Initially mostly oriented towards the description of language by means of simple formal devices (especially Finite State Transducers, [8]). Participation in the CEC's MT Project EUROTRA from 1980 until it ended in 1993. Main area of interest: formal and linguistic design issues (cf e.g. [4, 9]). In the second half of the 80s most of the time was spent on organisational issues (cf below). After the end of EUROTRA I took up the topic of evaluation (cf [5]), and this work was continued via participation in TEMAA (LRE-2 project on evaluation), and my participation in one of the EAGLES subgroups on standards and evaluation. In parallel I became interested in robust language processing. Work in this field (based on the combination of rule-based and statistical knowledge) was carried out in the context of the CLASK project (CEC International Collaboration) (cf [10, 11]). Machine Translation remains on my research agenda (cf [12],[13]). Ever since I took over the Coordination of ELSNET in 1995, the integration of language and speech (cf [14]), cooperation between academia and industry, interdisciplinarity and internationalization have become my main interests. During this period I have become interested in language and speech resources (cf [15],[16,[17]), especially for under-resourced and endangered languages (cf [18],[19]). Since 2005 I have been actively involved in the development of a common language resources infrastructure for the humanities, resulting in the CLARIN project.