Issue link: https://htpgraphics.uberflip.com/i/1055210
INNOVATORS LAND £30K FOLLOWING UMIP'S 'NEXT BIG THING' FINALE Three innovative spin-out ideas landed £30,000 following the final of UMIP's inaugural 'Next Big Thing' competition which attracted 23 applications from entrepreneurial academics, staff and post- doctoral researchers from across the University. UMIP HIGHLIGHTS Data Value Factory, ICE NINE and Eurimatics all secured £10,000 apiece which has enabled them to start their commercial journeys in the business world. 'The Next Big Thing', hosted at The University of Manchester Innovation Centre on Grafton Street by UMIP in April also saw four other finalists pitch business concepts to a panel of four judges. Data Value Factory's Norman Paton, a Professor of Computer Science at the University since 2000 and Nikolaos Konstantinou, are seeking to make it easier for data scientists to clean up and organise the data that they need in order to carry out analyses and gain insights. Post-Doctoral Research Associate Matthew Nancekievill is behind ICE NINE, which is aiming to sell a small educational robot to universities, colleges and schools. John McNaught, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Text Mining, standing in for the Director, Professor Sophia Ananiadou, pitched Eurimatics to the judges –a project that aims to help people working to elaborate best practices, guidelines and policies, by vastly reducing the amount of effort needed to filter nuggets of evidence from large datasets, through learning from human decisions on relevance. Chair of the judging panel, Dr Rich Ferrie, UMIP Director of Operations, said: "The Next Big Thing has been a real experiment for us.