The Open University

The Open University is a world leader in distance education. Currently, it has around 150,000
undergraduate and more than 30,000 postgraduate students. It has educated more than 2 million people since its launch in 1969. It enjoys an international reputation for the quality of its research in many fields. In the OU's institution-wide Research School there is very considerable academic, managerial and administrative experience and expertise in leading significant projects on a national and international scale.

Within the OU, the Centre for Research in Computing (CRC) brings together researchers from many
branches of computing and wider. The CRC includes the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute for Educational Technology (IET) and academic staff from the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology. CRC researchers participate in, and often lead, substantive externally funded research projects, nationally and internationally. Specific expertise of relevance resides in a number of research groups, including the Multimedia Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and the Semantic Web and Knowledge Services research groups within the CRC.