The Team

Yu Seo, Founder and President

Ms. Yu Seo is the founder and president of Agilingua, LLC. Ms. Seo has extensive experience in marketing research and new product development. She is responsible for building the companyfs overall business strategy and overseeing company finance, product planning, operations and management, in addition to establishing and strengthening new distribution, research and product development partnerships in all regions.

Ms. Seo received a Master of Arts from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. She is fluent in English and Japanese.

Matthias Denecke, Ph.D. Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Matthias Denecke is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Agilingua, LLC. Dr. Denecke founded Agilingua, LLC. in 2004 following more than 10 years of extensive research and career experience in the spoken dialogue system field. As CTO, Dr. Denecke is responsible for continuous technology development, bringing new technologies to the market on a regular basis, and building and strengthening research and industrial partnerships, as well as product planning and implementation.

Prior to founding Agilingua, LLC., Dr. Denecke served as a Research Associate for NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan, as a Postdoctoral Fellow for Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Deneckefs awards and stipends include the 2004 NTT Shocho Fund, and the 2002 FZI Dissertation Award given by Karlsruhe Research Center of Computer Science for outstanding dissertations. He has participated in several international academic research projects including European Union Project VODIS (Voice Operated Driver Information System), Multimodal Robot Control funded by the Army Research Lab, the General Motors Car Navigation Project, Interactive Meeting Room in CHIL funded by the European Union, and Command Post of the Future funded by Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Dr. Denecke has more than 30 publications in workshops, conferences and journals.

Dr. Matthias Denecke received a Master in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe in 1995, and a Master in Computational Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart in 1996. He received a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe in 2002. His dissertation was on the rapid prototyping of spoken dialogue systems.

At Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Denecke developed the open source spoken dialogue system Ariadne which can be downloaded from www.opendialog.org. Ariadne is used for multiple academic and commercial projects, including The Human-Robot Interaction Operation System by NASA, 2006.

Jie Yang, Ph.D.Multimodal Interface Technology Advisor

As a Multimodal Interface Technology Advisor for Agilingua, LLC., Dr. Jie Yang brings many years of academic experience in the human-computer interface technology.

Dr. Yang is a senior systems scientist in the Human Computer Interaction Institute of School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Yang has been leading research efforts to develop multimodal interfaces by applying computer vision and other sensing techniques to enhance human-computer interaction and human-human communication. He has involved the development of many multimodal systems such as gaze-based interface, lipreading systems, visual guided audio input, image-based multimodal translation agent, multimodal people ID, sign translation, and driving assistant systems.

Dr. Yang's research interests include multimodal human-computer interaction (modeling and learning), computer vision, and pattern recognition. He has published over 130 papers on his research in various journals and international conferences. He has served as a conference/program committee chair or program committee member for many international conferences, and a referee for a number of journals and conferences.

Dr. Yang is also currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.