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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

META-NET Executive Board

The META-NET Executive Board directs META-NET's strategic orientation and safeguards the interests of all members. It ensures that META-NET is making satisfactory progress on its mission to forging META.

	Hans Uszkoreit Chair of the META-NET Executive Board, Coordinator of META-NET and T4ME DFKI, Germany Biography Hans Uszkoreit is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at TU Berlin. In 1977, he received a Fulbright Grant for continuing his studies at the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in Austin he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center. In 1984 Uszkoreit received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. From 1982 until 1986, he worked as a computer scientist at the AI Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca. While working at SRI, he was also affiliated with CSLI (Stanford University) as a senior researcher and later as a project leader. In 1986 he spent six months in Stuttgart on an IBM Research Fellowship at the Science Division of IBM Germany. In December 1986 he returned to Stuttgart to work for IBM Germany as a project leader in the project LILOG (Linguistic and Logical Methods for the Understanding of German Texts). At the same time he also taught at the University of Stuttgart. In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the newly founded Language Technology Lab at DFKI. Uszkoreit is Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL), Honorary Professor at TU Berlin, Coordinator of the International Erasmus Mundus Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies, Member of the European Academy of Sciences and serves on several international editorial and advisory boards.
	Georg Rehm Network Manager of META-NET and T4ME DFKI, Germany Biography Georg Rehm works at DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, in Berlin. Together with Hans Uszkoreit he coordinates META-NET, a Network of Excellence forging the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance. He holds an M.A. in Computational Linguistics and AI, Linguistics and Computer Science (University of Osnabrück) and a PhD in Computational Linguistics (University of Giessen). During his studies he worked as a freelancing consultant for multiple companies and as a sound technician for various bands. After completing his PhD he worked, from 2006 to 2008, as a researcher at the University of Tübingen, leading a project on the sustainability of linguistic resources. In 2009, Georg worked as a Product Manager at the internet startup vionto GmbH (Berlin) where he was responsible for product development, language technology and also did a little bit of strategy development, sales and social media marketing, especially in the context of the award-winning visual semantic search engine eyePlorer. Georg joined DFKI in early 2010. Georg is (co-)author of more than 40 research publications. His main research topics are all aspects of language resources (data formats, metadata, sustainability, sharing, legal issues, standardisation), markup languages for NLP, ontologies, text and document structure recognition, and text as well as web genres and their automatic identification.
	Jan Hajic Participant of T4ME Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Biography Jan Hajic is a full professor of Computational Linguistics and the head of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the School of Computer Science at Charles University in Prague. His interests cover morphology of inflective languages, machine translation, deep language understanding, and the application of statistical methods in natural language processing in general. He also has an extensive experience in building annotated language resources. His work experience includes both industrial research (IBM Research Yorktown Heights, 1991-1993) and academia (Charles University in Prague and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA). He has published more than 60 papers both internationally and nationally. He has been the PI or Co-PI of several national and international grants and projects, most notably the large Czech Grant Agency grant for Large Corpora (2001-2005), and the U.S.-based large ITR project Malach (coordinated by the Visual History Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA). Currently he is the main PI of the Centre for Computational Linguistics, and a panel member of several grant agencies, including the USA-based National Science Foundation. He has served on many Programme Committees for international conferences and has been involved in the organisation of several of them, most notably the EMNLP 2002, ACL 2007, EMNLP 2007 and he is the General Chair for the ACL 2010 conference. Currently he is a member of the Committee for Social Sciences and the Humanities of the Research Council of the Government of the Czech Republic and a member of the Research Board of the Technological Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, and also a member of the Scientifc Board of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles Univeristy in Prague. He has also served in the past for four years at the TEI Board of Directors, and for one term in the European ACL Executive Board.
	Stelios Piperidis Participant of T4ME ILSP, Research Centre “Athena”, Greece Biography Senior Researcher at ILSP, RC "Athena" and Head of Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Extraction Department. President of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), national scientific coordinator for the CLARIN Research Infrastructure, member of the LREC Programme Committee, member of the FLaReNet Steering Committee and the META-NET Executive Board, coordinator of the META-SHARE infrastructure under development in the framework of META-NET. Coordinator of European research projects of ILSP, RC "Athena" and site manager for ILSP’s participation in more than 25 R&D projects in the areas of mono/multilingual and multimedia information processing. Lecturer of postgraduate courses on Language Technology and Logic at the NTUA-University of Athens. His research interests include statistical and deductive methods in natural language processing and understanding, language resources and automatic linguistic knowledge elicitation, machine translation and philosophy of language.
	Joseph Mariani Participant of T4ME CNRS-LIMSI & IMMI, France Biography Joseph Mariani is a senior researcher at CNRS-LIMSI. His research relates to the processes of multimedia and multimodal human-machine communication, spoken language processing and language technologies (language resources and evaluation). He was director of LIMSI from 1989 to 2000, and head of the Human-Machine Communication department. He then directed the Information and Communication Technologies department at the French Research Ministry from 2001 to 2006, where he launched the Techno-Langue national programme on language technologies, focusing on resources, evaluation, standards and survey. He is now director of the Institute for Multilingual and Multimedia Information (IMMI). He served as president of ESCA, ELRA and of the CNRS ICT Advisory Committee, and as a member of the CNRS Scientific Council and Committee of Ethics, of the INRIA Evaluation Committee, and of the ELSNET and FLaReNet Boards.
	Josef van Genabith Participant of T4ME CNGL and DCU, Ireland Biography Josef van Genabith is the Director of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at DCU and currently a member of the advisory board of the European Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL). He graduated in Electronic Engineering (Information Technology) and English at RWTH Aachen, Germany (1988), received his Ph.D. in Linguistics (1993) from the University of Essex (U.K.) and worked as a researcher at the University of Essex (1991-1992) and at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung IMS, Universität Stuttgart, Germany (1992-1996). He joined the School of Computing at DCU in 1996. He was Chair of the Programme Board for the B.Sc. in Applied Computational Linguistics (DCU) 1997-2001. From 2001 to 2008 he was the Director of the National Centre for Language Technology. He has been Principal Investigator for Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)- and Enterprise Ireland (EI)-funded Basic Research grants. In 2003 he became a Visiting Researcher at IBM's Dublin Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) and an IBM Faculty Fellow in 2004. Josef van Genabith's research interests include automatic treebank-based, deep grammar acquisition, machine translation, finite state morphology, computer-assisted language learning, formal semantics, and localisation. He is (joint) author of more than 85 peer-reviewed international research publications (including papers in the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation and Research on Language and Computation and COLING, ACL, EACL and EMNLP conferences). He leads the GramLab research group (funded by SFI and EI) which has developed technology to automatically acquire high-quality, wide-coverage, deep LFG resources from treebanks, for probabilistic parsing and generation, for English, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, French and German.
	Tamás Váradi Coordinator of CESAR Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary Biography Tamás Váradi graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in English, Spanish and General and Applied Linguistics in 1976. His interests later turned to Computational Linguistics. In 1990 he spent a year as visiting scholar at Lancaster University where he worked on the compilation of the Parsed LOB Corpus. Between 1991-1995 he taught at London University and worked on the MARSEC project with Lancaster University. Founded the Department of Corpus Linguistics at RIL in 1997 and has actively joined the European scene participating in a series of projects (MATCHPAD, TELRI, CONCEDE, CACAO). He is one of the initiators of the CLARIN infrastructure project and currently coordinates the CESAR project as part of the META-NET community as well as the iTranslate4 project.
	Adam Przepiórkowski Participant of CESAR Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Biography Adam Przepiorkowski is an associate professor and the head of the Linguistic Engineering Group (LEG) at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (ICS PAS). At the same time he serves as an associate professor at the Institute of Informatics of the University of Warsaw. Adam Przepiorkowski graduated from the University of Warsaw in Computer Science in 1995. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Tübingen in Germany in 1999 and his PhD in Computer Science from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2000. Adam Przepiorkowski's interest and experience include Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics such as deep and shallow parsing of Polish, corpus linguistics, information extraction and machine learning methods in NLP. In Theoretical Linguistics, Adam is interested in the syntax of Polish, linguistic formalisms, linguistic formalisms and semantics (especially HPSG).
	António Branco Coordinator of METANET4U University of Lisbon, Portugal Biography António Branco obtained his PhD in Informatics in 1999 from the University of Lisbon. He is the (co-)author of over 100 publications in the area of natural language technology and has participated in over 20 R&D national and international projects, five of which he was the Principal Investigator. He was the founder and is the head of research of the NLX Group. He is the national coordinator of the Portuguese CLARIN infrastructure network.
	Mike Rosner Participant of METANET4U University of Malta, Malta Biography Mike Rosner teaches at the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems at the University of Malta. He gives lectures in Programming in Java, Fundamentals of Object Orientation using Java, Computational Linguistics, Human Language Technology and Computational Semantics. Mike Rosner participated in projects like MLRS Maltese Language Resource Server and LT4eL. The current projects which Mike Rosner is involved in are CLARIN (FP7 Infrastructures) and MPROM (University of Malta).
	Andrejs Vasiljevs Coordinator of META-NORD Tilde, Latvia Biography Andrejs is the co-founder and chairman of the board of the leading Baltic language technology company Tilde. He received a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Latvia for the thesis work on terminology management. Andrejs is the coordinator of the META-NORD project and takes a leading role in the EU R&D cooperation projects ACCURAT (FP7) and LetsMT! (ICT-PSP). He is also a member of the Intergovernmental Council and Bureau for the UNESCO Information for All Programme (IFAP) and a member of the State Language Commission of Latvia.
	Koenraad De Smedt Participant of META-NORD Department of Linguistic, Literary and Esthetic Studies, University of Bergen, Norway Biography Koenraad de Smedt studied English and Linguistics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) where he received his degree in 1977. He became a researcher, first in Antwerp and from 1983 in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) in the areas of computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and language technology. In 1985 he became lecturer at the Dept. of Experimental Psychology in Nijmegen, where he obtained his PhD in 1990 with a dissertation titled Incremental sentence generation: A computer model of grammatical encoding. In 1993 he moved to Leiden University. Since 1995 he has been professor in Computational Linguistics at the University of Bergen (Norway). His research interests are in models of human language processing, computational linguistics, language technology including multilingual technologies, and higher education strategies. In recent years he has focused on treebanking, an area in which he led an advanced research project from 2004 to 2008. He has also recently become involved in and transnational researcher training and from 2002 to 2008 he coordinated two consecutive Marie Curie training sites on multilingual knowledge tools.