Franciska de Jong

Franciska de Jong

Professor of e-Research for the Humanities, Utrecht University • Executive director of CLARIN ERIC, CLARIN EU

As of September 2015 Franciska de Jong is full professor of e-Research for the Humanities and executive director of CLARIN ERIC, the governing body of CLARIN which has its statutory seat at Utrecht University. CLARIN (Common LAnguage Resources and Technology INfrastructure) has the objective is to provide scholars in the humanities and social sciences seamless access to digital language data and processing tools all across Europe.

Franciska de Jong studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University. She did a PhD in theoretical linguistics and started to work on language technology in 1985 at Philips Research where she worked on machine translation. She has been a full professor of language technology at the University of Twente within the Human Media Interaction group since 1992. She is also affiliated to the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Currently, her main research interest is in the field of access technology for digital libraries, text mining, cross-language retrieval, the disclosure of cultural heritage collections (in particular spoken audio archives), and e-research at large. She is the coordinator of the UU initiative Driven by Data.

From 2008 till 2016 she was a member of the Governing Board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and from 2009 till 2019 of the Governing Board of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). Currently she chairs the computational science advisory board of the Lorentz Center (since 2016), and she is a board member of the Netherlands eScience Center (since 2014), the EOSC-hub project management board (since 2018), the NWO Permanent Committee for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure (since 2018), the European Open Science Cloud working group on sustainability (since 2019), and the executive board of ERIC Forum (since 2020).