皇冠体育app

A tie-up between a London-based media monitoring start-up and Essex University has been named Best Partnership in the annual Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) awards announced at Innovate UK 2015.

Developing natural language processing apps

皇冠体育app aim of 鈥檚 KTP with the university鈥檚 was to develop the innovative natural language processing applications that would underpin the new company鈥檚 products and services.

Signal, founded in 2012 by David Benigson, now analyses more than 3.5 million blogs and news sources every day to create targeted feeds. As well as offering de-duplication and advanced filtering options, the software adapts and learns as the user interacts with it. Customers include Jamie Oliver鈥檚 site.

Signal achieves fast growth in staff numbers

皇冠体育app collaboration with Essex University led to considerable growth as Signal鈥檚 staff numbers grew from 3 to 23 in less than 2 years. Miguel Martinez-Alvarez, the young graduate brought in at the outset to deliver the project as KTP associate, has since become head of research at Signal and a shareholder in the company.

拢1.2 million in private investment in 2015

皇冠体育app company has raised 拢1.2 million through private investors this year. 皇冠体育app partnership and its results also featured in many scientific publications and won the award for best demonstration at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).

Dr Martinez-Alvarez said:

We developed our first prototype six months into the project. We are now 25 people, and our customers range from big corporates to SMEs. Without KTP it would have been very difficult to achieve that, especially being able to bring academic researchers into the business to work with the software developers.

Professor Udo Kruschwitz, the academic lead for the partnership, added:

皇冠体育app collaboration with Signal has been highly beneficial for all partners. 皇冠体育appre has already been a number of undergraduate and postgraduate students working at Signal via paid internships, and this is expected to continue.

on recent trends in information retrieval at next year鈥檚 ECIR conference in Italy.

Business Leaders of Tomorrow

Dr Martinez-Alvarez was named a Business Leader of Tomorrow in the 2014 awards. This year鈥檚 winners are:

• Edward Fitzpatrick, working with and , re-fitters for cruise liners, on laminate structures and new materials for maritime refurbishment

• Kieran Khamis, working with the and on development of a fluorescence sensor for the water industry

• Nandagopal Lakshminarayanan, working with the and to develop secure software for electro-mechanical locks in high-security environments

• Catarina Marques, working with and on a novel tempering cabinet as well as developing a new product development analysis tool

• Barry Moore, working with and to develop a bespoke manufacturing model for hazardous environments, mainly in the offshore oil and gas industry

皇冠体育app KTP Awards recognise the people and partnerships that are behind the most inspirational and successful KTP projects. Other categories and winners were:

• (RCUK) award for benefit to society: leading Welsh homeless charity , and Kate Hodgson

• RCUK award for knowledge base impact: major vegetable producer , and Guy Thallon

• Award for engineering excellence: Southampton-based fibre laser manufacturer , and James Stone

皇冠体育app Knowledge Transfer Partnerships programme has been helping businesses for 40 years to improve their competitiveness and productivity through better use of knowledge, technology and skills to be found within the UK knowledge base.