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Damir is Associate Professor focusing in his research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics related to natural language, speech and text processing, knowledge representations, computational semantics and pragmatics, including multi-modal input. He is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Informatics, Computation and Engineering (SICE) at IU. He is Adjunct in the Cognitive Science Program at IU and he is a Faculty Member in the Data Science Program in Computer Science at SICE. Between 2002 and 2006 he served as the Director of the Computational Linguistics Program, developing the first Natural Language Processing (NLP) related program at Indiana University. He studied and did research at various European Universities, e.g. the University in Frankfurt a.M. (Physics, Mathematics, and Linguistics), the University of Potsdam (Linguistics), the University of Hamburg in Computer Science and the Natural Language Division (NLP, ML), the Technical University in Berlin in Computer Science in the Artificial Intelligence Division (NLP, MT, ML). He received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Potsdam, Germany. Prior to graduation he was working at the Verbmobil project, one of the first speech to speech translation systems in the 90-ies. He worked as an IT-Architect in the 1st level management of the Dresdner Bank AG, one of the largest private banks in Germany, a division of the Allianz Group, before he returned to a faculty position at Indiana University in 2002.
His current research focus is in: - Knowledge Graphs and Description Logic: Graphs via Information Extraction from text, Description Logic, Ontologies for knowledge representation and semantic processing of text, language, image content. Learning and acquisition of knowledge from unstructured text and images, and reasoning over knowledge representations. - Conversational agents, chatbots, dialog systems and in particular models of pragmatics and semantics that include processing of indirect speech acts, implicatures, presuppositions. - Embedded and high performance Natural Language Processing systems for applications in the domain of Public Safety, Cybersecurity, Medical, Legal, and Business applications, in particular privacy sensitive sectors.
Damir directs his NLP-Lab working on the design of algorithms, the engineering of knowledge technologies, computational semantics and pragmatics, and experimental applications of multi-modal processing of language and visual information. He is also the Chief Science Officer at Semiring Inc., a startup focusing on NLP and AI for various verticals, in particular for the Legal, Medical, and Business domain.