Senior Research Scientist
Yorick Wilks is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College. He studied math and philosophy at Cambridge, was a researcher at Stanford AI Laboratory, and then Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Essex, before moving back to the US for ten years to run a successful and self-funded AI laboratory in New Mexico, the Computing Research Laboratory, a new institute set up by the state of New Mexico as a center of excellence in artificial intelligence in 1985. His own research group in New Mexico was rated among the top five in the US in its area by the Laboratory’s International Advisory Board, and it became totally self-supporting with grants by 1990. In 1993 he took up a chair of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and also became founding Director of the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH). Since then he has raised over $50 million in grants from UK research councils and the EC since 1993, and the Sheffield Natural Language Processing Research Group constitutes a major UK group in the area. He has participated in and been the PI of numerous UK, US and EC grants, including the UK-government funded Interdisciplinary Research Centre AKT (2000-2006) on active knowledge structures on the web (www. aktors.org). He has published numerous articles and nine books in that area of artificial intelligence, among which are Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings (1996 with Brian Slator and Louise Guthrie) from MIT Press, and Machine Translation: its scope and limits, in 2008 from Springer. His most recent book is Close Encounters with Artificial Companions (Benjamins, in press 2010). He is a Fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the UK Computing Research Council and on the boards of some fifteen AI-related journals. He designed CONVERSE, the dialogue system that won the Loebner prize in New York in 1997, and was the founding Coordinator of the EU 6th Framework integrated project COMPANIONS (4 years, 15 sites, 13meuro) on conversational assistants as personalised and permanent web interfaces. The distinguishing feature of a Companion is its detailed knowledge of its owner as well as the wider-world; its current major implementation is as a elicitor and organizer of someone’s personal knowledge and digital records, but the general concept is being adapted to learning, health and travel environments. In 2008 he was awarded the Zampolli Prize at LREC-08 in Marrakech, and the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award at ACL08 in Columbus, OH. In 2009 he was awarded the Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the ACM.