies and of new applications currently beyond the state of the art.
- A first user scenario focuses on the work of professional translators and aims at validating new technologies by assessing impact on productivity.
- The second scenario considers the work of technicians providing support to customers over the phone, holding a conversation in a language different from the language the technical documentation available to him/her is written in.
- The third user scenario, finally, consists in enabling a user to access portions of the multilingual Wikipedia in languages of which (s)he has limited command.
SMART is a 3-year "Specific Target Research Project" (STReP) funded by the European Commission through its "Information Society Technologies" (IST) priority, as part of the sixth Framework Programme. It started on October 1, 2006 and is coordinated by Nicola Cancedda at Xerox Research Centre Europe.
Primary investigator
- cjs
Secondary investigators
- ss03v
- yn05r
Partners
- Xerox Research Centre Europe
- Amebis
- Celer Soluciones
- Jozef Stefan Institute
- National Research Council Canada
- University of Bristol
- University of Helsinki
- Universita` degli Studi di Milano
- University College London
Associated research group
- Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group
- Date:
- 2006-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Learning Technologies
- Funding:
- IBM
RealTimeAnnotate will enable the highlighting and tagging of captions and the addition of synchronises notes.
Primary investigator
Partners
- IBM
- Liberated Learning Consortium
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2006-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, ELearning, Platforms and Tools, Learning Technologies
- Funding:
- IBM
RealTimeMerge facilitates the display of real time captions from multiple speakers with utterances identified by speakers' names
Primary investigator
Partners
- IBM
- Liberated Learning Consortium
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2005-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Learning Technologies, ELearning, Platforms and Tools
- Funding:
- IBM
Recognition errors will inevitably sometimes occur with speech recognition and so an application is being developed to allow errors in synchronised captions to be corrected in real time.
Primary investigator
Partners
- IBM
- Liberated Learning Consortium
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab
- Date:
- 2005-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Learning Technologies, ELearning, Platforms and Tools
- Funding:
- IBM
Liberated Learningââ¬â¢s research has shown that although projecting captions onto a large screen in the classroom has been used successfully by students in many situations an individual personalised and customisable display may be preferable or essential if only a few short lines of text are shown in the window because of the pause and separator settings and the rest of the screen being taken up by other material (e.g. Power Point displays). An application is therefore being developed to provide users with their own personal display on their own wireless enabled systems customised to their preferences (e.g. font, size, colour, text formatting and scrolling).
Primary investigator
Partners
- IBM
- Liberated Learning Consortium
Associated research group
- Learning Societies Lab