Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/I034092/1
Title:	GATE Cloud Exploratory: Adapting the General Architecture for Text Engineering to Cloud Computing
Principal Investigator:	Cunningham, Professor H
Other Investigators:	Bontcheva, Professor K
Researcher Co-Investigators:	Dr V Tablan
Project Partners:	Information Retrieval Facility Institute of Social Psychiatry Kings College London OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE
Department:	Computer Science
Organisation:	University of Sheffield
Scheme:	Standard Research
Starts:	01 February 2011	Ends:	14 October 2011	Value (£):	71,677
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	eScience Social Stats., Comp. & Methods Tools for the biosciences
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 09 Dec 2010 Cloud Computing for Research Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
When you plug your fridge into the mains electricity supply you don't worry about all the technology sitting behind the wall socket -- it just works. Cloud computing is starting to supply IT in a similar fashion. No more worrying about backups, no more hours spent configuring a new or repaired machine -- just plug into the network, fire up your web browser and away you go.Researchers have tougher and more specialised IT needs than most, so to realise the same ease of use that the cloud now provides for email or word processing requires work in several areas. One of these areas is to adapt existing established research tools to the cloud, and that is what this project will do. Our tool is called GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering. Over the last decade the UK's GATE system has become a world-leader for research and development of text mining algorithms.Text has become a more and more important communication method in recent decades. Our children are now spending over 6 hours in front of screens; our evenings often include sessions on Facebook or writing email to friends and relatives. When we interact with the corporations and governmental organisations whose infrastructure and services underpin our daily lives, we fill in forms or write emails. When we want to publicise our work or share details of our leisure activities we create websites, post Twitter messages or blog entries. Scientists also now use these channels in their work, in addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals -- a process which has also seen a huge expansion in recent years.This avalanche of the written word has changed many things, not least the way that scientists gather information. For example, a team at the World Health Organisation's cancer research agency recently found the first evidence of a link between particular genetic mutation and the risk of lung cancer in smokers. Their experiments require large amounts of costly laboratory time to test hypotheses, based on samples of mutations in gene sequences from their test subjects. Text mining from previous publications makes it possible for them to reduce this lab time by factoring in probabilities based on association strengths between mutations, environmental factors and active chemicals.A second area that has been revolutionised by new media is customer relations and market research, which are no longer about monitoring the goings on of the corporate call centre. Keeping up to date with the public image of your products or services now means coping with the Twitter firehose (45 million posts per day), the comment sections of consumer review sites, or the point-and-click 'contact us' forms from the company website. To do this by hand is now impossible in the general case: the data volume long ago outstripped the possibility of cost-effective manual monitoring. Text mining provides alternative, automatic methods for dealing with text.GATE provides four systems to support scientists experimenting with new text mining algorithms and developers using text mining in their applications:- GATE Developer: an integrated development environment for language processing components- GATE Embedded: an object library optimised for inclusion in diverse applications- GATE Teamware: a collaborative annotation environment for high volume web-based semantic annotation projects built around a workflow engine- GATE Mmir: (Multi-paradigm Information Management Index and Repository) a massively scaleable multi-paradigm indexWe have identified a need for a particular type of cloud service in our research field and this project will implement it such that there is close to zero barrier to entry for researchers. Based on our preliminary investigative work, we expect to complete a production quality service within this project. In simpler terms - this project will work towards making use of GATE on the cloud more like electric sockets and fridges!
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher
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Organisation Website:	http://www.shef.ac.uk