From left: Miguel Martinez-Alvarez and David Benigson, of Signal Media, with Professor Udo Kruschwitz, of the University of Essex. Picture courtesy of Innovate UK

An Essex-led Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with a media tracking company has won Innovate UK’s KTP Best of the Best Awards 2015.

The collaboration project, involving London-based company Signal and Professors Udo Kruschwitz and Massimo Poesio, from the University’s School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, won the Best UK Partnership category.

The KTP Awards, recognise the people and partnerships that are behind the most inspirational and successful KTP projects in the UK.

The main aim of the KTP with Signal was to develop cutting-edge, highly scalable natural language processing applications that monitor and analyse the world's news. The innovative intelligence platform developed by Signal can be used in any market, sector or domain to follow industry news, monitor risk and opportunity and track competitors. Signal, founded in 2012 by David Benigson, now analyses more than 3.5 million blogs and news sources every day to create targeted feeds. Customers of Signal's technology platform include Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Daily site.

Professor Kruschwitz, the KTP’s academic lead, added: “The collaboration with Signal has been highly beneficial for all partners and the end of the KTP project will not mark the end of the collaboration. There have already been a number of undergraduate and postgraduate students working at Signal via paid internships, and this is expected to continue.”

Signal and the University are also co-organising an international workshop in April 2016 on trends in news information retrieval, involving Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

Innovate UK – formerly the Technology Strategy Board - funds, supports and connects innovative businesses to accelerate sustainable economic growth and its work includes supporting KTPs across the country.