Ainhoa Llorente, one of KMi’s PhD students, has been awarded funding for 12 months from Abbey, one of the largest UK banks and part of the Banco Santander group, to continue her research on automated image annotation. Her doctoral work, which is supervised by Profs Stefan Rueger and Enrico Motta, aims to improve the quality of image annotation by exploiting a variety of large scale sources of background knowledge, including WordNet, Wikipedia, and the Semantic Web.

This funding was obtained in the context of a partnership set up between The Open University and Abbey, which is part of the wider Santander Universities scheme. This scheme provides scholarships to participating academic institutions to encourage the transfer of knowledge around the world, through research or course writing. As part of a 3-year agreement between the OU and Abbey, a call for project proposals was launched in January 2009 and applicants were invited to submit proposals, which had to fulfill three key requirements: i) a strategic link to a current OU research or teaching activity, ii) a connection with one of Santander’s countries or universities, and iii) proposing an activity that fits within Santander’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda.

While Ainhoa is one of the first researchers to benefit from this scheme, a further £50K will be made available from December 2009, following a new call for proposals to be issued in September.

Related Links:

• Ainhoa Llorente
  
• Santander-Abbey Fellowships at the OU