Pastra, Katerina
PROFILE

Katerina Pastra

Personal Information

Position: Scientific Associate
Phone or fax: +30 210 6875430

Areas of Interest

  • embodied language processing
  • knowledge representation and reasoning for robotic applications
  • language, action and perception integration in complex systems
  • embodied machine translation

CV Data

Katerina Pastra is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, ATHENA Research Center and the the Director of the Cognitive Systems Research Institute. She has coordinated a number of European and national research and development projects, including POETICON++ (FP7-ICT), its predecessor POETICON (FP7-ICT) and a distinguishing Latsis Foundation award for research on “Image-Language Dialectics”. Her research is focused on the computational integration of language, perception and action based on experimental findings from neuroscience. Among others, she developed the first ‘minimalist grammar of action’, a formal analysis of action in the sensorymotor domain, which is corroborated by biological findings; through this grammar language is seen and processed from a new perspective, that of embodied cognition.
Katerina holds a BA in Linguistics (University of Athens, Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation (UMIST, UK) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (University of Sheffield, U.K.) in which she explored the integration of vision and language within artificial agents engaged in everyday interaction. She has worked on information extraction and automatic text-based image/video indexing and retrieval in a number of projects (CONCERTO/IST, SOCIS/EPSRC, REVEAL THIS/IST). She has lectured on Human-Computer/Human-Robot Interaction and the use of cognitive and psychological methods in software engineering (University of Sheffield) and has organised international workshops on image-language association with sponsorships from GOOGLE, the EU-Cognition Network and other international foundations. She is the author of a number of publications on the above topics, one of which has won a distinction by the British Computer Society. She is a Senior IEEE Member and the chair of a recently formulated IEEE group on Language and Embodied Cognition.

Full CV

Publications

  • Vatakis, A. & Pastra, K. (2016). A multimodal dataset of spontaneous speech and movement production on object affordances. Scientific Data, 3(150078). [...] 
  • Pastra, K. & Aloimonos, Y. (2012). The Minimalist Grammar of Action. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 367(1585), 103-117. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. & Aloimonos, Y. (2011). Technical Report of the AAAI 2011 Workshop on "Language-Action Tools for Cognitive Artificial Agents: Integrating Vision, Action and Language". [...] 
  • Pastra, K., Balta, E., Dimitrakis, P. & Karakatsiotis, G. (2011). Embodied Language Processing: a new generation of language technology. In roceedings of the AAAI 2011 International Workshop on “Language-Action Tools for Cognitive Artificial Agents: Integrating Vision, Action and Language”. San Francisco, USA. [...] 
  • Wallraven, C., Schultze, M., Mohler, B., Vatakis, A. & Pastra, K. (2011). The POETICON enacted scenario corpus - a tool for human and computational experiments on action understanding. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE conference on Authomatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG'11). Santa Barbara, CA. [...] 
  • Pastra, K., Dimitrakis, P., Balta, E. & Karakatsiotis, G. (2010). PRAXICON and its language-related modules. In Companion Volume of the 6th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN), pages 27-32. [...] 
  • Pastra, K (2010). From Lexicon to PRAXICON: language-action-image semantic relations. In Potagas, K., Evdokimidis & I. (editors), Conversations on Language and Action, Aiginiteion Series. Synapseis. [...] 
  • Pastra, K., Wallraven, C., Schiltze, M., Vatakis, A. & Kaulard, K. (2010). The POETICON Corpus: Capturing Language Use and Sensorimotor Experience in Everyday Interaction. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis et al (editors), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). [...] 
  • Pastra, K. & Balta, E. (2009). A Text-Based Search Interface for Multimedia Dialectics. In Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session at EACL 2009, pages 53-56. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. & Balta, E. (2009). COSMOROE Search Engine and Visual Labelling System – Help File, ILSP. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. (2009). COSMOROE Annotation Guide, ILSP. [...] 
  • Csurka, G. & Pastra, K. (2009). Special Issue on Metadata Mining for Image Understanding. Springer Verlag. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. & Vatakis, A. (2009). POETICON Cognitive Experiments Annotation Guide: a Semantic-Pragmatic Annotation Scheme, ILSP. [...] 
  • Pastra, K., Balta, E., Dimitrakis, P., Mpantavanou, E. & Lada, M. (2009). Image-Language Dialectics in Greek Caricatures. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. (2008). COSMOROE: A Cross-Media Relations Framework for Modelling Multimedia Dialectics. Multimedia Systems, 14(5), 299-323. [...] 
  • Pastra, K. (2006). Beyond multimedia integration: corpora and annotations for crossmedia decision mechanisms. In Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Language and Evaluation (LREC-2006), pages 499-504. European Language Resources Association. [...] 
  • Piperidis, S. & Pastra, K. (2006). Crossing media for video search: enabling usability beyond traditional broadcast and TV. In Proceedings of the 4th European Interactive TV conference (EuroITV). [...] 
  • Piperidis, S. & Pastra, K. (2006). Video Search: New challenges in the Pervasive Digital Video Era. Virtual Reality and Broadcasting, 3(11). [...]