Organization

Structure

All organizations that constitute the project consortium have considerable experience in managing sizable projects including projects with EU scope. Such a background would ensure that the project is carried out professionally and led to success. The primary responsibility of the consortium is to make sure that all contractual obligations in terms of deliverables, quality and timeliness, are properly met.

Executive Board

The scope of the project requires an Executive Board to be elected to supervise and manage project activities and act as a steering group. The Executive Board will consist of nine people – one nominee from each partnering organization. Such a structure would ensure that each partner is equally involved in the project and dedicated to its success. Even though board members could be replaced, the board would refrain from such practice as it could have a destabilizing effect. The Executive Board will meet annually as part of the appointed project meetings, which will be attended by non-executives as well. Executives-only meetings, preceding the scheduled ones, might be organized if the circumstances necessitate. Non-scheduled meetings of the Board could also be arranged but only in exceptional situations. The project web site and a mailing list will be used for routine day-to-day communication of the Board.

The members of the executive board are:

• Anelia Belogay (Tetracom) – Coordinator, and CEO of ATLAS and chair person of the Executive Board
• Damir Ćavar (UniZD) – WP3 (Automatic text categorization)
• Adam Przepiórkowski (ICS PAS) – WP4 (Language Processing Chains)
• Dan Cristea (UAIC) – WP5 (Text Summarization)
• Cristina Vertan (UHH) – WP6 (Machine Translation and Cross-lingual search)
• Polivios Raxis (Atlantis) – WP7 (User Evaluation and Testing)
• Roumen Nikolov (ITD) – WP8 (Dissemination and Exploitation)
• Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI)
• Svetla Koeva (IBL DCL)

Executive Officers

The project coordinator who is nominated by the leading organization will become chair person of the Executive Board and will also take the position of project Chief Executive Officer. The CEO will carry out project management tasks with the help of other employees of the leading organization. Project management tasks include reporting to the European Commission, communicating with consortium participants, and project leadership. A Chief Technical Officer will also be appointed to oversee the advancement and to ensure the quality of the technical activities within the project. The CTO will be accountable for technical issues and will report to the Executive Board on all such matters. At the start of the project, the CEO will be Mrs. Anelia Belogay and the CTO will be Mr. Diman Karagiozov. Mr. Roumen Nikolov will be in charge of the project dissemination.

Management support team

Project management will be carried out by the CEO, CTO and additional personnel. The main responsibility of the management support team is to conduct the majority of the management tasks in order to facilitate the work of the other participants. Thus, non-managerial partners would be able to concentrate their efforts on meeting project objectives. The CEO and the CTO will perform the day-to-day decision making and report to the Executive Board. In addition, each partner carries out its own management attribution.

Subcommittees

The Executive Board will nominate several subcommittees during its first meeting. Each subcommittee reports its activities to the Board and sets new objectives for the next reporting period. The following subcommittees will be formed:

Intellectual Property Rights Subcommittee
The IPR subcommittee will establish a set of rules related to the ownership of intellectual property. Issues that will be specifically addressed include the status of ideas, software, and written materials, which are created for the purposes of the project or contributed by partners who already own them. The IPR subcommittee aims to ensure that all ownership issues are addressed in a manner that prevents possible conflicts.

Conflict Resolution Subcommittee
The purpose of the CR subcommittee is to resolve any significant disagreements between partners. The subcommittee aims at alleviating or eliminating sources of conflict in order to allow partners to reach an agreement. In case the CR subcommittee is unable to resolve the conflict, an independent arbitrator will be appointed.

Technology Subcommittee
This subcommittee will be alert for advancements in technology that might have an impact on the project. Members of the subcommittee must be able to recognize and deal with potential threats, opportunities as well as new concepts and ideas arising from such developments. The Technology subcommittee will also support the Chief Technical Officer in his/her duties.