Summary of the impact

The UoA research enabled a step increase in the technical and commercial capabilities of Atlantic Geomatics (UK) Ltd (AGUK, Cumbria) and the development of a postal addressing solution for the Government of Gibraltar (GoG). The beneficiaries and benefits included: AGUK who secured a contract safeguarding jobs and opening new international markets. Moreover, the GoG now have a definitive solution for legislation to replace their manual, multiple and inconsistent address lists by a spatially-based official address register (OAR) incorporating geographical information thereby enabling the people of Gibraltar to receive enhanced services (e.g. postal, emergency, utilities) from a centrally managed OAR.

Summary of the impact

The research improves digital data archives by embedding computation into the storage controllers that maintain the integrity of the data within the archive. This opens up a number of possibilities:

• Data analysis can be automated and incorporated into the archiving process;
• The approach improves the archiving of all types of digital objects, from television broadcasts to genomes;
• The approach can be applied to distributed data and to datasets that are too big for traditional approaches.

This has impact on three different classes of beneficiary:

• Providers of national data infrastructure in the UK and US, who are incorporating Cheshire 3 into national data repositories;
• Data Users, such as Astra Zeneca, RAI, Sanger Institute, who are using Cheshire 3 to extract valuable information from their data;
• Equipment vendors, such as NetApp, Xerox and Bellerophon Mobile, who are developing commercial systems that will use Cheshire 3.

Summary of the impact

KCL research played an essential role in the development of data provenance standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body for web technologies, which is responsible for HTTP, HTML, etc. The provenance of data concerns records of the processes by which data was produced, by whom, from what other data, and similar metadata. The standards directly impact on practitioners and professional services through adoption by commercial, governmental and other bodies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Nasa, in handling computational records of the provenance of data.

Summary of the impact

Research carried out at Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems since 2000 has produced techniques for the management and integration of complex, heterogeneous life sciences data not previously possible with large-scale life sciences data repositories. The research has involved members of the department and researchers from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and University College London (UCL) and has led to the creation of several resources providing information about genes and proteins. These resources include the BioMap data warehouse, which integrated the CATH database — holding a classification of proteins into families according to their structure, the Gene3D database — holding information about protein sequences, and other related information on protein families, structures and the functions of proteins such as enzymes. These resources are heavily utilised by companies worldwide to explore relationships between protein structure and protein function and to aid in drug design.

Summary of the impact

[text removed for publication], a developer of high-precision medical devices, have produced a new data annotation tool ([text removed for publication]) based on research in CSRI on data storage formats and activity recognition for applications within smart home environments. Within [text removed for publication] stereo-based cameras record activities in a specified environment (e.g. kitchen) which are then annotated using user-based pre-configured activity labels (e.g. prepare meal, wash dishes). [text removed for publication] is currently used by [text removed for publication] users and has yielded additional sales worth [text removed for publication]. [text removed for publication] have employed [text removed for publication] additional technical development staff to extend [text removed for publication] functionality, and through an MoU [text removed for publication] now supports automated annotation based on CSRI's research on activity recognition.

Summary of the impact

Researchers in Cambridge have developed a data standard for storing and exchanging data between different programs in the field of macromolecular NMR spectroscopy. The standard has been used as the foundation for the development of an open source software suite for NMR data analysis, leading to improved research tools which have been widely adopted by both industrial and academic research groups, who benefit from faster drug development times and lower development costs. The CCPN data standard is an integral part of major European collaborative efforts for NMR software integration, and is being used by the major public databases for protein structures and NMR data, namely Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and BioMagResBank.

Summary of the impact

The security of data in printing and network environments is an area of increasing concern to individuals, businesses, government organisations and security agencies throughout the world. Mathematical algorithms developed at the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University represent a significant step-change in existing data security techniques. The algorithms enable greater security in automatic document classification and summarisation, information retrieval and image understanding. Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's leading PC vendor, funded the research underpinning this development and patented the resulting software, with the aim of strengthening its position as the market leader in this sector of the global information technology industry. Hewlett Packard has incorporated the algorithms in a schedule of upgrades to improve the key security features in over ten million of their electronic devices. Accordingly, the impact claimed is mitigating data security risks for HP users and clients and substantial economic gain for the company.

Summary of the impact

Data-to-text utilises Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology that allows computer systems to generate narrative summaries of complex data sets. These can be used by experts, professional and managers to better, and quickly, understand the information contained within large and complex data sets. The technology has been developed since 2000 by Prof Reiter and Dr Sripada at the University of Aberdeen, supported by several EPSRC grants. The Impact from the research has two dimensions.

As economic impact, a spinout company, Data2Text (www.data2text.com), was created in late 2009 to commercialise the research. As of May 2013, Data2Text had 14 employees. Much of Data2Text's work is collaborative with another UK company, Arria NLG (www.arria.com), which as of May 2013 had about 25 employees, most of whom were involved in collaborative projects with Data2Text.

As impact on practitioners and professional services, case studies have been developed in the oil & gas sector, in weather forecasting, and in healthcare, where NLG provides tools to rapidly develop narrative reports to facilitate planning and decision making, introducing benefits in terms of improved access to information and resultant cost and/or time savings. In addition the research led to the creation of simplenlg (http://simplenlg.googlecode.com/), an open-source software package which performs some basic natural language generation tasks. The simplenlg package is used by several companies, including Agfa, Nuance and Siemens as well as Data2Text and Arria NLG.

Summary of the impact

Based on research within the Digital Media Technology group, innovative multi-media technologies for capturing, structuring, and analysing real-time crash test data were developed, between 1996 and 2006, leading to transformational impacts on the professional practices of the global vehicle crash testing industry. Initially realised through an award-winning technology transfer programme with MIRA, the systems have been widely deployed by leading crash test organisations, supported faster vehicle design iterations and contributed to the design of safer vehicles. The underpinning research has directly contributed to the ISO standard (ISO/DTR 13499) and its current version. The impact is ongoing and long lasting since most systems in current use are largely based on the original technologies.

Summary of the impact

The research in this case study has pioneered knowledge management technology. It has had major impact on drug discovery and translational medicine and is widely adopted in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The impacts are:

1. The formation of InforSense to commercialise the technology. The company had 150 employees in June 2009 when it merged with IDBS Ltd to create the world's second largest life science informatics company.
2. The results from knowledge management technology and associated software platform have enabled the integration of molecular, imaging, clinical data and analytics, to identify biomarkers for disease identification, treatment selection and side effect prediction.
3. Since 2002 the technology has been deployed by major pharmaceutical companies (including GSK, AZ, Roche, Pfizer, Bayer and Boehringer Ingelheim) and leading healthcare institutions e.g. Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and King's Health Partners, generating significant social, health and economic impact.