After being director of LIMSI-CNRS from 1989 to 2000, and head of its "Human-Machine Communication” department from 1987 to 2000, I’ve been Director of the "Information and Communication Technologies" department at the French Ministry for Research (Technology Directorate) from 2001 to 2006. I’m now director of the Institute for Multilingual and Multimedia Information (IMMI), which is a joint International Laboratory between LIMSI, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and RWTH Aachen (Germany). This Institute has been settled in the framework of the Quaero program.

I chaired the Scientific Committee of the Virtual Reality VENISE transversal Action at LIMSI, which recently benefited from a new building.

The laboratory is part of large scale actions in the Ile-de-France region, such as Digiteo, and cooperates with Competitiveness clusters, such as System@tic and Cap Digital.

I chaired the "Information Sciences and Technologies (Computer Science, Command and control, Signal Processing)" committee, and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee and of the « Engineering Sciences » department (now « Institute for Engineering and Systems Sciences », INSIS) Scientific Committee at the Scientific Research National Committee, of the INRIA Evaluation Committee and of the Information Technologies Advisory Council (now Industry, Energy and Technology Advisory Council (CGIET)). I’m presently a member of the CNRS Ethics Committee (COMETS), where I coordinated the publication in 2010 of a report on the Ethics of ICT research, of the Scientific Committees of the Telecommunication Schools Group (Institut Télécom), of the Adonis program and of the National Institute for Research on Safety (INRS). I chaired in 2009 the « Technologies for Information and Telecommunications » Scientific Committee at CEA.

In the framework of my position at the Ministry for Research, I participated in various bodies, and in particular in the Technological Research and Innovation Networks: on Telecommunications (RNRT), Software Engineering (RNTL), Audiovisual and Multimedia (RIAM) and Micro and Nanotechnologies (RMNT), now National Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies Network (R3N). I’ve also had the pleasure to settle the Techno-Langue and Techno-Vision actions, addressing technology development and evaluation in those two domains. I seated in the Board of Trustees of several organisms (ANFr, IGN, OST, INRIA…).

I coordinated the FRANCIL Network of the Francophone University Association (AUF), I chaired the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), participated in the Board of the European Language & Speech Network of Excellence (ELSNET) and was the general convenor of the Cocosda committee. I presently participate in FLaReNet (the Fostering Language Resources Network) and in the T4ME (Technologies for a Multilingual Europe) Network of Excellence EC project. I’m a past president of the European Speech Communication Association, now International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), and I’m now a member of its Advisory Council, as well as a member of the Francophone Speech Communication Association (AFCP) AdCom. I’m in the Editorial Committees of the « Language Resources and Evaluation » and « Speech Technology » journals, and of the « Text, speech and language » book series.

My research activities concern Human-Machine Spoken Communication, and how Language Technologies may sustain multilingualism. If you are interested in Automatic Language Processing, you may consult the "Survey of the State-of-the-Art in Human Language Technology" or the “Spoken Language Processing” book published in 2009, where one may find a lot of information on that topic. And you may also find at the MAAYA Web site a manifesto for language diversity.