katerina pastra 

PhD in Artificial Intelligence (Univ. of Sheffield, UK);  MSc Machine Translation (UMIST, UK);  BA in Linguistics (Univ. of Athens, Greece)

Katerina is a Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Greece. She is the Founder and Head of the “Language and Robots Lab”, in which she employs neuroscientific findings on how the human brain works to develop software that enables intelligent systems to understand and integrate words, actions and perceptions for effective interaction with humans and enhancement of their quality of life. Her research comprises theoretical contributions, experimental findings and technology development in semantics and multimodal cognition for embodied AI applications. Katerina has also founded and directed for a decade-long (2010-2020) the Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI), the first independent research institute internationally focusing specifically on Cognitive Systems. 

Katerina has worked as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence since 2000, originally in the U.K. and then in Greece. Since a post-doc, she designed and coordinated her own basic research and development projects, such as the European-funded POETICON Projects series (2008-2016), with an international & highly interdisciplinary consortium and has contributed as a PI and/or Coordinator to more than 11 European and Nationally-funded Research and Development Projects. Among others, she is the recipient of a distinguishing John Latsis Foundation Award for research in Cross-media Semantics in Newspaper Caricatures, a Google Award for AAAI-event organization on vision-language Integration technologies and a Best Paper Award by the British Computer Society on applied multimodal technology for Crime Scene Investigation. Her teaching experience involves teaching in the U.K and in Greece at a post-graduate level (MSc programmes in Computer Science, Data Science, Language Technology and CyberPsychology); the courses include “Language and Cognitive Robotics“, “Artificial Intelligence“, “Natural Language Processing“, “Search Engines and Web Mining“, and “Human-Computer Interaction and Graphical User Interfaces”.

She has published a number of papers in international conferences and journals, including a Nature paper on large-scale verbal elicitation of object affordances and co-speech gestures and a Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B paper on the Minimalist Grammar of Action. She is an associate editor in Interaction Studies and Cognitive Computation and Systems and a highly experienced R&D project and proposal reviewer (15 years of experience, more than 8 different, international Research Funding Organisations). She has been an invited speaker in a number of venues addressing diverse audiences, most notably at TED-X and the European Parliament and has been invited to contribute to a number of international AI innovation Think-Tanks.

Katerina is an advocate of Open Science; with her lab members, she has developed a large set of open access datasets and open source pieces of software. Among others, she has the honour to serve as the Vice-President of the Hellenic Association for Artificial Intelligence and as the President of GEARNET, the Greek Network of Gender Equity and Antidiscrimination Committees in Research Centers & Independent Research Institutes contributing thus to an unprecedented initiative for transforming the national research ecosystem with regards to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.