The University of Edinburgh is committed to the advancement of knowledge and its remarkable achievements in research –-in fields such as genetics, education, and computer science-– are evidence of its success.

Role in HealthAgents

Maximise the visibility and public awareness of the projects’ objectives, technologies and achievements, including the HealthAgents portal. On the technical side, Edinburgh contributes in Natural Language Processing.

Background

Its School of Informatics possesses a combination of breadth and strength of research unparalleled elsewhere in the UK and competitive worldwide. It is the UK’s biggest research group in computer science, and was the only department in the UK awarded the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The research environment is thriving, attracting prominent research grants from distinct global organisations. In particular, the Human Communication Research Centre is among the world’s foremost centres for research into cognitive and computational aspects of communication. It has become a major centre for postgraduate study and actively pursues training and research links with outside users in both the public and private sectors.

People

Prof. Bonnie L. Webber BSc (MIT, USA) MSc (Harvard, USA) PhD (Harvard, USA) Professor, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~bonnie/

Professor Webber taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 20 years before joining the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in 1997, where she is currently the deputy head of the School of Informatics. A well-respected computer scientist, she has authored numerous technical contributions and consulted for the industry. Her current research interests include biomedical text mining, structured terminologies, and free-text annotation in biomedical databases. 

Dr. Horacio González–Vélez BSc (UAM-I, Mexico) PGDipl (OIC, Japan) MSc (Essex, UK) PhD (Edinburgh, UK) Research Fellow, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0340602/

Doctor González–Vélez has over 10 years of proven industrial experience, working for Sun Microsystems and SGI in various management and engineering positions. He possesses proven expertise in high-performance computing, and grid technologies and has led different multi-disciplinary teams in the industry as well as served in various technical and industrial committees. As of January 2006, he is a research fellow in the School of Informatics, and the scientific dissemination leader for HealthAgents.

Carla Delgado BSc in Informatics (UFRJ, Brazil), MSc in Computing and Systems Engineering (COPPE Sistemas UFRJ, Brazil), DSc candidate (COPPE Sistemas UFRJ, Brazil). For the past five years, Ms Delgado has participated in 3 research projects, in the main areas of Artificial Intelligence and Education in Informatics. She has also worked as a lecturer at Instituto Metodista Bennett and was a research associate at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh until December 2006. Her current research interests involves modal logics and formal specifications of distributed systems.

Tiphaine Dalmas is completing a PhD on Information Fusion for Question Answering at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She holds a first degree in Classics (Sorbonne-Paris 4, France), a second degree in Computational Linguistics (Denis Diderot - Paris 7) and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence, major in Natural Language Processing (Pierre et marie Curie - Paris 6). She has two years of industrial experience in system administration, software development and web applications. Her current research interests includes text mining, information fusion and question answering.

Sarah Luger is currently a speech and language processing PhD student under the supervision of Bonnie Webber. Her research focuses on named entity recognition and information extraction in the domain of biomedical texts. She received a MSc from Edinburgh in 2003 and worked in the high tech industry for 6 years prior to that.