Academic Fellow, Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies
Heriot-Watt University, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
School of Management and Languages
About
Research focus: Using technology to investigate, understand and facilitate human communication, looking particularly at sign language.
Elaine Farrow is an RCUK Academic Fellow based in the School of Management and Languages, where she is part of the British Sign Language group. She is also affiliated with the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences. She particularly enjoys working on cross-disciplinary language technology projects and would love to hear from others who are interested in applying a cross-cultural perspective to their research, perhaps considering the needs of Deaf BSL users or non-native speakers of English.
From 2005-2009, Elaine worked in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh creating tutorial dialogue systems which use natural language interaction to support learning. She designed and built bespoke annotation tools to support corpus data analysis and had overall responsibility for the design of technical solutions supporting multi-site research as part of three international collaborations.
Her current post has given her experience in public engagement. In 2010, Elaine received a grant from the Edinburgh Beltane Beacons for Public Engagement to run a pilot project as part of their Public Engagement Challenge. Her project, the "EdSign34 Open Lecture Series" (a joint venture with Queen Margaret University and Moray House at the University of Edinburgh) was awarded second place in the challenge.
Elaine has an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh and a B.Sc. from the University of St Andrews. She holds a CACDP Level 2 Certificate in British Sign Language and is a member of the Sign Linguistics Corpora Network.
