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Dr Cecile Paris

Chief Research Scientist

https://people.csiro.au/P/C/Cecile-Paris.aspx

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Contact details:

PO BOX 76
EPPING NSW 1710 AUSTRALIA

Biography

Current Role:

I am a Chief Research Scientist at Data61, and the Director for the Collaborative Intelligence (CINTEL) FSP, a CSIRO-wide research programme about leveraging the intelligences and capabilities of humans and machines to form the best performing teams. Previously, I was the Group Leader of Knowledge Discovery and Management, now called Humans and Machines, within the Analytics and Decision Sciences Research Programme at CSIRO's Data61.

Short Biography:

I received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (more specifically in Natural Language Processing and User Modelling) in 1987 from Columbia University (New York) and my Bachelor degree from the University of California in Berkeley. My research has focused on Natural Language Processing (also called Computational Linguistics, and Language Technologies) and User Modelling throughout her career. I joined the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), an AI research laboratory in Marina del Rey (Los Angeles, Ca), where I stayed until 1996, working on knowledge based systems and Explainable AI. I then moved to the UK (ITRI, at the University of Brighton, UK), where I researched multilingual generation systems. I joined CSIRO late 1996, creating the Natural Language Processing team (now called "Language and Social Computing", currently led by Dr Stephen Wan). I was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology & Engineering (ATSE) in 2016 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW in 2019.

With respect to natural language, I am interested in (1) unlocking information contained in textual form so as to make it available for reasoning and decision making – this might be obtaining social insights through NLP and Social Media Analytics, or obtaining information from (textual) enterprise documents or scientific publications; (2) assisting people with their information needs in the digital age, where information is growing at an unprecedented pace and where new types of data are becoming available, (3) understanding how people communicate with each other and with information, and (4) doing large scale text analytics (e.g., on social media) so as to provide domain analysts new data to gain insights in their domain.

I have worked on flexible and tailored information delivery, automatically generating coherent presentations or briefs ( in a variety of contexts, including dialogue and multi-modality) that are optimally informative for their intended users, given the users' level of domain knowledge, their tasks, their goals, their native language, etc. To this end, I studied language and communication issues and designed potentially multilingual and multimodal information delivery systems that tailor their output to users and situations and are able to adapt their behaviour based on feedback from the user. My thesis research represented the first major work in user modelling and text generation, and my work on discourse planning for dialogue systems has been the basis for a number of other generation and multimodal presentation systems and research internationally. My work has also been applied in authoring environments.
In the past decade, my research has been in social media analytics and social computing, within a number of applications: monitoring discussions on social media, exploring the use of social media for mental health, syndromic surveillance and social licence to operate. Links to some of this work are included below.

More generally, I am interested both in facilitating communication with computers and in unlocking information from unstructured data (specifically textual data, such as social media posts, enterprise documents and scientific literature) to provide insights for a variety of purposes. I am also interested in understanding how people communicate, and how people can work most effectively with automated systems.

My research is typically multidisciplinary and rooted in practical concerns with a clear path to impact. The application domains for my work currently include government services, health, electronic business applications, knowledge management, e-Science, and emergency situation assessment.

Research Interests: Natural Language Processing; Social Media Analytics; Social Computing; Computer Human Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces; User Modelling; Collaborative Intelligence; Collaboration and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW); Information Retrieval; Digital Libraries; Data Integration and Data Fusion; Social-Technical Systems.

Links to Some Projects and Teams in the Group

Some Press Articles and Videos from the Group

See, at the bottom of this page, my publication list, a summary of my science impact and contributions, and my full cv.

Other Interests

Sailing; Reading; Contemporary Dance; The Arts in general; Gardening.

Professional Areas

Fields of Research

Current

Current Roles

  • Chief Research Scientist & Group Leader (Knowledge Discovery and Management)
    Data61

  • Chief Scientist (past)
    Data61

Academic Qualifications

  • 1987

    PhD, Computer Science/Computational Linguistics
    Columbia University, New York (USA)

  • 1982

    MSc, Computer Science
    Columbia University, New York (USA)

  • 1980

    BA (Hons), Computer Science
    University of California at Berkeley (USA)

Professional Experiences

  • 01/2017-01/2017

    Distinguished Fellow
    The University of Tokyo, Japan.

  • 2016-present

    Adjunct Professor
    RMIT, School of Science in the College of Science, Engineering and Health, Melbourne, Australia.

  • 2015-present

    Honorary Professorial Fellow
    The University of Wollongong, Australia

  • 10/2015-10/2015

    Distinguished Fellow
    The University of Tokyo, Japan.

  • 09/2014-11/2014

    Distinguished Fellow
    The University of Tokyo, Japan.

  • 2013-present

    Senior Principal Research Scientist and Group Leader; also Project Leader
    CSIRO Digital Productivity and Data61.

  • 2010-2014

    Adjunct Professor
    ANU (Australian National University), Department of Engineering and Computer Science,Canberra, Australia.

  • 2004-2010

    Executive Board Member
    HCSNet, the ARC Network for Human Communication Science, Australia.

  • 12/2004-1/2005

    Visiting Professor
    University of Bremen, Germany.

  • 15/05/2004-31/05/2004

    Guest Lecturer
    University of Bari, Italy.

  • 01/05/2004-14/05/2004

    Guest Researcher
    Fraunhofer/IPSI, Germany.

  • 2002-2007

    Advisory Board Member
    ICAN (Innovative Collaborations Alliances Networks), a Key Research Centre at UTS, Sydney, Australia.

  • 1997-present

    Honorary Associate
    Sydney University, School of Information Technologies, Sydney, Australia.

  • 06/1997-06/1997

    Guest lecturer
    University of Bari, Italy.

  • 1996-2013

    Senior Principal Research Scientist, Science Leader, Team & Project Leader
    CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, ICT Centre, Computational Informatics and Digital Productivity.

  • 1996-2016

    Adjunct Professor
    Macquarie University, Division of Information and Communication Sciences, Sydney, Australia

  • 1993-1996

    Principal Research Fellow
    Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI), University of Brighton, UK.

  • 05/1995-06/1995

    Guest Researcher
    LAFORIA (Institut Blaise Pascal, associated with CNRS, the National Research Center in France), Paris, France.

  • 05/1992-05/1992

    Guest Researcher
    IPSI-GMD (The Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung), Darmstadt, Germany.

  • 1992-1994

    Assistant Research Professor
    University of Southern California (USC), Department of Computer Science, Los Angeles, Ca, USA

  • 1987-1990

    Research Scientist
    USC/ISI Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, Ca, USA.

  • 1990-1994

    Research Group Leader and Assistant Research Professor
    USC/ISI (Information Sciences Institute) -- joint appointment with ISI and the University of Southern California (USC), Computer Science Department, Los Angeles, Ca, USA.

  • 05/1989-06/1989

    Guest Researcher
    The Institut fur Angewandte Informationsforschung and • Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany.

  • 1981-1987

    Graduate Research Assistant
    Columbia University: Computer Science Department. New York (USA)

Achievements and Awards

  • 2017

    Rei Miyata, the PhD student I co-supervised, receives the President's Medal
    The University of Tokyo, Japan

  • 2016

    Best student paper award (Yufei Wang; I was co-supervisor and co-author)
    ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association)

  • 2016

    Winners of the Shared Triage Task
    CLPsych (Computational Linguistics and Psychology) 2016

  • 2016

    The team won the Geo-Location Shared Task
    EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) W-NUT (Workshop on Noisy User Generated Text)

  • 12/2015

    Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of significant achievements in project delivery and customer engagement with the Boeing Corporation
    CSIRO Data61

  • 12/2015

    Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of significant achievements in project delivery and customer engagement for our work for the State Library of New South Wales.
    CSIRO Data61

  • 2015

    ACS Disruptor Award for ESA, an Emergency Situation Management System developed in Dr Paris' group
    ACS (Australian Computer Science)

  • 2015

    Best paper award
    WISE 2015 - Web Information Systems Engineering

  • 2015

    Team Award for direct impact on project delivery and customer/client engagement
    CSIRO Data61

  • 2015

    Best paper award
    IEEE Big Data Cloud 2015

  • oct 2014-dec 2014

    Distinguished Fellow
    University of Tokyo, Japan

  • 2013

    Impact from Science award for our work on Social Media Monitoring and the Early Adopters Group
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2013

    Team award for our work on the Online Community for Parents for the Department for Human Services
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2013

    Andrew Lampert, the PhD student I co-supervised, receives the Vice-Chancellor’s commendation for his thesis
    Macquarie University, Australia

  • 2011-2012

    Inventors Award
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2011

    CHISIG Medal
    CHISIG (Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group of the HSESA) & HFESA (Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia)

  • 2011

    Business Excellence Award for our work on “Social Networks for Human Services” with the Department for Human Services
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2010

    Best Reviewer award
    Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

  • 2011

    Leadership award, commendation
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2009-2011

    Top10 Publishers Award
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2009

    Finalist team at the Elsevier Grand Challenge in 2009 (3 finalists out of 70 international participants)
    Elsevier

  • 2008

    Recognition Award for our summarisation work in the Elsevier Grand Challenge
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2007

    CSIRO Partnership Excellence Award for setting benchmarks in relationship development and enabling strong growth in the CSIRO – Boeing Strategic Partnership
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2006

    CSIRO Partnership Excellence Award in 2006 a developing a deep partnering relationship with Boeing Phantom Works and delivering highly-valued outcomes to the Boeing Corporation over a continuous 3 year period, in technologies for information management
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2006

    Best paper award
    ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association)

  • 2005

    Best Demonstration award
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2005

    CSIRO award for our work on our project with the Boeing Corporation (EDKMS)
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2004

    Distinguished alumnus
    Columbia University (New York, USA)

  • 2004

    Best Presentation at the CSIRO ICT Conference
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2003

    CSIRO Partnership Excellence Award for our work on our project with the Boeing Corporation (DFDMSA)
    CSIRO ICT Centre

  • 2002

    My PhD Student Einat Amitay receives the Australasian Distinguished Dissertation Award
    CORE (Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia

  • 1999

    CSIRO award for our work on the CISRA (Canon Information Systems Research Australia)project: the User Interface Card (http://www.uicard.com/) - the system received the Australian Design Award the following year, in 2011
    CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences (CMIS)

  • 1999

    CISRA (Canon Information Systems Research Australia) award for the User Interface Card project team
    CISRA

Other highlights

  • 2019-

    Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales

  • 2016-

    Elected Fellow of the Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology & Engineering (ATSE)

Grants

  • 2017-2020

    CSIRO OCE (Office of Corporate Executive). PostDoctoral Fellowship, in collaboration with Minerals, for a project to mine social media to obtain insights about Social Licence to Operate

  • 2016

    CSIRO OCE (Office of Corporate Executive). Visiting Professor Grant, to invite Professor Keith Vander Linden, Calvin College, USA

  • 10/2016-12/2016

    CSIRO OCE (Office of Corporate Executive). Visiting Professor Grant, to invite Professor Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo, Japan.

  • 2016-2019

    CSIRO OCE (Office of the Chief Executive) Two PhD Fellowships (Austr $ 17K/year per student).

  • 2016-2017

    Grant from Women & Leadership Australia for the Advanced Leadership Program (Aust $12K)

  • 02/2014-12/2014

    In-kind funding from AWS to use the AWS infrastructure to develop a system to monitor Twitter for emotional content. In collaboration with the Black Dog Institute

  • 2013-2014

    NSW Mental Health Commissioner in collaboration with the Black Dog Institute to investigate Mental Health on Social Media ($ 50K)

  • 2004-2006

    CRSS Grant, a University of Melbourne-CSIRO collaborative research program: WAUTER: Web-sites Automatic Usability Testing EnviRonment (with Dr Balbo).

  • 1996-1999

    Office of Naval Research (ONR), User-Centered Direct-Interaction Systems programme: `Assessing the applicability of an authoring tool for on-line help ?

  • 1991-1994

    Advanced Research Program Agency (ARPA): `EXPECT: Intelligent Support for System Construction And Documentation' under the program: Knowledge-Based Systems Technology (with Dr. Swartout).

  • 1990-1993

    National Science Foundation (NSF): `Phrasing text according to the situation' (with Dr Bateman)

Community and Corporate Citizenship

  • 2011

    OzChi 2011 Technical co-chair

  • 2000-2016

    CHISIG Chair

Attachments

Publications

We have publications by Dr Cecile Paris