What was your previous role before Behavioral Signals?

Computational linguist

What is your role at Behavioral Signals?

Linguist/ Analyst

What do you find most disruptive/ challenging at Behavioral Signals?

Working with (almost exclusively) engineers

What kind of work would make you excited to get out of bed on Monday morning?

Something that would result in ultimately helping others

Who are your role models and mentors?

My friends

What professional mistakes have you’ve learned most from?

Bad planning; avoid leaving a lot of things till the very last minute

What is the connection between linguistics and emotions?

There is a deeper connection there: through language, we express our emotions, the language we use conveys emotion, but also, our emotions affect the way we speak and even the way we learn a language. This means that linguistics can be used as a tool to study and understand emotion

Why is linguistics important in AI?

Linguistics is important to make the communication between humans and machines a little bit better. To an extent, we can talk to the machines, and they can understand us and talk back to us, all of which require some linguistic work (Natural Language Understanding-NLU, Natural Language Processing-NLP). Linguistics can also help us reach a deeper level of understanding between humans and machines. As mentioned above, we can use language to understand one’s emotions. Similarly, we can understand the emotions of a speaker by studying his/her language (sentiment analysis) and based on that, a machine can respond in a more natural, empathetic way

What makes you happy?

Traveling

What makes you angry?

Unfair treatment to disadvantaged groups

What makes you dream?

Being asleep

What makes you get up and moooooove?

My stress levels

If you had a ‘warning’ label, what would it say in one word?

Stressed

Can procrastination be useful?

Absolutely

Post-its OR whiteboards?

Post-its

Tea or coffee?

Coffee

Food you never get bored eating?

Sushi

Book or movie you would suggest for someone to read/see?

“Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders, and “Der Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse

Who are you going to tag to do this interview next?

George Paraskevopoulos ⚡️