Signal Media Working on Second AI Partnership with University of Essex

Artificial intelligence company Signal Media have been awarded their second Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Essex, enabling them to disrupt the UK media monitoring market.

Run by Innovate UK, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are part-government-funded project-based collaborations between universities and businesses created to help UK companies innovate and grow. Projects are designed to address a specific challenge or business need and give companies access to academic expertise and a grant of up to two-thirds of the project cost.

The focus of this latest KTP project between Signal Media and the University of Essex is to develop new techniques to extract and visualise insights from unstructured text files, instantly converting large volumes of data into engaging and easily digestible presentation formats. A postgraduate, who will act as the research associate and project manager, is in the process of being hired and the project is set to kick-off in Q3 2018 and run for 18 months.

Prof. Udo Kruschwitz, from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at Essex, will be the Academic Lead. He said: “Our first KTP project has laid the groundwork for automatically processing, classifying and linking textual documents, and has evidently done so very successfully. We are now at a point where we will be moving from knowledge extraction to actual knowledge understanding and visualisation. It is exciting to see this new phase of our collaboration unfolding."

This is the second KTP between the University of Essex and Signal Media, the first one in 2015 helped the company secure investment of over £5.8m. This played a pivotal and transformative role in the development of Signal’s AI-powered media monitoring capabilities as well as the company’s growth. Utilising the university’s expertise in natural language engineering, Signal created techniques to retrieve, clean and analyse vast data sets consisting of millions of pieces of media content.