Massimo Poesio appointed Professor of Natural Language Understanding

Utrecht University's Executive Board has appointed Massimo Poesio to the position of Professor of Natural Language Understanding at the Faculty of Science's Department of Information and Computing Sciences. His research will focus on the field of natural language understanding, in close collaboration with the Faculty of Humanities. In this position, Poesio will also contribute to topical debates about the ethics of AI, such as biases that AI can inadvertently learn. Poesio will start the position on 1 May, 2023. The study of natural language has been a key research topic since the early days of Artificial Intelligence. Also, it has been studied extensively in relation to areas such as Cognitive Science with a focus on reasoning, symbol grounding, and learning. A dominant focus within the study of natural language is natural language understanding (NLU), which involves the study of computational models of human language interpretation.