Milica Gašić
Prof. Milica Gašić is a Professor in Dialog Systems and Machine Learning at Heinrich Heine University. Her research focuses on fundamental questions of human-computer dialogue modelling and lie in the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. She is a recipient of the European Research Council Starting Grant and the Alexander von Humboldt Sofja Kovalevskaja Award.
Prof. Gašić is the vice-president of SIGDIAL (Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue), a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz), a member of ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), a member of ELLIS (European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems) and a senior member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
Mikel L. Forcada
Prof. Mikel L. Forcada was born in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1963 and is married with two children. He graduated in Science in 1986 and got his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1991. In February 2024, he retired from his position of full professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat d’Alacant, which he held from 2002. He is currently founding partner (2006) and chief research officer of Prompsit Language Engineering.
From the turn of the millennium on, Prof. Forcada’s research interests have mainly focused on the field of translation technologies, but he has worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. He is the author of more than 70 articles in international journals, papers in international conferences and book chapters, of which about 40 are about translation technologies. In 2004, after heading several publicly- and privately-funded projects on machine translation he started the free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium (with more than 40 language pairs), where he is a member of the project management committee after ten years being president, and the free/open-source software project Bitextor (which crawls Internet sites to harvest parallel corpora).
Prof. Forcada has participated in the scientific committees of more than thirty international conferences and workshops. During 2009–2010 he was an ETS Walton Visiting Professor in the machine translation group at Dublin City University; during 2016–2017 he was visiting professor at Sheffield University and the University of Edinburgh.
Tanja Bäumel
Tanja Bäumel is a researcher in the Multilinguality and Language Technology Lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. She has a background in computational linguistics, computer science and cognitive science, and is currently pursuing her PhD. Her research is in the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), where she works on understanding and interpreting the inner workings of large-scale pre-trained language models, as well as their limitations.
Josef van Genabith
Prof. Josef van Genabith is a Scientific Director at DFKI, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where he heads the Multilinguality and Language Technology Lab. He is Professor of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University, Germany.
Previously, he was the founding Director of CNGL (now ADAPT), the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, in Dublin, Ireland, and a Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University. His research interests include language technology, machine translation, parsing, generation, computer assisted language learning (CALL) and morphology.
Mikel Artetxe
Mikel Artetxe is a co-founder of Reka and an honorary researcher at the University of the Basque Country. Prior to that, he was a Research Scientist at FAIR (Meta AI). He did his PhD at the University of the Basque Country, and interned at DeepMind, FAIR, and Google.
Mikel's general research area is in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. His background is mostly on multilinguality and, in particular, unsupervised machine translation and cross-lingual representation learning. More recently, he has also been working on large language models.