MUMIA, a network for multilingual and multifaceted interactive information access, started its operations on 30.11.2010.

The tremendous power and speed of current search engines to respond, almost instantaneously to millions of user queries on a daily basis is one of the greatest successes of the past decade. While this technology empowers users need to extract relevant information from the hundreds of thousands of terabytes of existing data available on the web, the next decade presents many new grand challenges. Future search technology must be able to search, filter, extract, combine, integrate, and process multiple and distributed sources of multilingual content, delivered to an even wider global audience and variety of population. Inevitably, Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access (MUMIA) research and development will be a key part of the next generation of search technology.

MUMIA is an EU-funded COST action. It aims to coordinate the collaboration between the involved disciplines (machine translation, information retrieval etc.), to foster research and technology transfer in these areas and to play an important role in the definition of the future of search. To form a common basis for collaboration the domain of patent retrieval has been selected as a pilot application. The action will operate for four years in 2010-2014. It funds co-operation, networking and training in the area, but not actual research which is funded from other sources.

The volume of Finnish research in the area is over 30 person years per annum. Finnish participants to the network are the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and the University of Tampere. Finnish participation in the network is coordinated by Prof. Hannu Toivonen at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

MUMIA on the COST web site: www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/mumia