People

Dr Eleni Efthimiou is Research Director at ILSP/ATHENA RC, where she has been working as a researcher since 1992.

In 1982 she graduated from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Athens and in 1986 she received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Linguistics of the University of Salzburg (Austria).

Her main research interests focus on theoretical linguistic analysis of natural language, Natural Language Processing based prototype development and optimisation techniques for Human-Computer Interaction.

In 1999 she founded the ILSP Team for Basic Research and Resources Collection for the Greek Sign Language (GSL). Work of the team resulted to methodologies for lexicon collection and terminology creation in GSL, creation of the first electronic resources collection for GSL, as well as to the first lexicographical products for the language. She currently heads the Sign Language Technologies Lab and co-ordinates the Assistive Technology Group at ILSP/ATHENA RC. The SLT Lab focuses on creation of wide scale electronic sign language resources (corpora, vocabularies and grammar), SL synthesis by means of virtual agent (avatar) technologies, SL recognition, development of sign language educational and communication tools, as well as implementation of principles of Universal Access for system architecture. In the context of language based Assistive Technology activities, ILSP is a member of the national accessibility network GR-DeAN (www.e-accessibility.gr) and the European accessibility network Ε-DeAN (www.e-accessibility.com ).

Having coordinated and/or participated in the development teams of various R&D projects in the domain of language technology in the past, she currently co-ordinates DICTA-SIGN project (FP7-ICT)(http://www.dictasign.eu/ ).

In parallel, she presents a continuous teaching activity in Theoretical and Computational Linguistics (University of Kreta: 1987-1990 - Lecturer, University of Umea - Sweden: 1990 - Invited Lecturer, University of Athens: 1991 and 1993-1994 - Reader, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA): 1991 - seminars, University of Salzburg - Austria: 1993 - Invited Lecturer, Language Technology: Interdisciplinary M.S. Program (NTUA, University of Athens, ILSP / ATHENA RC): 1999-).

Her publications include four books, series of ILSP internal editions and conference proceedings, numerous scientific articles, two electronic dictionaries of GSL (http://www.ilsp.gr/noema_eng.html), a trilingual educational tool for the training of the Deaf in the ECDL context (http://www.ilsp.gr/diolkos.html) and the educational software “MtN1” (http://www.ilsp.gr/noimata.html), which is part of the official curriculum of Nursery and Primary School education level of Special Education in Greece.