Katerina Pastra
Researcher
Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena R.C.
SHORT BIO
| Katerina leads the “Language and Robots Lab”, at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena R.C. Her research is highly interdisciplinary; she employs neuroscientific findings on how the human brain works to develop software that enables intelligent systems and robots 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 focused on Cognitive Systems. She has contributed as a PI and/or Coordinator to more than 11 European and Nationally-funded Research and Development Projects, such as the European-funded POETICON Projects series (2008-2016). 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 UK and Greece at a post-graduate level (MSc programmes in Computer Science, Data Science, Language Technology, and CyberPsychology). She has published several 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 a highly experienced R&D project and proposal reviewer, and an invited speaker in several venues addressing diverse audiences, most notably at TED-X and the European Parliament, and an invited contributor to international AI innovation think tanks. Katerina is an advocate of Open Science; with her lab members, she has developed several open-access datasets and open-source software. She currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Hellenic Association for Artificial Intelligence and as Chair 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 regard to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. |
