US firm invests in Lancaster University

07/20/2006 15:36:45

Lancaster University is the only academic institution in the UK to have been awarded a grant from the US firm Xerox, which aims to fund the inventors of tomorrow.

Lancaster is one of ten universities in the US, UK, Canada and Germany which have won a share of research grants totalling $200,000.The research will be carried out by Dr Simon Kelly and Dr Mark Rouncefield in the Department of Computing.Dr Kelly will be working with Xerox at their European base at Grenoble in France.

He said: “A principal area of interest and research will be on the use of information and communications technologies to support leadership work, in particular the intersection of these technologies with the production and use of documents of various kinds.
“The project will generate a number of insights regarding the kinds of technologies needed to support leadership as it actually occurs in practice. These ideas will be developed in partnership with Xerox through a series of workshops where the focus will be upon the implications of these insights for the actual design and deployment of leadership technologies.”

The research grants are part of Xerox’s programme to stimulate academic research in technologies of long-term importance to the company.Researchers are not required to deliver a specific result, nor is the work proprietary to Xerox.

Gregory Zack of Xerox said: “Investing in the work of science and engineering students today may lead to their success as inventors at Xerox tomorrow.
“The full range of technology found in Xerox products is being studied at universities as well as in our research labs, and this grants programme helps strengthen the bridges between our organizations and our people, while advancing science at the same time.”