Jochen L Leidner is a Director of Research, R&D at Refinitiv Labs in London, where he heads the R&D site. He has been with Refinitiv since 2008 in scientific and later also managerial functions. He is also Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Data Analytics at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield.
His background includes a Master’s in computational linguistics, English and computer science (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), a Master’s in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Informatics (University of Edinburgh), which won the first ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Award. His scientific contributions include leading the teams that developed the QED and ALYSSA open-domain question answering Systems (evaluated at US NIST/DARPA TREC), proposing a new algorithm and comparing existing algorithms for spatial resolution of named entities, and information extraction of usual and unusual things (e.g. event extraction, company risk mining, sentiment analysis). Prior to Refinitiv, He has worked for SAP and founded and co-founded a number of start-ups.
He currently lives in London after working for several years in Germany, Scotland, the USA, and Switzerland. He also taught at universities (Erlangen, Saarbrücken, Frankfurt, Zurich, Essex), and is a scientific expert for the European Commission (FP7, H2020). He is an author or co-author of several dozen peer-reviewed publications (incl. one best paper award), has authored or co-edited two books and holds several patents in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, and mobile computing. He has been twice winner of the Thomson Reuters inventor of the year award for the best patent application.
