It is the worst nightmare of almost every busy business executive. A few hours before a vital meeting, they are told they have to make a presentation on a subject of which they know next to nothing. This is one they can’t blag or spoof their way through – the room will be full of people who know more about it than they do.
The days of that particular cold sweat scenario may be drawing to a close thanks to the work of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL).
The centre, which has just received an investment of €19.8 million from SFI and 16 industry partners, is working on advanced technologies which are aimed at developing applications that can search the web and create a PowerPoint presentation for you regardless of your degree of ignorance of the subject matter.
An academia-industry research consortium dedicated to delivering disruptive innovations in digital media and intelligent content such as multilingual content analysis, the centre has been in existence for five years. It boasts seven spin-out companies supporting 30 jobs to its name. The latest investment will support it for the next 2½ years as it tackles issues as diverse as global marketing, customer care, elearning, fraud detection and personalisation of content across languages and devices.
CNGL combines the expertise of world-leading researchers at four universities (Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University, University College Dublin and University of Limerick), and partners with Microsoft, Symantec, Intel, McAfee, Cisco, DNP, Xanadu, Welocalize, Alchemy Software Development, VistaTEC and several other industry leaders.
"Our research focuses on both the challenges and opportunities associated with the explosion of content now available to users, enterprises and communities", explains centre director Prof Vincent Wade.
Savvy companies
"Content is the lifeblood of an organisation and savvy companies view content as a strategic asset. Today we are experiencing massive growth in volume of content being generated and an ever-expanding variety of devices on which people access this content. There are now over 175 million tweets sent a day, for example.
“Globally, companies, individuals and communities are increasingly seeking content and services to be delivered according to their own needs, context and preferences and in their own language.”
CNGL is not some kind of new Google which will efficiently find individual pieces of data – it is looking at how the next generation of content will be defined and created and is developing applications which will discover, analyse, deconstruct and personalise content to users' requirements.
Wade gives an example of how this might work for a new software product launch. “We are not just looking at corporate content but user-generated content from sources such as social media as well,” he says. “When a company launches a new product, it typically creates a lot of content. Users create a lot of content and queries as well. Our technology looks at what happens to the corporate-generated content when it gets out there and analyses the comments to give an indication of consumer sentiment.”
The technology will also be able to deliver a richer experience to users with product queries. Not only will they get responses and tips from the software producer, they will also be given access to the most relevant content created by other users.
It will go further in terms of personalisation. “Not only will it give the customer the information they are looking for in relation to their specific problem, it will be tailored for their device so they won’t get information for a Mac if they are using a PC and it be in their language. The technology will look at all these areas and unify them.”
Then there is the PowerPoint presentation. “Our aim is to create a website which will ask you just a few questions – what the topic is, how much you know about it and how long you’ve got to speak for,” Wade adds. “It will then find the information and generate the presentation for you.
“For longer or more detailed presentations, it will be able to ask further questions such as whether you want historical, cultural or other context included and then navigate the web to find the relevant information.”
The technology will also help companies reach out to new customers.
“As companies try to grow their customer base and get into new markets, to do this and go global they will need to use different languages. Our work on machine translation will allow their content to be translated into multiple languages and to tailor it to different domains to improve quality. We are working with a number of translation companies in this area.”
Spread of expertise
It is this spread of expertise which makes CNGL unique.
“Our technological expertise in creation and curation, delivery and interaction, translation and localisation, search and discovery, personalisation and analytics is unique in the world. Research centres would normally have just one or two of these. We are bringing these together to develop new state of the art technologies.”
This research has a very clear commercial focus.
"We collaborate very closely with industry partners and clients in content-related sectors to move our innovations out of the academic laboratory and into the marketplace. This will help reinforce the leadership position we have created for Ireland in content intelligence and create high- tech, high-quality employment opportunities in the process."
