Biography:

Julie Carson-Berndsen is Professor in the UCD School of Computer Science & Informatics. She received a BA (Mod) in German and Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin in 1986 and was awarded a Council of Europe Higher Education Award to undertake postgraduate studies at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She received her doctoral degree in 1993 for her research on finite state models in speech recognition supervised by Prof. Dr. Dafydd Gibbon and was awarded the Dissertationspreis der Westfälisch-Lippischen Universitätsgesellschaft for her Dr. Phil. thesis. She worked as a wissenschaftliche Assistentin at the University of Bielefeld until 1998 when she joined University College Dublin. Carson-Berndsen received an SFI Investigator Award in 2002 to undertake research in the area of multilingual ubiquitous speech and language technology and was subsequently awarded an industry supplement to this grant to collaborate with the IBM Dublin Software Lab. Carson-Berndsen was invited to become a Faculty Fellow at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin in 2003 and in 2005 won an IBM Innovation Award (only one in Ireland) to collaborate with Dr. Leo Ferres of Carleton University, Canada. Carson-Berndsen's research group has been developing speech recognition and synthesis systems which use fine-grained linguistic information paving the way for the development of robust multilingual applications which are easily scaleable. These systems are now being integrated with machine translation technologies to provide speech-to-speech translation within a major new collaborative initiative, the SFI-funded CSET on Next Generation Localisation which is led by Dublin City University in collaboration with University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, University of Limerick and 9 industry partners. Prof. Carson-Berndsen was Director of the UCD College of Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Graduate School from 2005 to 2007. In Sept 2008 she took up the position of UCD Deputy Registrar for Graduate Studies and became Dean of Graduate Studies in June 2010.