People

Katerina Pastra is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, ATHENA Research Center and the the Director of the Cognitive Systems Research Institute. She has coordinated a number of European and national research and development projects, including POETICON++ (FP7-ICT), its predecessor POETICON (FP7-ICT) and a distinguishing Latsis Foundation award for research on “Image-Language Dialectics”. Her research is focused on the computational integration of language, perception and action based on experimental findings from neuroscience. Among others, she developed the first ‘minimalist grammar of action’, a formal analysis of action in the sensorymotor domain, which is corroborated by biological findings; through this grammar language is seen and processed from a new perspective, that of embodied cognition.
Katerina holds a BA in Linguistics (University of Athens, Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation (UMIST, UK) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (University of Sheffield, U.K.) in which she explored the integration of vision and language within artificial agents engaged in everyday interaction. She has worked on information extraction and automatic text-based image/video indexing and retrieval in a number of projects (CONCERTO/IST, SOCIS/EPSRC, REVEAL THIS/IST). She has lectured on Human-Computer/Human-Robot Interaction and the use of cognitive and psychological methods in software engineering (University of Sheffield) and has organised international workshops on image-language association with sponsorships from GOOGLE, the EU-Cognition Network and other international foundations. She is the author of a number of publications on the above topics, one of which has won a distinction by the British Computer Society. She is a Senior IEEE Member and the chair of a recently formulated IEEE group on Language and Embodied Cognition.