Current Projects

PATHS (Personalised Access To cultural Heritage Spaces)
PATHS Project The vision of the PATHS project is to enable: personalised paths through digital library collections; offer suggestions about items to look at and assist in their interpretation; and support the user in knowledge discovery and exploration. We aim to make it easy for users to explore cultural heritage material by taking them along a trial, or pathway, created by experts, by themselves or by other users. PATHS project website

Past Projects

IPAS
IPAS - Integrated Products And Services is a project co-funded by the UK Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) and Rolls-Royce plc. The goal is to integrate the development of product with the after-market services by collecting the knowledge created in Rolls-Royce at different stages of the design, test and support of jet engines, organizing and facilitating the access across the company. In this context, the University of Sheffield (Department of Computer Science and Department of Information Studies) is studying, implementing and testing innovative systems that use information extraction to support the reuse of information and knowledge.
X-Media
An EU IP project, X-Media address the issue of large scale, distributed and multimedia knowledge management. In the context of car and jet engine engineering and manufacturing, X-Media will develop methodologies and techniques to extract information from text, images and numeric data, fuse it into knowledge and make it easily accessible to users. The project started in March 2006 and will last for 4 years, involves 15 partners across Europe and has a budget of about Euro 13M. X-Media project website
MyExhibition
An interdisciplinary project co-funded by AHRC and EPSRC under the program Designing for the 21st Century, the My Exhibition project experiments with methodology and technipques for the personalization of museum and exhibition visits. Conversely from the current trend in personalization in museums, the target of personalization in MyExhibition is the exhibition space, not a hand-held guide. The methods and technique adopted will be evaluated during 6 months exhibition at the Royal Armories in Leeds (UK).
Tripod
Tripod's primary objective is to revolutionise access to the enormous body of visual media. Applying an innovative multidisciplinary approach Tripod will utilise largely untapped but vast, accurate and regularly updated sources of semantic information to create ground breaking intuitive search services, enabling users to effortlessly and accurately gain access to the image they seek from this ever expanding resource. Tripod project website
MultiMatch
The MultiMatch project is developing a vertical search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information. The aim is to enable users to explore and interact with online cultural heritage content, across media types and languages boundaries. The project will integrate techniques and results from a diverse set of system and user-oriented research areas including focused Internet crawling, information extraction and analysis, multilingual information access and retrieval, multimedia complex object management, and user interface design.
Memoir
Memoir is an EU training grant to build expertise in a new multidisciplinary area, encompassing the computer science disciplines of information retrieval and human computer interaction, as well as design, ethics, history and cognitive science. Memoir will study the new area of personal memories, to better understand the technology, ethics and psychology of storing and accessing personal information. Changes in digital storage technology mean that people are beginning to store huge amounts of digital videos, photographs, music and speech in personal file systems. We will research new techniques to organize, store and retrieve such personal information that focus on user-centric concepts and methods. This research will draw on methods for multimedia retrieval, human computer interaction and ontologies. We will also explore cultural and social differences in such memories within different EU cultures, as well as socially disadvantaged communities in our local region. Our project may help address the digital divide as personalisation has been suggested as a way of making technology relevant to sections of the society who are reticent to adopt it.
AMI
AMI Project The AMI project aims to enhance the value of multimodal meeting recordings and to make human interaction more effective in real time. There are 17 academic and industrial partners involved in the project located across Europe and the United States. Sheffield is investigating HCI problems and possibilities for accessing multimodal meeting data. AMI project website
BRICKS
Bricks Community Bricks is a new project aiming to increase the share of cultural heritage across Europe. Sheffield is contributing cross language information retrieval technology and expertise. BRICKS project website
SPIRIT
Spirit Project The Sprit project concerns itself with Geographic Information Retrieval. The aim of the project is to enhance web search for the end use by identifying and standardising geographic references in web pages. The project has several European partners and one of Sheffield's contributions is the construction of web search engine which indexes 94 million web pages on a 25 PC cluster. SPIRIT project website
CiQuest
The CiQuest (Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool) project investigated, developed, and evaluated an approach to interactive query expansion using concept hierarchies that were automatically derived and visualised from a set of retrieved documents. A series of user tests were carried out to study the interaction of a concept-based query expansion support tool.
CLARITY
Clarity focuses on cross language information retrieval. Specifically, it provides help for bilingual journalists in the location of newspaper articles written in a range of Baltic languages. The project has produced new user interfaces using a user-centred system design methodology and has developed new evaluation metrics. CLARITY project website
Eurovision
Eurovision focuses on the cross language retrieval of images. The goal is to retrieve images, which are described by captions written in one language, based on queries written in different languages. The main contribution of Sheffield in this project is the construction of a test bed for other researchers to use.
MIND
The goal of the Mind project is to produce a multimedia metasearch engine. This will allow increased access to multimedia available on the web which is currently invisible to web users. Sheffield's contribution to the project is in the retrieval of spoken documents. MIND project website