Yesterday the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UMIST, launched its Millenium Project under which it intends to raise UKP25m from industry sponsors by the turn of the century so that it can continue to be at the leading edge of science, technology and management. It has already raised UKP5m prior to the launch with 30 gifts from industry. These gifts are added to the UKP11m+ which UMIST receives from contract research work and grants every year. Along with its expertise in environmental technology and spectrometry, UMIST also has strong computational linguistics and electronic materials centres. Indeed, on the day of the launch Robert Maxwell on behalf of Maxwell Communications made a donation to set up a professorship within computational linguistics. This new professor will assist Professor Tsujii (poached from Kyoto University) who is now working at UMIST to develop a processing and translation system which translates English text into Japanese. In fact, according to UMIST’s principal, Professor Harold Hankins, the Institute specialises in the development of software to complement work going on at the University of Manchester’s computer science department on hardware development. UMIST already has sponsorship links through its computational language centre with companies such as ICL, Data Logic and Istel, while its electronic materials centre, which is researching and developing semiconductor applications has industry links with several companies including GEC (which funds a chair in solid state electronics) and Thorn EMI. IBM does not yet actually sponsor UMIST research but has donated equipment to its schools of management and textile design. Further donations for the Millenium Project are required – in return UMIST provides the computer and related industries each year with about 1,000 graduates with qualifications in electronic engineering and information technology who also have a solid industrial grounding.
