Nikos Tsourakis

Contact information:
ISSCO/TIM/ETI,
University of Geneva
40 bd. du Pont-d'Arve
CH-1211 Geneva 4
Switzerland

Tel: +41 22 379 8682
Office number: 6337
Nikos' email

Home page: Nikos Tsourakis
Social media:

Background and Research Interests

I have been a member of TIM/ISSCO since February 2007, where I am employed as a research associate. My research interests concentrate on the development and evaluation of multilingual multimodal dialogue systems on mobile devices. I am involved in the MedSLT and CALLSLT projects, and I have previously contributed to the Regulus and the IM2 projects. All of these projects are/were funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

At the moment, I am lead developer in the project "Web-Based Deployment of Speech-Enabled Applications for Medicine and Education", funded by the Ernest Boninchi Foundation.

I hold a BSc (5 years degree) in Computer Engineering, an MSc in Computer Engineering and an MSc in Engineering Management from TU Crete and a PhD in Multilingual Information Processing from the University of Geneva. Before joining TIM/ISSCO I worked as a software engineer developing telephone-based speech recognition applications. I also worked as a researcher on relevant technologies including automatic speech recognition and dictation systems, voice user interfaces and multimodal interaction at TSI. I also serve as an expert reviewer for the European Commission.

I am certified as a "Java 7 Professional Programmer" by Oracle, as a "C++ Associate Programmer" by the C++ Institute and as a "Professional Scrum Master I" by Scrum.org. Between February and May 2012 I attended the "venture challenge" start-up training program offered by the Commission for Technology and Innovation CTI (14 modules - 45 hours). I have also completed the "Advanced Voice User Interface Design" course offered by the Nuance Speech University.

Research Activities

I am/was involved in the following projects:

Publications

Using Hand Gestures to Control Mobile Spoken Dialogue Systems, Tsourakis N., in: Springer International Journal on Universal Access in the Information Society (UAIS) - Special issue on Mobile Accessibility, 13:3, pp, 253-275, 2014.
CALL-SLT: A Spoken CALL System Based on Grammar and Speech Recognition, Rayner M., Tsourakis N., Baur C., Bouillon P. and Gerlach J., in: CSLI Journal of Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, Vol. 10:2, 2014.
Evaluating the Quality of Mobile Medical Speech Translators based on ISO/IEC 9126 series: Definition, Weighted Quality Model and Metrics, Tsourakis N. and Estella P., in: IGI International Journal on Reliable and Quality e-Healthcare (IJEQEH), vol. 2:2, pp. 1-20, 2013.
Methodological Issues in Evaluating a Spoken CALL Game: Can Crowdsourcing Help Us Perform Controlled Experiments?, Rayner M., Tsourakis N., in: Proceedings of the Interspeech Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), Grenoble, France, 2013.
A Scalable Architecture for Web Deployment of Spoken Dialogue Systems, Fuchs M., Tsourakis N. and Rayner M., in: Proceedings of the Eighth ELRA International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2012, Istanbul, Turkey.
Evaluation of a Mobile Language Learning System Using Language-Neutral Prompts, Tsourakis N., Rayner M. and Bouillon P., in: Proceedings of the Interspeech Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), 2011, Venice, Italy,
Examining the Effects of Rephrasing User Input on Two Mobile Spoken Language Systemsi, Tsourakis N., Lisowska A., Rayner M. and Bouillon P., in: Proceedings of the Seventh ELRA International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2010, Valetta, Malta.
Design Issues for a Bidirectional Mobile Medical Speech Translator, Tsourakis N., Bouillon P. and Rayner M., in: Proceedings of the Fourth ACM MobileHCI Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments (SiMPE), 2009, Bonn, Germany.
Discriminative Learning Using Linguistic Features To Rescore N-Best Speech Hypotheses, Georgescul M., Rayner M., Bouillon P. and Tsourakis N., in: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACL 2008 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, 2008, Goa, India, pp. 97-100.

A full list of publications can be found here.

This is the manuscript of my PhD thesis entitled: "Development & Evaluation of Multilingual Multimodal Dialogue Systems on Mobile Devices". The presentation of my thesis defense created with HTML5 is available here and can be downloaded with this zip file. However, there are various issues when using different browsers and this is how it looks with Firefox:

Reviewing

Demos