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 Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. 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. 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 Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca. 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 1986 he went to Stuttgart on an IBM Research Fellowship at the Science Division of IBM Germany, where he later worked as project leader. 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. 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). He is also co-founder and professor of the "European Postgraduate Program Language Technology and Cognitive Systems", a joint Ph.D. program with the University of Edinburgh.

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 advisor of XtraMind Technologies GmbH, Saarbruecken, now part of Attensity Inc., 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.

Uszkoreit has coordinated several EU-funded R&D projects. Currently he is coordinator of META-NET, a Network of Excellence dedicated to technologies for the multilingual European information society, EuroMatrixPlus, a project on bringing machine translation to the European users, and EM-LCT a European Erasmus Mundus Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies. He is also co-PI of the German Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction inSaarbruecken.

Uszkoreit has documented his research in more than 150 scientific publications. His current research interests are computer models of human language understanding and production as well as advanced applications of language and knowledge technologies such as translingual technologies and semantic information systems.