This term we are studying Human Language Technologies (HLT) and for that reason I have published in the previous posts some definitions that I found useful to gain a good insight into this topic. However, I think it is the time to meet some of the most important researchers, scholars and professors on this field.
Hans Uszkoreit's portrait
The first researcher that I am going to present is Hans Uszkoreit, who is Professor of Computational Linguisitcs at the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics of Saarland University at Saarbrücken (Germany). At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he heads the Language Technology Lab.
Mr Uszkoreit was born in Rostock (Germany) in 1950 and read in Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Berlin (Germany). In 1977, he received a grant for continuing his studies at the University of Texas (Austin, Texas, US), where he worked, among other things, as a research associate in a large machine translation project, obtaining his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1984.
After some years working for very important firms such as IBM and teaching at the University of Stuttgart, in 1988 Hans Uskoreit took the chair of the recently created Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at the Saarland University; just one year later, he became the head of the Language Technology Laboratory at the DFKI, as I have already mentioned above.
Hans Uszkoreit giving a lecture at the European Semantic Technology Conference 2008 (Vienna, Austria)
His current research interests include computer models of natural language understanding and production, advanced applications of language and knowledge technologies such as semantic information systems, translingual technologies, cognitive foundations of language and knowledge, deep linguistic processing of natural language, and, finally, syntax and semantics of natural language.
Mr Uszkoreit is Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL); Member of the European Academy of Sciences; Past President of the Association for Logic, Language and Information; Member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech; and, finally, Member of the Board of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
As Hans Uszkoreit is one of the most relevant figures on this field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) I thought it would be useful for all of us this brief profile about his life and career. However, if you want further information (CV, publications, courses… ) you can find it easily in the references below. I hope you have found this post entertaining.
References:
- Hans Uszkoreit’s personal homepage (2009). Retrieved: 23:09, March 3, 2009, from
http://hans.uszkoreit.net/ - Hans Uszkoreit’s personal homepage (2009) at Saarland University. Retrieved: 23:12, March 3, 2009, from
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/ - Hans Uszkoreit’s personal homepage (2009) at DFKI. Retrieved: 23:14, March 3, 2009, from
http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/
(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)
