Our research and enterprise impact

Producing effective and accessible privacy protection models

For major corporations, protecting individuals’ privacy when using data is a key business process. One international player, Nokia, is working with the University of Brighton to help manage this complex area. 

Every time we use a mobile phone, our location is recorded. Originally, this was necessary to enable the cellular communications system to work properly. Today, however, our location is a valuable piece of commercial data, used to direct us to the nearest coffee shop or to tell us which motorway exit to take. 

Ensuring individuals’ privacy is protected is a business-critical task and telecoms giant Nokia recognised that research being undertaken by the University of Brighton led by Professor John Howse, could give them a competitive advantage. Today, diagrammatic logics, automated diagram drawing and theorem proving are producing effective and accessible privacy protection models for the company. 

“We worked with Nokia first on ontology design,’ said Dr Gem Stapleton, “we developed ways to share data infrastructure across different software and hardware platforms. Concept diagrams have helped Nokia design ontologies – frameworks for organising information – and this will be a big growth area in the future as ontology engineering demands increase.”

Concept diagrams can take many forms, but at heart they are a way of communicating more simply and more visually. Nokia’s challenge is to bridge different language and technical backgrounds to make sure that everyone involved in collecting and using personal data is aware of the rules that affect them, their colleagues and their customers.

Privacy engineering in the telecommunications sector is a complex task. Not only are millions of new pieces of data created every second, as a global business Nokia deals with scores of different legal jurisdictions with staff fluent in all of the world’s major languages. As a high-tech company, it also employs professionals in many fields, all of whom speak their own technical language.

Download the 'Keeping it simple for Nokia' article from our Making research matter publication.

Sketch Engine: Revolutionising language use

Researchers have developed a lexicographical tool that has helped change the face of dictionary publishing and enabled accurate analysis of language usage around the world.

Not so long ago dictionaries used to be compiled on huge card indexes. Compilers would collect examples of how words were used in different ways and make subjective decisions on their meanings in a range of contexts. All that has changed and University of Brighton researchers have been at the forefront of providing computational tools that can analyse large quantities of text objectively and keep up-to-date with the fast-changing nature of language in a diverse world through computer-based statistical analysis of the behaviour of individual words in large bodies of text online. 

Using word sense profiles, or word sketches, a computational lexicography Tool is created, which was commercialised as the ‘Sketch Engine’ by company, Lexical Computing Ltd, in 2003, at a time when dictionary publishers were beginning to look at moving online. 

Since then the Sketch Engine has been adopted by four of the UK’s five major dictionary publishers. Lexical Computing Ltd is working with Oxford University Press to analyse children’s language and Cambridge University Press to analyse the language produced by learners of English. National language institutes in nine European countries and 200 universities worldwide use it to support language research, dictionary production, language technology products and to enable language teaching. It has allowed users to access information on between 30 million and 70 billion words in 61 different languages. Lexical Computing Ltd now employs staff in the UK and the Czech Republic, along with freelancers in a number of other countries. Half of the company’s business is overseas and it runs training courses around the world.