ESCAPE - The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 824064.
Franciska de Jong (1955) is Executive Director of CLARIN. She leads the expansion and sustainability of CLARIN, the outreach to new user communities while strengthening collaboration with new partners and continents, and the promotion of collaboration with commercial partners.
Franciska studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University, did a PhD track in theoretical linguistics and made the switch to language technology in 1985 when she started working on machine translation at Philips Research. She has been professor of language technology at the Universiteit Twente (UT) since 1992, and is director of the Erasmus Studio for e-research at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR) where she also holds a chair in e-research for the social sciences and the humanities.
Currently her main research interests are in multimedia indexing, spoken document retrieval, text mining, access technology for digital libraries, interview archives and cultural heritage collections, and e-research in general. She is frequently involved in international programme committees, expert groups and review panels, and has initiated a number of projects funded within the EU framework programmes. From 2008-2016 she was vice-president of the governing board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Currently she is a member of the NWO Permanent Committee for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure (since 2018) and the executive board of ERIC Forum (since 2020).