I am a post-doctoral Research Associate on the EU FP7 ICT project SEALS: Semantic Evaluation at Large Scale and work within the Organisations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) Group led by Prof. Fabio Ciravegna. I am involved with WPs 1-8 and 13; I am Work Package (WP) Leader for WPs 3 and 13.

The goal of the SEALS project is to provide an independent, open, scalable, extensible and sustainable infrastructure (the SEALS Platform) that allows the remote evaluation of semantic technologies thereby providing an objective comparison of the different existing semantic technologies. This will allow researchers and users to effectively compare the available technologies, helping them to select appropriate technologies and advancing the state of the art through continuous evaluation.

Previously, I was a Work Package (WP) Manager on the EU FP6 project AMIDA: Augmented Multi-party Interaction with Distance Access (FP6-0033812) and worked within the Speech and Hearing Research Group. On AMIDA, I managed all work concerned with automatic recognition from audio, video and combined audio-video streams.

The AMIDA vision is to understand better, and build new support for, human communication at a distance. AMIDA represents a very challenging shift in emphasis from meeting recordings to live meetings with remote participants, using affordable commodity sensors (such as webcams and cheaper microphones), and targeting the development of advanced videoconferencing systems featuring new functionalities such as (1) filtering, searching and browsing; (2) remote monitoring; (3) interactive accelerated playback; (4) meeting support; and (5) shared context and presence. A core technology produced by AMIDA is a web-based automatic speech recogniser (webASR) which is free to use. It's very easy to use - just upload an audio file and after a short processing period, the transcript will be available in a range of formats including PDF.

Before AMIDA, I also contributed to the work conducted at Sheffield on the M4: MultiModal Meeting Manager project and the AMI: Augmented Multi-party Interaction project - both precursors to AMIDA.