European Language Technology Vendors Set up ‘LT-Innovate’ as Their Representative Body

Brussels, 8-9 October 2012

Over 50 Language Technology (LT) stakeholders, among them recognized LT vendors, as well as representatives from the European Commission, participated in the LT-Innovate Workshop which took place in Brussels on 8/9 October 2012.

The main outcome of the Workshop was the decision to set up LT-Innovate as a legal entity to serve as representative body for LT vendors at European level.

This decision comes in the wake of the very successful LT-Innovate Summit that brought together more than 160 LT stakeholders in June 2012.

LT-Innovate furthermore appointed five new members to its Board of Directors: Heidi Depraetere, Director of Crosslang; Jose C. Gonzalez, CEO of Daedalus; Jerzy Nedoma, CEO of XTRF Management Systems; Alexander Rylov, Director of Abby and Andrejs Vasiljevs, Chairman of Tilde. (see full list of Board members here)

The first day of the Workshop was dedicated to EU funding opportunities available in the current Calls for Proposals under “Content analytics and language technologies” and the “SME initiative on analytics”. Roberto Cencioni and Kimmo Rossi from the European Commission presented the two Calls. Building upon these opportunities, Margaretha Mazura outlined the elements that constitute a successful project proposal. Participants had, afterwards, the opportunity to present their project ideas for peer review.

The agenda of the second day was very intense. In the morning, attendees discussed elements of a draft industry vision statement, were briefed on the latest consolidated LT market data available from IDC, and brainstormed the idea of organizing “innovation partnering focus groups” with key client segments (healthcare, finance, tourism, publishing, government, etc.).

Presentations were given respectively by Ruben Riestra, Rose Lockwood and Philippe Wacker. The afternoon was dedicated to discussing communication and public relations actions aimed at increasing the collective visibility of the industry as outlined by William Stevens, and reviewing the collaborative agenda of LT-Innovate’s Special Interest Groups under the guidance of Philippe Wacker.

All the Workshop-related material is available on the LT-Innovate website.