Hans Uszkoreit is Professor of computational linguistics at Saarland
University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he
heads the DFKI Language Technology Division and coordinates the
DFKI Berlin site. By cooptation he is also Professor of the Computer
Science Department at Saarland U.
Uszkoreit grew up in East Berlin, where he became part of a circle of
young people opposing the totalitarian East German regime. After
being expelled from high school and spending fifteen months in
prison for subversive agitation, mainly for protesting against the 1968
invasion of Czechoslovakia, he saw no chance to continue his
education in East Germany. Thus he escaped to West Berlin where he
could finish school and then study Linguistics and Computer Science
at Technische Universität Berlin. With a group of young journalists, he co-founded the Berlin city magazine
Zitty, for which he worked as a part-time editor and writer while being a student.
In 1977, he received a Fulbright Grant for continuing his studies at the University of Texas at Austin. During
his time in Austin he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project. A second
Fulbright grant allowed him to enter the Ph.D. program, which he completed in 1984 with a Ph.D. in
linguistics. From 1982 until 1986, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI
International in Menlo Park, Ca. During this time he was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of
Language and Information at Stanford U. as a senior researcher and later as a project leader. In 1986 he spent
six months in Stuttgart on an IBM Research Fellowship at the Science Division of IBM Germany and returned
to Stuttgart later that year to work for IBM as a team leader in the project LILOG (Linguistic and Logical
Methods for the Understanding of German Texts). At the same time he also taught at the U. of Stuttgart.
In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University
and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the
newly founded Language Technology Division at DFKI.
