The ALT-EDIC is pleased to announce the appointment of its first director, Edouard Geoffrois. He will take up his post on January 1st, 2025, taking over from the Chair of the ALT-EDIC Assembly of Members, Tibault Grouas, who acted as director until then.
The director is in charge of recruiting the ALT-EDIC team and will manage the ALT-EDIC activities and operations. He will ensure collaboration with the ALT-EDIC’s various stakeholders, including the Assembly of members, the Strategic Orientation Committee and the industries. He will also be responsible for driving the ALT-EDIC development towards fully mature and operational services, in line with the Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030.
Edouard Geoffrois has a PhD on the topic of Automatic Speech Recognition and has created the activities on Language Technologies at the French Ministry of Defence. He has coordinated multi-country cooperations with EU support (ERA-NETs) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies at the French National Research Agency (ANR), and since 2019 has been working at the European Commission on the European Defence Fund with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. He has an extensive experience of the creation and management of linguistic data and of the design and organisation of evaluation campaigns, as well as of the management of large complex R&D programmes.
Edouard Geoffrois: « With the advent of high-performance large language models and generative AI, the release of open-source state-of-the-art models, and the emergence of foundation models that can be adapted by third parties and users, the domain of language technologies is moving fast. The development of these technologies in Europe is very active and, more than ever, to ensure the efficiency of this development, there is a need for pooled language resources and for federating development efforts. As a European entity with a public mission to serve the LT community, the ALT-EDIC is perfectly suited to address these gaps. »
English (UK)