Jens Edlund

Background

About Jens Edlund

I was born in the Stockholm area in 1967 where I grew up and spent most of my life. My first 10 or so professional years I co-managed a small family business in international trade, whilst dabbling with studies in linguistics and other topics as a pastime. In the mid 90s I went into computational linguistics and speech technology full-time, and have stayed in that field since. My research interests are broad in scope with human behaviour and communication as the common denominator. In the eraly naughts I spent most of my time working with humanlike spoken dialogue systems, often by trying to ascertain experimentally how people behave in human-human as well as human-computer interaction, and to model this in the systems. During that time I took part in the development of several spoken dialogue systems in both industry (Telia Research, Sweden) and academic settings (SRI International in Cambridge and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm). Currently, I divide my time between research on the one hand, mainly focussing on what humans do when they interact with each other and with virtual agents and robots. On the other hand I manage the build-up of the national research infrastructure Språkbanken Tal, which will provide speech technology resources for Swedish researchers. Specialties: analysis of spoken multimodal interaction, human-human dialogue, humanlikeness in machines, speech technology, spoken dialogue systems