Katerina Pastra is the Director of the Cognitive Systems Research Institute, a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, ATHENA Research Center and a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth, U.K. She has coordinated a number of European and national research and development projects, and has gained a distinguishing Latsis Foundation award for research on “Image-Language Dialectics”. Her research is focused on the computational integration of language, perception and action based on experimental findings from neuroscience. Among others, she has developed the first ‘Minimalist Grammar of Action’, the PRAXICON semantic memory model, the PLT affordances network and the COSMOROE image-language semantic interplay framework.

Katerina holds a BA in Linguistics (University of Athens, Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation (UMIST, UK) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (University of Sheffield, U.K.) in which she explored the integration of vision and language within artificial agents engaged in everyday interaction. She has worked on information extraction and automatic text-based image/video indexing and retrieval in a number of projects. She has lectured on Human-Computer/Human-Robot Interaction and the use of cognitive and psychological methods in software engineering (University of Sheffield) and has organised international workshops on image-language association with sponsorships from GOOGLE, the EU-Cognition Network and other international foundations. She is the author of a number of publications on the above topics, one of which has won a distinction by the British Computer Society. She is a Senior IEEE Member, the vice-chair of the European Network on Vision and Language Integration, and co-editor of the Language and Cognition Research Topic in Frontiers in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

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