School of ECM University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1483 259823 Fax: +44 (0)1483 876051

Bogdan Vrusias, B.Sc. has been the Research Officer under the Teaching Company Scheme (TCS) since November 1998. The TCS, run by the Teaching Company Directorate (TCD), was set up to improve links between academia and industry.

Our program is a collaboration between the AI group and IML Ltd, a medium sized company based in Liphook, Hampshire. IML design, build and provide electronic handsets for audience polling at business meetings, conferences and training programs. They also run employee surveys via email and the WWW. Our TCS has been set up to introduce IML to data analysis techniques; to increase the 'power' of their data. The size of datasets ranges from 30 people meetings to 3000 people conferences to company sized training programs, which means a range of techniques will be needed.

The AI group at the University of Surrey has expertise in text processing and classification. There is a strong history in the group in the use of Kohonen maps for this task and we have recently looked at a comparison with Decision Trees (ID3). We intend to build on both these techniques for implementation within a "Pollsters' workbench".