Dr Ou Shiyan appointed Professor at Nanjing University

Congratulations to Dr Ou Shiyan on her appointment as Professor at Nanjing University, Dept of Information Management. Dr Ou obtained her PhD at NTU Wee Kim Wee School in 2006. Her thesis was on “Automatic Multidocument Summarization Using a Variable-Based Framework”. She then took a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at the U. of Wolverhampton, Computational Linguistics Research Group. She talks about her life after NTU:

Chris has asked me to write something for the DIS blog. I have delayed too much. 🙂 I will talk briefly about my life in Singapore and afterwards in the UK.

I am a former PhD student in DIS from 2001 to 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Chris Khoo. Chris is a very nice and patient supervisor, but also very strict with me. 🙂 During my study, other DIS faculty, Dr. Dion (my co-supervisor), Dr. Schubert, Dr. Yin Leng, Dr. Abdus, and Dr. Na, also gave me much help and encouragement.

After my PhD, I went to England and worked in the Computational Linguistics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, as a post-doctoral research fellow. Professor Ruslan Mitkov (http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~le1825/) is the director of this group. Wolverhampton is a small city, located in the middle of England. It takes about 30 minutes by train or tram from Wolverhampton to Birmingham, the second biggest city in England. Wolverhampton has a famous football team in the English Premier League, called Wolves, which has a more than 100 year history. Britain is a very beautiful country, with lots of cultural heritage. I visited several nice cities and towns, such as London, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, and Edinburg.

At the University of Wolverhampton, I mainly participated in an EU-funded project QALL-ME (http://qallme.fbk.eu/). The main goal of this project is to develop a multilingual and multimodal question-answering system with the help of semantic web technologies. This project has seven partners from four EU countries – Italy, Germany, Spain and UK. Every four months, we had a project meeting in the location of one of the partners. So I had the chance to visit some nice EU cities, such as Saarbrucken in Germany, Milan, Venice, and Trento in Italy.

In the EU, universities and research institutes have close relations. We often had visitors from France, Spain, Belgium and other countries, who presented their research and communicated with us. Some visitors are well-known in their fields, such as Eduard Hovy. When I read their papers as a PhD student, I did not imagine I would have the opportunity to meet them some day in person!

Currently I have completed my work in the UK and gone back to China. I have joined the Department of Information Management at Nanjing University (http://www.nju.edu.cn). I will introduce my life in China in a later post.

Hope all students and staff in the DIS have a wonderful New Year! I hope to visit you in Singapore again.

— Ou Shiyan