While drawing on the strength of the Xerox Corporation around the world, our focus is on Europe. We work with organisations drawn from the continent and reflect their needs and talents. We cooperate with the scientific community and collaborate with a wide range of European research organisations particularly within the European Community frameworks but also as part of national government initiatives.

Current Projects

SAPIR (Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval): An FP6 Network of Excellence program which involves the building of a large scale information community. As a search engine for audio/visual content, SAPIR will explore new ways to analyze, index and retrieve the vast amounts of speech, image, video and music currently filling the digital universe and will hence make multimedia more accessible.

SMART (Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation): A project that aims at developing natural and easy to use interfaces that communicate intelligently via several modalities or with multilingual capabilities. The project brings together leading research institutions in Statistical Learning, Machine Translation and Textual Information Access and builds up new and more effective statistical approaches.

PINVIEW (Personal Information Navigator Through Viewing ): We develop new information retrieval principles needed for replacing or complementing explicit queries. The new techniques will be applied to construct prototypes of proactive information navigators, the next generation systems able to adapt to the user and her tacit information needs.

SHAMAN (Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg): Researchers focused on security infrastructures for two increasingly important aspects of mobile communications. First, the ability of the mobile user to roam globally and to connect to the network and its services, using various access networks including wireless LAN and Bluetooth. Second, the development of mobile terminals featuring wireless components – some of which are worn – made up of dynamically configurable components.

CACAO (Cross language Access to Catalogues And Online libraries): A project that offers an innovative approach for accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual content in digital libraries and Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs). The CACAO cross language platform will enable librarians to query in their own languages an online catalogue that encompasses the catalogues of all project partners.

Recent Past Projects

PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and computational Learning): An FP6 Network of Excellence program which brings together research groups in Computational Learning, Statistics and Optimisation along with experts in application domains suitable to benefit from advances in those areas.

REVEAL THIS: Retrieval of Video and Language for The Home user in an Information Society; REVEAL THIS addresses a basic need underlying content organisation, filtering, consumption and enjoyment by developing content programming systems that will help European citizens keep up with the explosion of digital content scattered over different platforms (radio, TV, World Wide Web, etc), different media (speech, text, image, video) and different languages.

VIKEF: An advanced software framework for enabling the integrated development of semantic-based Information, Content, and Knowledge (ICK) management systems

CONVIVIO (NoE): The Network for People-Centred Design of Interactive Systems.

LAVA: Learning for Adaptable Visual Assistants. May 2002 - April 2005

TransType II: Computer Assisted Translation. March 2002 - February 2005

Thetis: Thetis focuses on the creation and localization of enhanced on-line pedagogical content for language learning in the tourism industry. December 2003 - December 2004

CONTACT: (Franco-Finnish PROACTIVE initiative): intelligent mobile systems and contextual services. February 2003 - Nov 2004

MILK: Multimedia Interaction for Learning & Knowing. January 2002 - July 2004

KerMIT: Kernel Methods for Images and Text. March 2001 - Feb 2004

MUCHMORE: Multilingual Concept Hierarchies for Medical Information Organisation and Retrieval. July 2000 - May 2003

PIE: Progress Instance Evolution. The investigation & demonstration of what "services" are needed to support human intensive processes that are typically long lived, distributed and always submitted to dynamic evolution to cope with real industrial and market pressure. February 1999 - July 2001

Campiello: enable people to interact and co-operate in building a new, richer sense of community based on exchange of knowledge sedimented over cultural resources. September 1997 - Aug 2000

COORDINA: Collaboration in assessing and improving the various models and languages, in order to advance the state-of-the-art. Also, put to the test the theoretical advances by studying test cases based on real applications. Aug 1997 - Aug 2000

EUROgatherer: Designing and implementing a system which provides a personalized information gathering service and is based on software agents. April 1998 - March 2000.

TMR: Training & Mobility of Researchers in Machine Learning.

TRINDI: Task-Oriented Instructional Dialogues between Man and Machine. Dialogues between humans and machines that enable the human to make choices in the performance of a certain task (task oriented instructional dialogues). Jan 1998 - Aug 2000