Yorick Wilks is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield and Director of ILASH, the Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing, since 1993. He is alsoa Senior Research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College. During the period 1985-93 he was the first Director of the Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, which became a major US centre for research in artificial intelligence and its applications to natural language processing.
He was a researcher at Stanford AI Laboratory, a SERC Senior Fellow at Edinburgh University, and then Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Essex. He has published numerous articles and six books in that area of artificial intelligence, of which the most recent are Artificial Believers (1991 with Afzal Ballim) from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and Electric Words: dictionaries, computers and meanings (1996 with Brian Slator and Louise Guthrie) from MIT Press. He has also produced recent edited collections Machine Conversations (2000, Kluwer) and Readings in Machine Translation (2003 with Sergei Nirenburg and Harold Somers). He is also a Fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the EPSRC College of Computing, a member of the UK Computing Research Council and on the boards of some fifteen AI-related journals. He designed CONVERSE, the dialogue system that won the Loebner prize in New York in 1998, and is currently Coordinator of the EU 6th Framework integrated project COMPANIONS (4 years, 15 sites, 1.3meuro) on conversational assistants as personalised and permanent web interfaces.