2.3 Project management during the period

Management tasks carried out during the first semester of MOLTO finalized the administrative and organizational setup of the project. The website for the project is online at http://www.molto-project.eu. The Consortium Agreement had been signed before the Grant Agreement in December 2009. The workplan for MOLTO (Deliverable D1.1) is hosted on the wiki pages on the website.

The Steering Group of MOLTO, elected during the Kick-Off meeting, presently consists of voting members A. Ranta (UGOT, Chair), J. Saludes (UPC), B. Popov (Onto), and L. Carlson (UH). The Steering group held monthly calls to discuss the project's progress and recorded the minutes on the website. The MOLTO Advisory Board has been established, with members Prof. Stephen Pulman (Computing Laboratory Oxford) and Keith Hall (Google Research Zurich).

The project had to face a major challenge with the dissolution of the Consortium partner company Matrixware. Upon learning of this, the Coordinator informed the Commission and proceeded to formalize the dismissal of Matrixware, that left the Consortium at the end of Month 2, on April 23, 2010. In order to be able to carry out the tasks set forward in the MOLTO DoW, with minor disruption, MOLTO started negotiations with EPO, European Patent Office, to incorporate it as new member of the MOLTO Consortium. This process has taken a long time, about 3 months and we expect to learn their final decision at the end of October. In case of positive outcome, then EPO will step in and we expect little changes to the original workplan. In case of negative outcome, then MOLTO will discuss changing the workplan for Workpackage 7, the Patent Case Study, possibly to a different domain. MOLTO partners have been approached by several interested parties with use case study domains that could be suitable testbeds for the tools developed during the project, these wil be approached first.

The original workplan has been slightly modified to cope with changes in the Consortium, mainly by shifting the start of two workpackages. The loss of Matrixware affected the MOLTO activities scheduled for Workpackage 7: Case Study Patents (led by MXW) from Month 4 to Month 30. The major task that has been put on hold is the preparation of a parallel patent corpus (Mxw) to fuel the training of statistical MT (UPC). The work on Workpackage 7 will start as soon as the Consortium situation clarifies. UPC, the most directly affected partner (whose tasks depended on the work of Mxw), has begun the work on Workpackage 6: Case Study Mathematics in Month 5 instead of Month 7.

Two project meetings have been organized, in Barcelona, 8-10 March 2010, and in Varna 10-12 September, 2010. A bilateral meeting, between UH and UGOT, has been organized in Helsinki on 5-6 May 2010.