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Welcome to ICON, the new institute for Cognitive Informatics at the
University of Sheffield.
ICON brings together Sheffield's multidisciplinary strengths in Language, Web,
Information, Speech and Hearing research. ICON provides infrastructure for
collaborative research, both internally and with our research partners. The
Sheffield community in these fields is one of the largest and strongest
worldwide: ICON reaches several hundred academics and researchers across 7
Departments and 5 Faculties. Funding for the research teams founding the
institute is currently running at more than £1 million yearly, and last year
attracted £5 million in new grant income. The institute is intended to be a
focal point for this research and to promote and extend interdisciplinary
links between fields.
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Cognitive Informatics is the study of the computational mechanisms that
underlie human-like methods for processing information, or computational
systems that mimic or augment such methods. It is a new multidisciplinary
field concerned with natural systems (people and other living organisms),
artificial systems (computers and other computational devices) and hybrids of
the two (e.g. for assistive technology). The scientific goal in Cognitive
Informatics is to develop a unified account of pattern and information
processing that explains the organisation and structure of communicative
information such as speech and language as well as biological and chemical
structures. The technological goal of Cognitive Informatics is the
implementation of engineering solutions such as multimodal interactive
agent-based systems, data, text and web mining, multimedia content management,
communicative robots and real-time virtual environments for distributed
collaborative work.
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