7/15/2025
Terranova partners with King's College London to create dynamic reports
King's College London
King's College London is amongst the top 35 universities in the world and 5th best in the UK (QS World University Rankings 2026), and one of England’s oldest and most prestigious universities. With an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research, King’s maintained its sixth position for ‘research power’ in the UK (2021 Research Excellence Framework). King's has more than 33,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from some 150 countries worldwide, and 8,500 staff.
For nearly 200 years, King’s students and staff have used their knowledge and insight to make a positive impact on people, society and the planet. Focused on delivering positive change at home in London, across the UK and around the world, King’s is building on its history of addressing the world’s most urgent challenges head on to accelerate progress, make discoveries and pioneer innovation. Visit the website to find out more about Vision 2029, which sets out bold ambitions for the future of King’s as we look towards our 200th anniversary.
The Goal
We set out to enable users to create dynamic reports simply by describing their needs in natural language. This approach represents a quantum leap in terms of user experience because it eliminates the need to know complex technical tools or structured query languages. Making natural interaction with the system possible enables even non-technical figures to independently access data, make specific requests and get immediate responses, significantly improving decision-making speed. This is an ambitious challenge because it requires correctly interpreting complex intents, handling linguistic ambiguities, and ensuring consistency and reliability in results.
The Project
The real-time system takes a user request that will be translated into a query in a database system. This user request will be in natural language (so it will be translated into English or any other language that the system can recognize) and will then be translated into machine language.
Together we have created an entire system that allows us not only to ask these questions or these requests in real time, but also to translate them into a much richer formalization of the data than just a textual response. In other words, if a user needs to view data by year and to see the evolution of, for example, a marketing campaign or a political campaign, the system will show the requested data in this type of visualization.
The idea for this system is broken down into four different parts, which King's College London students have been working on. The four aspects the students focused on are:
- The translation of natural language, in this case English, to machine language.
- The translation of machine output to natural language
- The visualization of data, so that if a user asks for a specific visualization of data evolution, the system provides it.
- The nteraction with chatbots, i.e., what language patterns can facilitate interaction with the user
All of this together facilitates the whole pipeline to be able to get these data outputs and show them to the user in the format of a report.
Lecturer in Computer Science - Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Héctor Menéndez
Dr. Héctor Menendez is a Lecturer in Computer Science - Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Informatics, King's College London.
Héctor obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2014, where he also graduated with a BSc in Mathematics, Computer Science and an equivalent MSc. His primary research interests are in machine learning, software testing, cybersecurity and quantum programs.
Terranova's research and development team focuses on understanding cutting-edge technologies, which is not always the case when working with a company more focused on software or solution development.
Because Terranova is so focused on development and research, together with the students we were able to work on some interesting and innovative projects that have real-world application.
Terranova & Open Innovation
We collaborate with research organisations, universities and start-ups around the world, with the common goal of creating solutions that enable us to revolutionise the world of Utilities. Over the years we have built a collaborative ecosystem based on knowledge sharing, within which we have created partnerships that accelerate the innovation process and allow us to develop solutions that exceed market standards.
