The Companions consortium

The University of Sheffield

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group is one of the leading natural language processing groups worldwide. Areas of expertise include Adaptive Information Extraction, Dialogue Modelling, NLP Architectures and Semantic Web applications, Ontology Design and Induction, Semantic Structures, Belief models, Grammar Induction, and Text Reuse Measures.

Roger Moore (PI)
Website: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~roger/

The University of Oxford

The Oxford University Computing Laboratory is at the heart of computing and related interdisciplinary activity at Oxford. It is a centre for research in computer science, numerical analysis, computational biology, quantum computation, computational linguistics, and information systems. It is also a place where students can obtain an outstanding education in computer science through a variety of undergraduate and graduate programmes, including a part-time, professional programme in software engineering.

Stephen Pulman (PI)
Website: http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/Stephen.Pulman/

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a leading world centre for the multidisciplinary study of the Internet and society, with research projects covering the social, economic, political, legal, industrial, technical and ethical issues of the Internet in everyday life, governance and democracy, science and learning, and shaping the Internet.

The University of Teesside

The School of Computing conducts research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D graphics, with a specific emphasis on virtual characters, including conversational characters and interactive narrative. Teesside has conducted research in dialogue generation for virtual characters and multimodal interaction with virtual actors in interactive storytelling applications.

Marc Cavazza (Project Leader and PI)

Charles University (Czech Republic)

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL) is a department of the Computer Science School. The main expertise of the Institute is in the theoretical (formal) description of language structure and meaning, tools for natural language processing, machine learning applied to inflective languages, machine translation, and language modelling for speech recognition.

Jan Hajic (PI)
Website: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hajic/

The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS)

The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) aims to contribute to the competitive strength of Swedish industry by conducting advanced and focused research in strategic areas of computer science. Its research focus is on distributed and networked interactive real-time multimedia systems and applications, from infrastructural issues to software methodologies to human-computer interaction.

Björn Gambäck (PI)
Website: http://www.sics.se/~gamback/

Napier University

The Centre for Interaction Design (School of Computing) undertakes work in requirements generation, interaction design and evaluation of human-computer systems of all types. The group has been actively involved in many research and knowledge transfer projects including the Living Memory project (LiME), PERSONA, BENOGO, FLEX, and DISCOVER.

David Benyon (PI)
Website: http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~dbenyon/

University of Tampere

The Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interaction (TAUCHI) has strong experience in speech-based, auditory and pervasive computing applications and their architectures. The group also has experience on ubiquitous computing applications in office environments, and collaborates closely with users with special needs (e.g. visually impaired users).

Markku Turunen (PI)
Website: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~mturunen/english.html

University of West Bohemia

The Speech Processing Group (Department of Cybernetics) has developed speech synthesis (TTS) and continuous speech recognition (ASR) systems, created acoustic and language models for use in large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems (LVCSR) for highly inflectional Eastern European Slavic languages, and collected, transcribed and annotated speech databases.

Pavel Ircing (PI)
Website: http://www.kky.zcu.cz/en/people/ircing-pavel

The University of Washington

The Signal, Speech, and Language Interpretation (SSLI) Laboratory is the principal site in the world for the application of Bayesian Network techniques to speech and language processing. The Graphical Models Toolkit (GMTK) was developed at the University of Washington by Jeff Bilmes. GMTK is the most widely used system for graphical models and Bayesian networks in speech and language.

Jeff Bilmes (PI)
Website: http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/people/bilmes/

University at Albany (State University of New York)

The Institute for Informatics, Logics and Security Studies (ILS) was established in December 2001 by extending and broadening the scope of the Institute of Programming and Logics. The formation of ILS represents a significant shift in the focus of the institute and its revised research priorities to address critical national security issues.

Tomek Strzalkowski

As An Angel

As An Angel is a French Société Anonyme specialising in man/machine communication, concentrating on the development, integration, and implementation of second generation conversational interfaces. The aim of the company is to establish a firm and durable market of conversational agents for e-business, m-business, and CRM, as an integrator of services and provider of dialogue technology.

Dominique Noel (PI)

Loquendo

Loquendo is a company founded in 2001 as spin-off of the Speech and Language Technology department of Telecom Italia R&D Labs. Its high-quality technologies (Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, Loquendo Speaker Verification), platforms (VoxNauta and Loquendo MRCP Speech Server) and applications (both prepackaged and full-custom), guarantee voice interactive solutions in 30 languages.

Morena Danieli (PI)

The Telefónica Group

Telefónica I+D is Telefónica's Research and Development arm. It has expertise in formal methods, object oriented design and programming systems, software engineering tools, real time systems, databases and knowledge bases, knowledge representation and reasoning, man-machine interfaces, and software tools for network simulation.

Mari Carmen Rodríguez Gancedo (PI)

France Telecom

The Image, Rich Media, New Interactions and Hyperlanguages (IRIS) Laboratory is France Telecom's R&D laboratory, focusing its research on core technologies relating to interactive multimedia (audiovisual compression and indexing, rich media, watermarking) and new interactions based on virtual, mixed reality, collaborative interface and computer vision technologies.

Danielle Pele (PI)