Pierre LISON
Nationality: Belgian
Date of birth: 30.08.1982
Family status: Married
Phone: +47.967.998.12
Address:
Institutt for informatikk
Postboks 1080 Blindern
0316 Oslo
Email:
plison@ifi.uio.no
Professional interests
Research & development in natural language processing (computational linguistics), machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Education
2014
Ph.D. in Computer science
at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Dissertation: "Structured Probabilistic Modelling for Dialogue Management"
2008
M.Sc. in Language Science & Technology
at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Specialisation: Computational Linguistics
2006
B.Sc and M.Sc (ingénieur civil) in Computer Science
at the University of Louvain, Belgium.
Specialisation: Artificial Intelligence
2006
Minor degree and 1st year of the M.A in Linguistics
at the University of Louvain, Belgium.
Work experience
2014-present
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
3-years postdoctoral position funded by the Norwegian Research Council on
"Dialogue Modelling for Statistical Machine Translation". Visiting Researcher
at IDIAP (Swiss Federal Institute for Technology) in 2014.
2011-2014
PhD Research Fellow
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Research on spoken dialogue systems, in particular dialogue management.
Doctoral dissertation successfully defended in February 2014. Thesis supervisors: Stephan Oepen, Erik Velldal and Geert-Jan M. Kruijff.
2008-2010
Researcher
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Research in human–robot interaction and spoken dialogue systems in two
large EU-funded projects: CogX (2008-2012) and ALIZ-E (2010-2014).
2006-2008
Research assistant
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Research and development work for the CoSy project (2004-2008).
Publications
See my website for an updated list of publications.
Scientific Talks & Posters
See my website for an updated list of talks and posters.
Awards & Funding
2015
2014-2017
September 2009
January 2008
Runner-up, E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize.
Postdoctoral project on "Dialogue Modelling for Statistical Machine Translation" funded by the Norwegian Research Council (FRIPRO funding scheme).
Acceptance rate: 8 %. Total budget: NOK 3.3 million.
Recipient of GSCL1 Best Master Thesis Award, 1st prize.
Recipient of the DAAD Award for "Outstanding academic and social achievements of foreign students"2 for the University of Saarland.
Participation in committees
2010-2012
2012
Program chairs
Reviewing
Member of the EACL Student Board.
Organisation Committee for the 8th Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (Seoul, South Korea).
Mentoring chair for SIGDIAL 2016 (Los Angeles, USA).
2012 EACL Student Research Workshop (Avignon, France).
ESSLLI 2010 Student Session (Copenhagen, Denmark).
LREC 2016, VL 2015, SemDial 2015, APL 2014, SemDial 2014, EACL-SRW
2014, LREC 2014, AAMAS 2014, ESSLLI 2013, ACM TiiS (2013), IJARS (2013),
MLIS 2012, LREC 2012, IJCNLP 2011, IJCAI 2011, ICRA 2011, HRI 2011, ROMAN 2010, LREC 2010.
Secondary reviewer for ACL 2010 and SIGDIAL 2010.
Teaching activities
1
2012 & 2014
Co-teacher for the master course "Language Technology Applications", lecturing
on Spoken Dialogue Systems (50 % of course content).
Spring 2014
Co-teacher for the course "Søketeknologi" (25 % of course content).
2009-2010
Lecturer for the master courses "Computational linguistics" (coordinator) and
"Foundations of language science and technology" at the University of Saarland.
Supervision
Supervision of master theses: Sindre Vetjen (2013), Michał Kosek (May 2014),
Paolo Dragone (September 2015), Mathias Ramm (expected November 2016),
Natalia Smirnova (expected May 2017).
Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistik, the German Society for Computational Linguistics.
"DAAD-Preis für hervorragende Leistungen ausländischer Studierender", awarded every year in German universities by the
Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, the German Academic Exchange Service.
2
Technical Skills
Programming
Long programming experience in Java and Python. Good knowledge of PHP,
Javascript, C, C++, SQL, Prolog, Mozart/Oz, Shell, Matlab, R.
Specialisations
Artificial Intelligence: Search, constraint programming, mathematical logic,
knowledge representation, planning, probabilistic modeling and reasoning,
machine learning, pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, robotics.
Language technology: Speech recognition & synthesis, parsing algorithms,
computational semantics, information retrieval, machine learning for NLP,
spoken dialogue systems, statistical machine translation.
Foundations
Algorithm design & analysis, formal languages, computer networks, signal
processing, databases and information systems, interaction design, software
engineering, agile development, high-performance computing.
Language Skills
Based on the conventional levels of the ’Common European Framework’ [CEF]:
French:
English:
Norwegian:
German:
Dutch:
Language certificates:
Listening
C2
C2
C1
C1
B2
Reading
C2
C2
C1
C1
B2
Speaking
C2
C2
C1
C1
B1
Writing
C2
C2
C1
C1
B1
(native)
(fluent)
(very good)
(good)
(passive)
IELTS (ranked as "expert user") for English
Goethe-Zertifikat C1 (Zentrale Mittelstufenprüfung) for German
UiO Norskkurs trinn 3 for Norwegian
Intermediate level certificate (evening class) for Dutch
Miscellaneous
2002-2006
Qualified youth movement leader, responsible of several youth groups.
2003-2006
Elected co-president of the General Assembly of the Students of Louvain,
representing the student interests in university boards (Academic Council,
Strategic Orientation Board, Executive Board)
2007-2008
Member of the French-German theatre troupe "Le Pont".
Hobbies
Reading, outdoor activities, spending time with my family.
Note: all the papers and talks can be downloaded at:
http://folk.uio.no/plison