Katerina Pastra is the Director of the Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI) and a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth, U.K. She has coordinated a number of European and national research and development projects, including POETICON++ (FP7-ICT, its predecessor POETICON (FP7-ICT) and a distinguishing Latsis Foundation award for research on “Image-Language Dialectics”. She is a Senior IEEE Member and the vice-chair of the European Network on Integrating Vision and Language (iVL). Her research is focused on the computational integration of language, perception and action based on experimental findings from neuroscience.

Katerina holds a BA in Linguistics (University of Athens, Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation (UMIST, UK) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (University of Sheffield, U.K.). She has worked on information extraction and automatic text-based image/video indexing and retrieval and she has lectured on Human-Computer/Human-Robot Interaction and the use of cognitive and psychological methods in software engineering (University of Sheffield, U.K.).