\mysection{The Consortium Members and Management Structure}

{\sc Nespole!} will be pursued by a consortium of four scientific
partners and two user/technology provider partners.  The scientific
partners are (1) Istituto Trentino di Cultura, Istituto per la Ricerca
Scientifica e Tecnologica (ITC-irst) in Trento, Italy, (2) CLIPS-IMAG,
in Grenoble, France, (3) The Interactive Systems Lab at the University
of Karlsruhe, Germany, and (4) The Interactive Systems Lab and
Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
The scientific partners are amongst the major players in the speech
and natural language processing community. All these institutions have
also been cooperating since 1994 as partners of an international consortium
for spoken language translation: C-STAR II.  For this reason, they have a
long and well-established experience of joint work and of successful
cooperation.

The user and technology provider partners are Azienda per la
Promozione Turistica di Trento (APT) and AETHRA.  APT is a provider of
tourism services.  AETHRA is a medium-size enterprise involved in the
production and commercialization of video-conference equipment, and an
e-commerce/service supplier with users in South America, Asia, Europe,
and North America.  

In addition to these partners, which form the {\sc Nespole!}
consortium, a user-group will be set up from the beginning of the
project to act consult on strategic choices, exploitation,
external validation, and dissemination.

The role of the various partners is as follows: ITC-irst, UKA, CMU-LTI
and CLIPS will provide the human language technologies for Italian,
German, English and French, and the technologies for multimedia and
multimodality. APT will provide requirements of a typical tourist
destination, and will help with validation. AETHRA will provide both
the video-call center technology and the user expertise of a help-desk
managing organization on a global level.

Project management corresponds to Workpackage~1 in the European {\sc
Nespole!} proposal.  The management structure will consist of (1) two
Project Directors, one from Europe and one from the US, (2) a Project
Management Committee with one member from each partner, (3) a Project
Technical Committee with one member from each partner, (4) a team of
Workpackage Leaders reporting to the Technical Committee, 
and a Project Exploitation Manager for technology transfer.




