Jonas Doumen

Jonas obtained a master in Linguistics in 2013 and a master in Artificial Intelligence in 2014, both at the KU Leuven. During his studies, he did a year-long internship at Microsoft Ireland, where he worked on natural language technologies, in particular on the development of spell checkers. Jonas started his professional career in October 2014 at Nuance Communications, first in Aachen, Germany and later in Merelbeke, Belgium. At Nuance, he was a member of the Speech Output team, where he was responsible for optimising the development and test workflow for the delivery of text-to-speech products to the automotive market. Within itec, Jonas will start a PhD project under the supervision of prof. Piet Desmet, prof. Celine Vens and dr. Paul Van Eecke. During his PhD project, which is situated at the crossroads of the fields of emergent communication and computational linguistics, he will investigate mechanisms through which artificial agents can build up flexible, adaptive and transparent (construction) grammars through task-based communicative interactions. Potential applications of his research project include more natural and transparent human-computer interfaces and intelligent tutoring systems.