2007 UIMA Innovation Awards

IBM is pleased to announce the 2007 Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) Innovation Awards program, an international award competition designed to encourage the development of community and capabilities around the open source and open standards-based Apache UIMA, for academic curricula and research.

The UIMA framework separates the development of Natural Language Processing and more generally algorithms for unstructured information (text, audio, video) analysis, from the more mundane (but critical) tasks involved in managing the creation, component assembly, configuration, deployment, scaling and monitoring of applications that use these analysis algorithms, in real-world application settings. These include applications running on configurations ranging from stand-alone laptop computers to large clusters of distributed servers that analyze and extract knowledge from unstructured sources for business intelligence, enterprise search, social networking, bioinformatics, customer relationship management, technical support, security etc.

Interesting applications of UIMA-based analytics, including:

• Augmenting other open-source efforts (e.g. Apache Lucene or Apache Jackrabbit) with UIMA capabilities
• Compelling integration of UIMA with other emerging trends, such as Mashups, the Semantic Web, Automatic Question Answering etc.
• Connecting existing communities or existing NLP tools working in unstructured analytics to UIMA, through interoperability layers, porting of significant analysis algorithms to the UIMA framework, etc.
• Supporting the on-going development of the world-wide UIMA community through contributions of tooling, UIMA-annotated copora, etc. of interest to the community

Awards are valued in the range of US$10,000 to $30,000. To qualify for these internationally competitive awards, the submitter must be a full-time faculty member at an accredited college or university which offers Baccalaureate, Master's or Doctoral programs.

Congratulations to our 2007 UIMA Innovation Award recipients.