Biographie

Biography

 I am currently Scientific Director of Multilingual Technologies at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Full Professor and Chair of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at the University of Saarland, Germany. 

I graduated with the 1st Staatsexamen in Electronic Engineering (Information Technology) and English (Language, Linguistics and Literature) at RWTH Aachen, Germany in 1988, received a 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 the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung IMS, Universität Stuttgart (Germany) 1992-1996. 

I joined the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU) as a Lecturer in 1996, became Senior Lecturer in 1999 and Associate Professor in 2002. 

I chaired the Programme Board for the B.Sc. in Applied Computational Linguistics (DCU) 1997–2001. 

In 2001 I took on the Directorship of the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT). I developed the NCLT to an internationally recognised research centre in language technologies, with more than 30 PhD students, 20 postdoctoral researchers, and a rich research project portfolio, entirely based on external grant income. 

I was Principal Investigator for a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)- and two Enterprise Ireland (EI)-funded Basic Research grants and was awarded an SFI Principal Investigatorship in 2004. 

In 2003 I became a Visiting Researcher at IBM’s Dublin Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) and an IBM Faculty Fellow in 2004. 

In 2006 I was awarded an IRCSET planning grant to lead a consortium of six Irish universities (DCU, UCD, TCD, DIT, NUIM, UL) and two industrial partners (IBM and Microsoft) to draft a Graduate School in Speech and Language Technology. 

In 2007 I was awarded a € 16.8M Science Foundation Ireland CSET grant (2007-2012) as Founding Director for the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), an Academia-Industry partnership led by DCU with four University partners (DCU, TCD, UL, and UCD) and ten Industry partners (IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Dai Nippon Printing, SDL, VistaTEC, Alchemy, Applied Language Solutions, Welocalize, and SpeechStorm). I have been building a strong research eco-system at DCU around the NCLT and across CNGL, concentrating in particular on EU FP7 funding. I have led CNGL and the research eco-system build around CNGL to a total of 150 people and a research income of over €40M (including Industry contributions).

In 2013, I handed the CNGL Directorship over to Prof. Vincent Wade (TCD) and continued to work for one year as Deputy Director for CNGL-II and lead DCU PI. CNGL-II (2013-2016) was awarded a total of € 10.5M in direct SFI funding with € 3.7M direct funding for DCU.

In 2014 I accepted the post of Scientific Director for Multilingual Technologies at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), in Saarbrücken, Germany and the Chair of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at the University of Saarland, Germany.

Since 2007 I have served as local DCU, University of Saarland and DFKI Principal Investigator in EU-funded Research and Development projects including EuroMatrixPlus, T4ME-META-NET, Panacea, CoSyne, QTLaunchPad, EXPERT, LT-Web, MLI, Falcon and QT21. Currently I am overall coordinator for the EU H2020 Research and Development Project QT21 and the ELRC effort under the SMART 2013 Programme.

Since 1996, I supervised 19 Ph.D. and 5 M.Sc. by Research students to completion.  I am (joint) author of over 175 peer-reviewed international research publications.