I am area manager of the Cross-Language Technologies group, at the Xerox Research Centre Europe. My research interest is in the use of machine learning for language problems in general, in particular for problems involving crossing language barriers: machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, and related problems.

My role in PASCAL was on the one hand to bring Xerox into the network, and on the other to be in charge of the hardware and software infrastructure. Since we wanted PASCAL to become a virtual institute we needed the researchers in different places to be able to collaborate as tightly as possible – possibly as if they were in the same building. This involved identifying the software and hardware to best support the situation, which resulted in the adoption of a videoconferencing tool and document management support tools, buying equipment for videolectures.com, and eventually purchasing a cluster of PCs that was made available to all the researchers.
PASCAL has been an extremely valuable network. I’m now coordinating SMART – a European project that would not have existed without PASCAL, for that’s where I met the partners who came into SMART. Also, I’m much more aware of the research going on in machine learning and optimisation now than I could ever be if I was not part of PASCAL. We participated in several pump-priming projects and actually ended up hiring some of the people for a longer term or even in permanent positions. We have a couple of PhD students (one is Anastasia, also in the brochure) – they greatly benefited from PASCAL, attending conferences and visiting other groups.

I think PASCAL helped a lot to form a community. I have some experience in European projects. This is one of the very few cases where I really see enthusiasm and people putting more into the network than they would get in terms of financial benefit. I think it worked very well.
My role for PASCAL 2 is now to be in charge of the Harvest programme, which is the main mechanism for outreach to new companies. I’m optimistic that there is a high potential to be explored there.

Nicola Cancedda