Hans Uszkoreit and Yorick Wilks (Q1)

There are many relevant researchers like Martin Kay, Yorick Wilks, Hans Uszkoreit, Fabian M. Suchanek and Silviu Cucerzan, but I’m going to talk about two of them, Hans Uszkoreit and Yorick Wilks.

HANS USZKOREIT

Hans Uszkoreit is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Laboratory. By cooptation he is also Professor of the Computer Science Department.
Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. He co-founded the Berlin city magazine Zitty, for which he worked as an part-time editor and writer. 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 Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. While working at SRI, he was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University as a senior researcher and later as a project leader. 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).
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. He has been a co-founder and principal investigator of the Special Collaborative Research Division (SFB 378) “Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes” of the DFG (German Science Foundation).
Uszkoreit is Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL), Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, Member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech, Member of the Board of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), and serves on several international editorial and advisory boards. He is co-founder and Board Member of XtraMind Technologies GmbH, Saarbruecken, acrolinx gmbh, Berlin and Yocoy Technologies GmbH, Berlin. Since 2006, he serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the international initiative dropping knowledge.

YORICK WILKS

Yorick Wilks was born on1939 and is a British Computer Scientist, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Wilks was educated at Torquay Boys’ Grammar School, before attending Pembroke College, and he obtained his Ph.D. in 1968 under Professor R. B. Braithwaite for his thesis Argument and Proof. His main early contribution in the 1970s was called “Preference Semantics”. That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries as was normal at the time.
Yorick Wilks has been elected a fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee. In 1991 he received a Defense Advanced Projects Agency grant on interlingual pragmatics-based machine translation and in 1994 he received a grant by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in order to investigate in the field of Large-scale information extraction (LaSIE). In the 1990s Professor Wilks also became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue . He is currently the Director of the EU funded Companions Project on creating long-term computer companions for people. He was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize in honor of his lifetime work at the LREC’2008 conference on May 28 in 2008, and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACL’2008 conference on June 18 in 2008. In 2009, he was awarded the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal.

In 1998, Wilks became in head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield, where he had started working in the year 1993 as Professor of Artificial Intelligence, a post that he still possesses. In 1993 he became the founding director of the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH). Yorick Wilks also heads the Natural Language Processing Group of the University of Sheffield.

REFERENCES

* Yorick Wilks, from wikipedia, retrieved on March 14,13:02 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorick_Wilks
* Hans Uszkoreit, from his own webpage, retrieved on March 14, 12:47 http://hans.uszkoreit.net/