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This case describes social and health impact which arose as a result of interdisciplinary research at the University of Liverpool and the University of Manchester on the use of computer tools for communication with children and vulnerable adults. This research led to the development of the In My Shoes (IMS) computer program which is now widely used for interviewing children (for example in cases of child abuse) in local authorities across the UK. Since 2008, IMS has been used in the UK by more than 750 practitioners including psychologists, child psychiatrists, other mental health staff, health workers, educational workers, and specialists in forensic services. IMS is also used internationally in Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, and Norway, where more than 100 practitioners are already trained and are using the program in their day to day work.
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.
In 1997 Professor David MacKay of the University of Cambridge Department of Physics developed Dasher, a software accessibility tool for entering text by zooming through letters displayed on a screen. Dasher has since transformed computing for tens of thousands of individuals unable to use a normal keyboard, and is recommended by many charities involved in assistive technologies, such as the European Platform for Rehabilitation network. Since 2008, Dasher has been downloaded over 75,000 times and has been ported to smart phones, making use of input devices such as tilt sensors and joysticks. Linking Dasher's information-efficient text generation from gestures or gaze direction to text-to-speech or real-time-text output channels has made Dasher an ideal component of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems which address digital exclusion.
Emotional signals — obvious outbursts, or more often subtle changes in tone of voice, or facial expression — play a key part in human communication. Psychology researchers at Queen's have made fundamental contributions to `affective computing', which enables automatic systems to use those signals. The team's work has influenced a new computing language for describing these signals and the states that they reveal: EmotionML (Emotion Markup Language). The language has been recommended as a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium, to define how software describes emotions.
The language is used by multinational corporations in a range of applications in a rapidly expanding field. Queen's expertise in emotion led Dr Gary McKeown to found a start-up company, Adoreboard (previously known as Mediasights) along with entrepreneur Chris Johnston, which specifically uses EmotionML in opinion and sentiment analysis in marketing. Its product, Adoreboard, lets companies track consumers' emotional responses to their products. The company has agreed funding of £470,000, partnerships with three multinational corporations, and was recently selected to take up residence at Google's campus in London.
GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering—see http://gate.ac.uk/) is an experimental apparatus, R&D platform and software suite with very wide impact in society and industry. There are many examples of applications: the UK National Archive uses it to provide sophisticated search mechanisms over its .gov.uk holdings; Oracle includes it in its semantics offering; Garlik Ltd. uses it to mine the web for data that might lead to identity theft; Innovantage uses it in intelligent recruiting products; Fizzback uses it for customer feedback analysis; the British Library uses it for environmental science literature indexing; the Stationery Office for value-added services on top of their legal databases. It has been adopted as a fundamental piece of web infrastructure by major organisations like the BBC, Euromoney and the Press Association, enabling them to integrate huge volumes of data with up-to-the-minute currency at an affordable cost, delivering cost savings and new products.
Research into the operational characteristics and applicability of biological reaction networks, carried out at the university in collaboration with groups at Caltech and Sony Systems, revealed the pressing need for a standard format that could be used for storage and exchange of mathematical models of such systems. Hertfordshire researchers played a crucial role in the initial design, dissemination and early exploitation of the Systems Biology Markup Language, SBML, now recognised as the de facto standard format for this purpose. Several major scientific publishers operating across academic boundaries require their authors to use SBML, and 254 software tools, including MATLAB and Mathematica, are now SBML-compliant. Online forums testify to a sizeable, international user-developer community that encompasses engineers, biologists, mathematicians and software developers.