Language, Technologies and the Future of Europe

International conference. September 21, 2012. Riga, Latvia.

This section provides brief information about some of the key speakers at the conference.

Valdis Dombrovskis Valdis Dombrovskis is the Prime Minister of Latvia. He previously served as Minister for Finance of Latvia and as a Member of the European Parliament for the New Era Party.
Žaneta Jaunzeme-Grende Žaneta Jaunzeme-Grende is Minister for Culture of Latvia since 2011. She was Chairperson of the Board of the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry from 2008 to 2011. She has a Master’s Degree in Social Science (public administration), University of Latvia.
Harolds Celms Harolds Celms is director of the "Publications and Dissemination" directorate" at the Publications Office of the European Union since 2010.
Uldis Priede Uldis Priede is head of the Latvian Language Department at Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission. Before joining the Commission in 2007, he worked in translation and localization industry for ten years. He was manager of Tilde's Localization department between 2002 and 2005.

Hans Uszkoreit

Hans Uszkoreit is Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. He is coordinating the European Network of Excellence META-NET, the European Master Program in Language and Communication Technologies and various research projects in language technology. He is also co-founder and advisor of several language technology enterprises and member of the European Academy of Sciences.

Kimmo Rossi Kimmo Rossi manages the research and innovation sector of the unit "Data value chain" at DG "Communication networks, content and technology" of the European Commission. He first worked in the software localization industry before joining the Commission in 1994. The past 12 years he has been working with European research and innovation programs, covering the life cycle from program planning, stakeholder consultation through evaluation, negotiating and monitoring of projects. He has been dealing with socio-economic challenges such as competitiveness, inclusion, multilingualism and access to information. The science and technology areas he has dealt with include language processing, information management, natural interaction technologies, and their useful applications in commercial and administrative services.
Stelios Piperidis Stelios Piperidis is Head of Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Extraction Department of ILSP/”Athena” RC. He is the President of the European Language Resources Association, national scientific coordinator for the CLARIN Research Infrastructure, member of the LREC Programme Committee, member of the FLaReNet Steering Committee and the META-NET Executive Board, coordinator of the META-SHARE infrastructure under development in the framework of META-NET.
Kadri Vider Kadri Vider is Executive Manager of the Center of Estonian Language Resources and CLARIN-ERIC National Coordinator in Estonia. 2007-2011 she was chief expert of Research Policy Department in Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. Today she works at University of Tartu as researcher of language technology and also project leader in META-NORD and DASISH projects. Her research interests include semantics, computer lexicons, word sense disambiguation, lexical functions.
Andrejs Veisbergs Andrejs Veisbergs, Professor of the University of Latvia, Head of the Department of Translation and Interpreting. He is also the Head of the Presidential State Language Commission. Consultant of Oxford English Dictionaries, author of dictionaries, monographs and around 300 research papers on Linguistics, Interpreting, Phraseology, Lexicography.

Inguna Skadiņa Inguna Skadiņa is Chief Scientific Officer at Tilde. She is also a senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, and a professor at Liepāja University. Her research interests include machine translation, language resources, computational morphology and syntax. I. Skadiņa has participated in many national and international projects related to language technology, including ICT PSP project META-NORD and FP7 project CLARIN.
Daiva Vaišnienė Daiva Vaišnienė is Chairperson of the State Commission of Lithuanian Language. She has worked on the development of digital archive of Lithuanian dialects (at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language) and also has participated in META-NORD project as author of the study „Lithuanian Language in the Digital Age“.

Armands Magone Armands Magone directs agency Culture Information Systems, a governmental body operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. The CIS agency is introducing information systems as well as developing usage of ICT in Latvian museums, archives and libraries. For the past five years, Armands has overseen the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-financed “Father’s Third Son” program aimed at reforming Latvian public libraries.
Lauma Sīka Since 2011 Lauma Sīka is working as a Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Education and Science, responsible for EU affairs, policy coordination, higher education and science. Lauma has been participating in negotiations with European Commission on programming documents for structural funds and ESF in particular for two programming periods: 2004 – 2006 and 2017-2013. Has been leading the structural funds programming process for education and science sectors for the period of 2004 – 2006 and 2017-2013. Has been participating in developing implementing and monitoring system for structural funds in Latvia and ESF in particular and leading the development of implementing and monitoring system for structural funds in the field of education and science.
Jolanta Zabarskaitė Jolanta Zabarskaitė is a director of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and associate professor of Vilnius Pedagogical University, chairman of the board of Language and Intercultural Dialogue Association. Member of The European Association of Lexicographer (Euralex) and European Union's Linguistic Authority Federation (EFNIL). National coordinator of the META-NORD project aims to establish an open linguistic infrastructure in the Baltic and Nordic countries.  Zabarskaitė participates in the activities of the Commission for the Lituanistic Development led by Prime Minister of Lithuanian Respublic Andrius Kubilius.
Ēriks Eglītis Ēriks Eglītis has more than 20 years' experience in various positions in ICT industry, including technical, sales and management. He has been working for industry leading companies, such as IBM, Lattelecom, Samsung Electronics and since year 2011 is a Country manager at Microsoft Latvia.
Normunds Grūzītis Normunds Grūzītis is a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia. His research interests include computational grammars, semantic parsing, knowledge representation and controlled natural language.
Dace Baumgarte Dace Baumgarte is an E-learning project manager and content editor at Datorzinību centrs JSC. Her main duties include electronic learning course project management, quality management and participation in learning material development, setup, improvement, methodological management and support.
Raivis Skadiņš Raivis Skadins is the chief software architect at Tilde. He is leading development of Tilde’s language technology products – proofing tools, machine translation and other. R. Skadins participated in EC FP5 project Clarity, FP6 project Tripod, eContent Programme project EuroTermBank, FP7 project Accurat, ICT PSP projects LetsMT! and EASTIN-CL. Currently involved in FP7 projects TaaS and TTC, and ICP PSP project META-NORD. His main research interest is MT, he has received Dr. Comp. Sc. degree in 2012 (thesis “Combined Use of Rule-Based and Corpus-Based Methods in Machine Translation”) and is the author and a co-author of more than 20 publications.

Andrejs Vasiļjevs Andrejs Vasiļjevs is the cofounder and chairman of the board of Tilde, a leading Baltic language technology and localization company. He is a member of the Commission of the Official Language of Latvia and the UNESCO Intergovernmental Council for the Information for All Programme.
Contact information: conference@tilde.com; +371 67605755