Sussex computer scientists help Innovation Centre company to “make media local”
Posted on behalf of: Sussex Innovation Centre and the Department of Informatics
Last updated: Tuesday, 19 August 2014
Computer scientists at the University of Sussex are supporting the development of a media platform that will help smartphone users to find out what’s happening at the end of their street.
And now the project they are involved with – which is based at the Sussex Innovation Centre on campus – has been awarded a £470,000 grant to develop the “hyperlocal” platform.
The Near You Now project received a grant from a national competition to develop a second phase of a platform that will help media organisations identify local news stories and social media posts.
The Destination Local competition was run by Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board), a non-political government body and Nesta (formerly NESTA, the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts), a charity that promotes innovation.
The competition awarded grants to projects that demonstrated potential for hyperlocal media technology to serve communities across the UK. The University was part of the consortium that entered the competition and helped the Near You Now project secure its funding.
Professor David Weir, Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics, supported the initial research and development of a prototype for the platform.
Professor Weir said: “In the future, we expect that people will be able to check their smartphones not just for news on a national or regional level, but to find out what’s happening at the end of their street.”
He added: “This grant will give us the opportunity to explore ways in which natural language processing methods can help the Near You Now platform to deliver increasingly relevant content to individual users.”
Near You Now Ltd is based at The Sussex Innovation Centre, an organisation that supports the collaboration between public, academic and business sectors and is owned by the University. It is committed to harnessing the economic potential of the extensive education and research resources available in the Sussex area.
Anthony Sheehan, Founder of Near You Now Ltd, said: “Customers currently struggle to find relevant local stories and information online and on mobile devices. We believe our platform will make it easier for publishers to customise their service for each visitor based on their current location or where they live.
“Funding from the Technology Strategy Board will allow us to further our research collaboration with the University of Sussex and test the commercial viability and sustainability of these new approaches with leading media groups.”
Researchers in the Department of Informatics will continue to work alongside Near You Now to create more detailed algorithms and semantic analysis, helping to define the relevance of news to an increasingly localised user base.