Members
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Current IKITIK members include
- Acentra Inc. (Mika Willberg),
- Hospital District of Southwest Finland (Heikki Korvenranta),
- Lingsoft Inc. (Juhani Reiman, Simo Vihjanen),
- University of Turku, Department of Information Technology and TUCS, Bioinformatics Laboratory (Tapio Salakoski, Hanna Suominen) and
- University of Turku, Department of Nursing Science (Sanna Salanterä, Heljä Lundgrén-Laine), as well as
- Kites Association (Klaus Oesch) and
- Turku Science Park (Janne Lahtiranta).
Acentra Inc. is a Finnish software service house established in 2002. Its expertise is in research, developing and tailoring software solutions; data management and analysis; and system integration. In the IKITIK consortium, the responsibility of this company is to provide a platform that contains the IKITIK language technology solutions, to maintain it and provide user help services, user interfaces and portals.
The Hospital District of Southwest Finland is one of the five hospital districts in Finland. It provides specialized health care services and develops the entire health care system, and its hospitals are used for multidisciplinary teaching and research. Both Finnish and Swedish are user in communication within the Hospital District. The Hospital District has approximately 6,000 employees and its revenue is about 500 million euros. In the IKITIK consortium, the Hospital District defines realistic problems to be solved through language technology, as well as provides research material and genuine clinical settings for piloting the technology solutions.
Lingsoft Inc., established in 1986, is a full-service language company. It is a major supplier to Microsoft and a market leader in Nordic languages, German, and several non-European languages. The company is known for its state-of-the-art finite state syntactic analysis and advanced speech technology solutions, and continues to be very research-intensive. In the IKITIK consortium, Lingsoft Inc. brings added-value particularly to proof-reading and language analysis technology parts.
Research at the Bioinformatics Laboratory (University of Turku, Department of Information Technology) is focused on human language technology and machine intelligence methods and their interdisciplinary applications, especially for automated text and speech processing in the clinical and biomedical domains. Its leader is professor Tapio Salakoski and it belongs also to Turku Centre for Computer Science (TUCS), which is a joint institution of three universities in the Turku area: Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, and Åbo Akademi University. TUCS was established in 1994 and over 60 professors, senior researchers, and post docs, and over 110 PhD students work there in the field of information technology. The Bioinformatics Laboratory has lead several research projects involving both academia and industry. The laboratory has had four PhD dissertations 2007–2008, and another four students will receive their PhD in 2009. In the IKITIK consortium, the Bioinformatics Laboratory brings added-value to language technology development and tailoring.
Nursing Science began at the University of Turku in 1986 and the Department of Nursing Science has developed into a diverse education and research unit. Students can graduate at bachelors or masters level from the basic stage of education. The Post-Graduate School of Nursing Science is responsible for PhD level study. The department is also a coordinator of the Finnish National Post-Graduate School in nursing and caring sciences. Graduates at all levels of education go on to be placed in specialist and managerial roles within the health care, health education and health management systems. The Department of Nursing Science operates a diverse program of research. The first research plan was started in 1990 and it has naturally been re-specified and expanded on a regular basis. Research is aimed at actively responding to the needs of health care development in society and many research projects involve collaboration with clinicians from the field of nursing as well as from other scientific disciplines. In the IKITIK consortium, the professor Sanna Salanterä group is an expert in clinical heath care, decision-making and documentation.
Kites Association develops and promotes multilingual communication, multi-cultural interaction and their technical content management to improve the competitive edge of the Finnish economic life and the public administration. At the same time, Kites aims at developing the commercial business of this field's actors into international service activity. For Kites, the multilingual communication and content management means connecting the traditional language skills, culture know-how and the multi-channel and multi-source communicative skills with the help of the newest information technology.
Turku Science Park joins together the academic and business experts. Its special focal areas are biotechnology and ICT. It offers a unique growth environment for the commercialization of research-oriented innovations and for the generation and growth of enterprise activities related to high technology. The company responsible for overall development of the Science Park -area and activating the numerous players from many fields targeting the common goals is Turku Science Park Ltd. Turku Science Park Ltd is actively networking with national and international expertise clusters. We have e.g. a co-operation agreement with the German Technologiepark Heidelberg GmbH, one of the best-known clusters of biomedical business and research expertise in Europe and with the world-famous Swedish Karolinska Institutet we have a joint venture company, Biocelex Ltd. The company provides innovation and business development services for the internationalization and growth of biotechnology business. In the IKITIK consortium, the role of Turku Science Park is not only to provide resources but also support in national and international networking.
Outcomes of the IKITIK consortium include, for example, in 2008 the first proof-reading program for Finnish health and clinical text. In addition, the IKITIK members have collaborated in the Louhi project, which belonged to the FinnWell - Future Healthcare Technology Programme of the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes).
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