Staff Profile - Aline Villavicencio
Aline is a Professor in our Natural Language Processing group, and is the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background:
My background is in Computer Science, and after doing my undergraduate studies in Brazil, I moved to the UK to study for MPhil followed by PhD at the University of Cambridge. After working as a postdoc in Cambridge and in the University of Essex (UK) I went back to Brazil in 2005 to start as an academic at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. During this time I was a Visiting Scholar at various institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS, France) and two years ago I decided to return to the UK.
Sheffield as a city has so much going on, there is a vibrant cosmopolitan atmosphere, with cultural events, theatre and music!
Aline Villavicencio Professor in NLP
Why did you choose to work at Sheffield:
The university has one of the top CS departments in the UK, and one of the largest and most prestigious Natural Language Processing groups in Europe. The department provides this stimulating (and friendly) atmosphere and being a part of this community is a real privilege. My research interests are in cognitively inspired computational models of language acquisition, processing and loss in typical and clinical conditions. This involves interdisciplinary collaborations with linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, and Sheffield produces leading research in all these areas.
What's it like living in Sheffield, what do you like to do outside of work?
There are plenty of outdoor activities in the many parks and in the Peak District. In fact I love combining a walk along one of the parks, with a stop in one of the charming specialised coffee shops. The famous friendliness of the Sheffield residents also makes the whole experience even better.