Keynote Speakers

Dr. George Mikros
Dr. George Mikros


Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar

Bio
Dr. George Mikros is currently a Professor and Coordinator of the MA Program of Digital Humanities and Societies at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Before this, from 1999 to 2019, he served as a Professor of Computational and Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Athens, Greece, where he founded and became the Director of the Computational Stylistics lab. Since 2013, he has also been Adj. Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. He had the position of Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing. He was part of research groups that developed important language resources and NLP tools for Modern Greek. Since 1999, he has held the position of Teaching Associate at the Hellenic Open University, and from 2016 to 2019, he was the Director of the Undergraduate Program “Spanish Language and Culture.” Prof. Mikros has authored 5 monographs and over 100 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. Since 2007, he has been elected as a Member of the Council of the International Association of Quantitative Linguistics (IQLA). In the 2018 - 2021 period, he served as its president. He is the keynote speaker at many international conferences, workshops, and summer schools related to Digital Humanities, AI, Forensic Linguistics, and Quantitative Linguistics. His main research interests are computational stylistics, quantitative, computational, and forensic linguistics.

Dorothy
Dorothy Zemach


Macmillan Education.

Bio
Dorothy Zemach taught English, French, and Japanese for over 18 years in Asia, Africa, and the US. She holds an MA in TESL from the School for International Training in Vermont, USA. An author of over 20 textbooks, she now concentrates on writing and editing English language teaching materials and conducting teacher training workshops – including the new 3rd edition of Skillful (2024) by Macmillan Education. In 2012, she founded a micropress that publishes fiction, non-fiction, and educational materials. Her areas of specialty and interest are teaching writing, teaching reading, business English, academic English, testing, and humor. She is a frequent plenary speaker at international conferences, and a blogger for Teacher Talk at Azar Grammar.

Michelle
Dr. Paul Piwek


The Open University, UK.

Bio
Dr. Paul Piwek, Associate Professor at the Open University, brings a deep interest in language and logic to the world of Artificial Intelligence. He earned his PhD from the Institute for Perception Research (Eindhoven University and Philips Research), focusing on the intersection of these disciplines. His recent project, "Opening Up Minds" (mcs.open.ac.uk/pp2464/Opening_Up_Minds/), aims to develop AI tools that help navigate conversations, even across ideological divides. This work addresses a pressing societal challenge, seeking to bridge communication gaps and foster mutual understanding. He has published his work in journals such as Artificial Intelligence and Synthese, as well as at conferences like ACL and COLING. He has developed courses at the Open University, including the popular free "Digital Thinking Tools" (open.ac.uk/digital-thinking) course co-authored with Richard Walker. He is Public Understanding and Schools Liaison Officer for the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB; aisb.org.uk).

Thomas
Dr. Thomas Christiansen


University of Salento, Italy.

Bio
Thomas Wulstan Christiansen is an associate professor in English Language and Translation at the Università del Salento (Italy) and the Director of the University Language Centre. Of Danish-English heritage and originally from Birmingham, England, he has been based in southern Italy since he graduated in 1987.
He has taught at various higher education institutions in Apulia (Italy), Poland, and the UK. He is also a language teaching and testing consultant. In this capacity, he has worked widely for prestigious international examination boards in Italy, as well as Albania and Kosovo. He has worked in specialist work groups drafting revisions to some of the most popular English-language exams in the world and has presented numerous seminars and webinars on a wide range of subjects related to testing, language teaching, exam preparation, and the applications of AI to language teaching.
He has published three books and numerous articles on various areas of linguistics, including discourse and cohesion, systemic linguistics and functional grammar, varieties of English, ELF, teaching English, language testing, and the analysis of different corpora, including spoken discourse.