A University of Essex-led knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) with media tracking company Signal has won an Innovate UK KTP Best of the Best Award.

The collaboration, involving Professors Udo Kruschwitz and Massimo Poesio from the university’s School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, won the Best UK Partnership category.

The awards, recognise the people and partnerships that are behind the most inspirational and successful KTP projects in the UK.

The main aim of the KTP with Signal was to develop cutting-edge, highly scalable natural language processing applications that monitor and analyse the world’s news.

The innovative intelligence platform developed by Signal can be used in any market, sector or domain to follow industry news, monitor risk and opportunity and track competitors.

Signal, founded in 2012 by David Benigson, now analyses more than 3.5million blogs and news sources every day to create targeted feeds. Customers of Signal’s technology platform include Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Daily site.

Prof Kruschwitz, the KTP’s academic lead, said: “The collaboration with Signal has been highly beneficial for all partners and the end of the KTP project will not mark the end of the collaboration. There have already been a number of undergraduate and postgraduate students working at Signal via paid internships, and this is expected to continue.”

London-based Signal and the university are also co-organising an international workshop in April 2016 on trends in news information retrieval, involving Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

Innovate UK, formerly the Technology Strategy Board, funds, supports and connects innovative businesses to accelerate sustainable economic growth and its work includes supporting KTPs across the country.