Press Release: Dr. Stelios Piperidis to Serve as New ELRA President

[Helene Mazo]

Press Release - Immediate - Paris, France, 6 October 2008


ELRA INTRODUCES NEW BOARD
Dr. Stelios Piperidis to Serve as New ELRA President


Paris, France, 6 October 2008- The European Language Resources 
Association (ELRA) announces today the results of the ELRA Board 
election. This election has taken place during the 1 October 2008 Board 
Meeting, held right after the ELRA Annual General Assembly. The newly 
elected President is Dr. Stelios Piperidis.

Dr Piperidis is a Director of Research at the Institute for Language and 
Speech Processing (ILSP) / Research Centre “Athena”. He has been the 
Head of the Department of Language Technology Applications of ILSP since 
its inception in 1994. At the same time he is lecturing at the National 
Technical University of Athens on Logic, Semantics and Human Language 
Technology where he is also supervising postgraduate students’ research 
projects. He was the Project Scientific Coordinator of the 
Translearn/LRE, MUSA/IST and REVEAL THIS/IST projects. In 2001, he was 
appointed national expert delegate, member of the Management Committee 
of the eContent programme of the European Union. He currently serves on 
several national and international editorial, assessment and advisory 
panels and boards. He is co-founder and Board member of Cognitron LLC 
and Knowledge-Language and Culture Entrepreneurial Cluster in Athens. 
His research interests include statistical and deductive methods in 
natural language processing and understanding, language resources and 
automatic linguistic knowledge elicitation, machine translation and 
philosophy of language. He has published more than 100 articles in 
international scientific books, journals and proceedings of many 
international conferences, while he has given several invited tutorial 
and keynote speeches.

Further to a change in the ELRA statutes, the ELRA Board is now composed 
of 9 members:

    * Robrecht Comeyne, Secretary
    * Martine Garnier-Rizet, Vice-President
    * Theo van den Heuvel, Board Member
    * Jimmy Kunzmann, Treasurer
    * Asuncion Moreno, Board Member
    * Stelios Piperidis, President
    * Gabor Prószéky, Board Member
    * Gregor Thurmair, Vice-President
    * Hans Uszkoreit, Board Member


Khalid Choukri remains the General Secretary of the Association.

After serving 3 terms, which is the maximum allowed by the ELRA 
statutes, Bente Maegaard (former ELRA President), Nicoletta Calzolari 
(Vice-President) and Pasi Tapanainen (Board Member) have left the Board. 
ELRA is grateful to the 3 of them for the work they did for the Association.


*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit 
making organisation founded in 1995, with the support of the European 
Commission and the European HLT key-players, whether industrial or 
academics. The mission of the Association is to promote language 
resources (henceforth LRs) and evaluation for the Human Language 
Technology (HLT) sector in all their forms and all their uses, in a 
European context. Consequently the goals are: to coordinate and carry 
out identification, production, validation, distribution, 
standardisation of LRs, as well as support for evaluation of systems, 
products, tools, etc. - related to language resources.
To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: www.elra.info
Contact:
Helene Mazo
mazo at elda.org