Nathalie Colineau

Nathalie Colineau

Senior Research Scientist

Contact

CSIRO ICT Centre
Cnr Vimiera & Pembroke Roads
MARSFIELD NSW 2122
Australia
Mail: PO Box 76, Epping NSW 1710, Australia

Tel: +61 2 9372 4701
Fax: +61 2 9372 4490
Email

Science Area

  • Human Information Interaction

Biography

I’ve always been interested in Linguistics. My interest started when I began University with optional courses in Linguistics, and eventually, I decided to continue in this field of study giving up my original discipline Literature.

Leaving my little town, I spent several years in Paris where I studied Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. It was at that time, that my interest in Spoken Language and Human-Computer Interaction grew. After a training period at France Telecom R&D (Lannion, France), analysing a spoken dialogue corpus, and at Thomson-CSF (Bagneux, France), working on human - computer interfaces in the Air Traffic Control framework, I decided to do a Ph.D. in Spoken Dialogue Systems, which I did in Grenoble.

In Grenoble, I studied Cognitive Sciences and worked at the Institute of Speech Communication (ICP). Then, I did a Ph.D. at the CLIPS laboratory (Lab. specialised in human-computer interaction). I worked in the GEOD group (group working on speech and dialogue) and studied discourse cues in spoken dialogues. During my Ph.D., I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Quebec for a-six month collaboration at Laval University in the Cognitive Informatics Laboratory.
Three years later I became a member of the Human Computer Interaction Group at Thales Research and Technology (TRT Lab). Between April 1998 and June 2000, I have been involved in several projects concerned with designing more flexible and natural spoken interfaces. In particular, I worked on Speech Understanding and Dialogue Modelling, primarily in the context of two projects: (1) the THISL project (THematic Indexing of Spoken Language - European Esprit project), to process spoken queries for a spoken document retrieval system; and (2), the SETHIVoice project, in its initial phases, in the framework of the ThomSpeaker platform development (an authoring multimodal spoken language system).

Since November 2000, I’m a Research Scientist at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), in Sydney, Australia. I am in the Information Engineering Lab of the CSIRO ICT Centre.
I am still interested in Speech Understanding and Discourse Analysis. But I have now broadened my interest to Text Generation and Discourse Planning to design Intelligent Information Systems. I am looking into delivering information customised for the users taking into account their tasks and their environment. In particular, I am interested to study how notions of coherence and dialogue can be applied to media other than the textual medium, and how they can support natural and appropriate interactions. I have also been involved in evaluating some of our applications, in particular in designing and conducting experiments to evaluate the approach underpinning our technology.

Academic Qualifications

1997 PhD. in Cognitive Science with distinction. Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France
1994 DEA in Cognitive Science. Grenoble Institute of Technology, France (equivalent of a Graduate Diploma in Cognitive Science). Second Class Honours. Electives: Spoken Communication, Memory and Learning, Knowledge Representation
1993 DESS in Artificial Intelligence, Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris 6), France (equivalent of Graduate Diploma in AI). Second Class Honours. Elective: Natural Language Processing
1992 Maîtrise in Linguistics, Denis Diderot University (Paris 7), France. (equivalent to a Bachelors of Arts in Linguistics, First Class Honours)
1992 Maîtrise in Computational Linguistics, Denis Diderot University (Paris 7), France. (equivalent to a Bachelors of Arts in Computational Linguistics, Honours)

Recent Professional Experience

2003–Present Senior Research Scientist at the CSIRO ICT Centre.
2000-2003 Research Scientist initially working at the CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science (CMIS) division, and then, moving to the ICT Centre when it was created in 2003.
1998–2000 Research Scientist at Thales Research and Technology (previously Thomson-CSF, Corporate Research Laboratory) in Orsay, France. I was in the Human-Computer Interaction group in the Computer Science Department.
1994–1997 PhD at the CLIPS–IMAG Laboratory (Grenoble, France), in the Speech and Dialogue Research Group.
1996 Visitor at Laval University (Quebec, Canada), in the Computer Science Department (6 months)

Student Supervision

2008-2009 Melody Wang, vacation Student for 2 months -- jointly supervised with C Paris.
2007 Meriem Raji (Polytech’Montpellier, France), intern for 3 months -- jointly supervised with C Paris.
2006-2007 Romain Chanu (Compiegne University, France), intern for 12 months -- jointly supervised with C Paris.
2006 Yann Driutti (Polytech’Montpellier, France), intern for 5 months -- jointly supervised with C Paris.
2004-2005 Julien Phalip (ENAC, France), intern for 5 months, and then, junior software engineer for 6 months on the Boeing-DFDMSA project -- jointly supervised with A. Lampert.
2004 Ardrian Hardjono (UNSW, Sydney) vacation Student for 2 months -- jointly supervised with A. Lampert.
2002 Abhishek Kapur (India), intern for 5 months.
2001-2002 Mary Gardiner (Sydney University), vacation student for 2 months.

Science Citizenship

Associations
2009-present ACM Member (Association for Computing Machinery)
2008-present member of SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction)
2006-Present member of ACL (Association in Computational Linguistics)
2003-Present member of ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association)
2001-Present member of SIGGEN (Special Interest Group on Generation)
Reviewing
2007-2009 Reviewer for CHI (Computer Human Interaction Conference)
2008-2009 Reviewer for CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative work)
2004-2009 PC member of ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association)
2009 Reviewer for Interact (Conference in Human-Computer Interaction)
PC member of TALN (French annual conference on Language Technology)
PC member of OZCHI Workshop on "Designing for Healthy Living"
2008 PC member of the International Natural Language Generation Conference
Review paper for I3 (Information – Interaction – Intelligence), a French Journal in Information Engineering Sciences (http://www.revue-i3.org/)
2007-2008 PC member of the MMIES workshop (Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization)
2007 Programme Co-chair (with Mark Dras from Macquarie University) of the ALTA workshop (Australasian Language Technology Association) held in Melbourne.
Reviewer for UM (User Modelling Conference) and for selection of Best Student Paper
2006 Programme co-chair (other chairs: C. Paris, S. Wan and R. Dale - Macquarie Uni), of the International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2006) held in conjunction with the COLING/ACL Conference.
PC member of a Special Issue (on Computational Approaches to Discourse and Document Processing) of the French Journal TAL, a Journal on Computational Linguistics
2005 PC member of EWNLG (European Workshop on Natural Language Generation)
PC member of IUI (Intelligent User Interfaces Conference)
2004 Guest Editor with Cécile Paris of a Special Issue of RIA (“Artificial Intelligence Review”) on Tailored Information Delivery, including both Tailored Virtual Documents and Tailored Displays.
Reviewer for ACL (Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics)
2003 PC member of TALN (French annual conference on Language Technology)

Links