NSF / ITR – EC / IST 1 United States National Science Foundation and European Commission

This report describes a collaboration between researchers at the Technion in Haifa and the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute in Los Angeles. The goal of the collaboration is to jointly construct an email analysis and routing system that will help city governments more rapidly deal with communications from their citizens. This system, or some variant of it, is planned to be incorporated into the EU-funded research project QUALEG, to which the Haifa partners belong; the US partners are funded independently for this collaboration by the NSF. Since the project is only halfway along, this report describes technical results to date and discusses administrative and legal issues that affect the collaboration. 1 Part I: Technical Collaboration 1.1 Partners and Overall Project Structure This collaboration exists between researchers of the Natural Language Group at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) in Los Angeles, USA, and the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. The NL Group at USC/ISI (http:/www.isi.edu/natural-language) has a long history of research in most aspects of human language technology, including information extraction, machine translation, text summarization, question answering, ontology construction, parsing, generation, and other aspects. Contact: Dr. Eduard Hovy, [email protected]; +1-310-448-8731. The Technion researchers are part of the EU-funded QUALEG Project (not a Network of Excellence), which falls in the EU’s eGovernment Programme (IST Strategic Objective 2.3.1.9 “Networked businesses and governments”; see http://www.cordis.lu/ist/so/business-govt/). QUALEG comprises 11 partners (4 research, 4 commercial, and 3 city government): • Israel (research): Technion — Israel Institute of Technology (http://www.technion.ac.il/). Contact: Dr. Avigdor Gal, [email protected]; +972-4-8294425 • Italy (research): Associazione Impresa Politecnico (http://www.impresapolitecnico.polimi.it/) • France (research): Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (http://www.hec.fr/) • Poland (research and conference organizers): Stowarzyszenie “Miasta w Internecie” (http://www.mwi.pl/) • France (commercial): Business Flow Consulting (http://www.business-flow.com/) contact: Norbert Benamou, tel +33 1 41879620 — Project Lead • France (commercial): SQLI (http://www.sqli.com/)