After completing his doctoral dissertation with Gerhard Heyer at the University of Leipzig (Germany), Chris Biemann joined the semantic search startup Powerset (San Francisco) in 2008, which was acquired to become part of Microsoft's Bing in the same year. In 2011, he joined TU Darmstadt (Germany) as an assistant professor (W1) for Language Technology. His interests are situated in statistical semantics, unsupervised and knowledge-free natural language processing and in leveraging the wisdom of the crowds for language data acquisition. Alexander Mehler is professor (W3) for Computational Humanities / Text Technology at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where he heads the Text Technology Lab as part of the Institute of Informatics. His research interests focus on the empirical analysis and simulative synthesis of discourse units in spoken and written communication. He aims at a quantitative theory of networking in linguistic systems to enable multi-agent simulations of their lifecycle. Alexander Mehler integrates models of semantic spaces with simulation models of language evolution and topological models of network theory to capture the complexity of linguistic information systems. Currently, he is heading several research projects on the analysis of linguistic networks in historical semantics. Most recently he started a research project on kinetic text-technologies that integrates the paradigm of games with a purpose with the wiki way of collaborative writing and kinetic HCI.
