Ever since Xerox invented the modern office it has been studying how information is created, distributed and stored. As such, it has commercialized products, software and solutions that manage information in both electronic and hard copy format. As an investor in R&D, Xerox and the European Research Centre has also been pioneering research in areas such as imaging, linguistics and datamining for many years all of which deal with information. Early examples of this research include first generation enterprise content management software, linguistics software for multilingual search and text analysis, translation software and knowledge sharing collaborative tools.
All the research areas at XRCE are in some way relevant to information overload: automatically making sense of electronic documents through semantic analysis, learning and inference from ‘high-dimensional data’ that is heterogeneous and evolving over time, transforming unstructured information into structured documents, creating innovative services & solutions in the areas of visual content quality and understanding and text categorization or creating effective automatic machine translation tools to overcome foreign language barriers.
