The University of Sheffield (USFD)

The University of Sheffield (USFD) is participating with two groups belonging to two departments: The Information Retrieval (IR)Group (Department of Information Studies) and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group (Department of Computer Science), which is one of the largest language technology and information science clusters in the UK Since 2001.

The two groups have secured external funding for over 35 research and application contracts 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 departments the groups are in are highly rated by the UK Government's research assessment exercise. In the latest exercise, Computer Science and Information Studies were awarded the two highest possible ratings: respectively 5 and 5*. 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.

Key roles in Tripod
USFD will coordinate the project and contribute its place name identification tool, components of the SPIRIT system, web search experience and multi-document summarisation system to the caption creation and use its usability testing lab for evaluation.