As of 1 September 2015, Prof. dr. Franciska de Jong has taken up her post of Executive Director of CLARIN . Both as a scholar (among others, she is director of the Erasmus Studio for e-research at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) and as an administrator (having been vice-president of the governing board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO), Franciska de Jong is eminently qualified to take on the main challenges of CLARIN in the coming years. She is taking over from Steven Krauwer, who has successfully managed CLARIN for many years.
Franciska de Jong will lead the expansion and sustainability of CLARIN, start outreach to new user communities while strengthening collaboration with new partners and continents, and will initiate promotion of collaboration with commercial partners. Also as of September 2015 the University of Utrecht has appointed her as professor of e-Research for the Humanities.
Franciska de Jong (1955) studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University, did a PhD track in theoretical linguistics and made the switch to language technology in 1985 when she started working on machine translation at Philips Research. She has been professor of language technology at the Universiteit Twente (UT) since 1992, and is director of the Erasmus Studio for e-research at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR) where she also holds a chair in e-research for the social sciences and the humanities.
Currently her main research interests are in multimedia indexing, spoken document retrieval, text mining, access technology for digital libraries, interview archives and cultural heritage collections, and e-research in general. She is frequently involved in international programme committees, expert groups and review panels, and has initiated a number of projects funded within the EU framework programmes. Since 2008 she has been vice-president of the governing board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). A detailed profile can be found here.
CLARIN ERIC and Utrecht University
CLARIN ERIC is hosted by the Netherlands, and Utrecht University has been home to the CLARIN ERIC headquarters from the very start. A strong link exists with the Faculty of Humanities of that university, in particular with the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication (Talen, Literatuur en Communicatie, TLC) and with the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS). The new Executive Director will work closely together with the Faculty of Humanities.
CLARIN ERIC and the whole CLARIN community thanks very warmly Steven Krauwer. From the early days onwards Steven was involved in CLARIN in various functions and he served as the first Executive Director of CLARIN ERIC after the ERIC's establishment in 2012.
Photo: Eric Brinkhorst