Jeremy Jancsary

I am currently a researcher at the Language Technology (LT) group of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). Previous work experience includes a position as an embedded software engineer at INSO and a spin-off thereof, RISE, where I contributed to firmware development for the Austrian electronic healthcare card reader (e-Card). Prior to that, I was a teaching assistant (Tutor) at the Compilers and Languages group of Vienna University of Technology.

I received my bachelor's degree in Software & Information Engineering from Vienna University of Technology in 2005 and completed a master's program in Software Engineering & Internet Computing in February of 2008. I am now enrolled in a PhD program. My advisors are Harald Trost and Gerald Matz.

The overarching goal of my research is to develop methodological advances that solve real-world problems in information processing and data analysis. A lot of these problems are popping up in natural language processing these days, so it is an ideal playground. As one of our principal means of communication, language is also a fascinating topic in itself. Turns out many tasks in natural language processing (and a variety of other areas, such as digital communications and protein design) can be described very accurately using graphical models. While extremely versatile and powerful conceptually, most computations in graphical models are NP-hard. For this reason, approximation algorithms are indispensable. Early algorithms in this field work empirically well, but are not yet completely understood and often have serious drawbacks such as non-convergence. So I currently try to improve my understanding of these issues.

Currently consulting for Microsoft Research Cambridge