Professor Jochen Leidner

Dr Jochen L Leidner is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is also a Research Professor for Explainable and Responsible AI at Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and is a founder and Director of Polygon Analytics and KnowledgeSpaces. His experience includes positions as Director of Research at Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv in London, where he headed its R&D team. He has built up research and innovation teams, which he also built up. He was also the Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Data Analytics at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, and continues to hold a visiting affiliation today.

His background includes a Master's in computational linguistics, English and computer science (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), a Master's in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Informatics (University of Edinburgh), which won the first ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Award.

His scientific contributions include leading the teams that developed the QED and ALYSSA open-domain question answering Systems (evaluated at US NIST/DARPA TREC), proposing a new algorithm and comparing existing algorithms for spatial resolution of named entities, and information extraction of usual and unusual things (e.g. event extraction, company risk mining, sentiment analysis). Prior to Thomson Reuters, he has worked for SAP and founded and co-founded a number of start-ups.

He has lived and worked in Germany, Scotland, the USA, Switzerland and London, and has taught at various universities (Erlangen, Saarbrücken, Frankfurt, Zurich and others), and is a scientific expert for the European Commission (FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe) and other funding bodies.

He is an author or co-author of several dozen peer-reviewed publications (incl. one best paper award), has authored or co-edited two books and holds several patents in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, and mobile computing. He has been twice winner of the Thomson Reuters inventor of the year award for the best patent application.