Dr John R Elliott Reader in Intelligence Engineering Innovation North - Faculty of Information and Technology Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

Profile
My main area of interest is in the field of unsupervised natural language learning. In particular, the search for generic human and inter-species language universals to devise computational methods by which language can be discriminated from non-language and core structural syntactic elements of unknown languages can be detected. Aims of this research include: contributing to the understanding of language structure and the detection of intelligent language-like features in signals, to aid the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

For my PhD, I investigated and developed purely computational approaches to identify language structure at its varying levels of abstraction: from its physical level to the parts-of-speech, which encode internal and external ontologies. The results of my work will hopefully contribute towards the decoding of unknown languages, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial and a better understanding of what language structure actually is. My research draws from and incorporates many disciplines, which include: computational linguistics, linguistics, information theory, computer visualisation, psychology, neuroscience and statistics. It is by using such a multi-disciplinary approach, which I believe is essential in attacking such a problem, that will hopefully contribute and ultimately answer some of the questions.

For the period September 30th to October 2nd (midday) inclusive, I was an invited participant at a special SETI workshop on interstellar message design and construction, which was held this year (2001) prior to the main International Astronautical Congress in Toulouse, where I also presented two papers. Invited participants represented a wide variety of disciplines including those of mathematics, computational linguistics, philosophy, art, psychology, education, telecommunications engineering and signal processing. It is thought that, "there has never been a comparable group of experts from such a range of backgrounds engaged in a focused discussion of interstellar messages"[Doug Vakoch, SETI].

Current Projects
In keeping with my heterogeneous attack on the problem, one of my current objectives is the analysis of audio files supplied by Kent Cullers of the SETI Institute.  The contents of which range from Pulsars and stellar 'noise' to human voice transmissions, which phase shift.  This is concurrent with the continuing development of tools and algorithms for parts-of-speech classification in unknown languages using aids such as my visualisation toolkit for linguistic objects.

Implicit in the understanding and detection of 'universal' attributes of language, is the need to study and analyse a representative set of the human language chorus. So I have collected many raw text samples in electronic format, - which are attainable over the internet - covering most of the major language groups. In endeavouring to apply the same principles to how the hidden layer of parts-of-speech interact and to glean a more complete and generic comparative picture linguistically, I am pursuing the much harder task of compiling a repository of an equivalent representative set of tagged corpora. Up until now, I have collected samples of tagged texts in English, Romanian, Hungarian, Cuban-Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Dutch, Thai, Bulgarian, German, Portuguese, Czechoslovakian and Hindi. If you know of any other languages available, please contact me. I am targeting - and therefore very interested in - the following: Vietnamese, Tamil, Hausa, Malay, Gaelic, Greek, Japanese and Russian.

	Unidentified ('alien') Signal

Project Phoenix
The search project for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Additional

Membership of Boards, Committees and Advisory Panels:

International Academy of Astronautics, SETI Permanent Committee member;

Member of an International Task Group for the Post-detection identification of unknown radio signals. This is a select number (12) of academics from around the world who are recognised experts, in their related fields, and are on a secure 24-7 hotline;

Member of Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board

Committee member for Computational Linguistics in the United Kingdom

Member of the Tomorrow Project: a programme of research, consultation and communication about people's lives in Britain in the next twenty years, which is supported by a number of government agencies

Recently (October 2008), I have had published a New Scientist article, which has caused subsequent media interest: e.g. BBC Radio (inc BBC Wales: Science Café); Daily Telegraph; YEP; Discovery Channel; Russian Science Magazine; Edinburgh “Talk107” radio;

TV interview at Jodrell Bank Observatory for the new series of Jane Goldman Investigates...The Dark Side, where she looks at the unexplained. This program - the first in her new series called 'Aliens' - looks at the search for ET and the science behind it. The program was televised on Living TV at 10.30pm 12/10/04 and includes Prof. Ian Morrison from the observatory.

Other media stuff: (Click here)

Recent background

2008 to date: Reader in Intelligence Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University., UK

2002 to 2008: Senior Lecturer and Academic Leader for Artificial Intelligence at Leeds Metropolitan University., UK

1999 - 2003: PhD [University of Leeds] in Computational Linguistics looking at Language universals and language discovery

1998 - 1999: MSc [University of Leeds] in Distributed Multimedia Systems

1995 - 1998: BSc(Hons) [University of Leeds] degree in Information Systems with Artificial Intelligence.

Major component strands were: Artificial intelligence (which includes computer vision, expert systems, image processing, natural language processing, constraint satisfaction and constraint programming); professional development; computer ethics; database theory; systems analysis; software engineering and programming.
 

Publications

Conference papers

Elliott, J. (2008) A Post-Detection Decipherment Strategy: in proceedings of the 58th International Astronautical Congress, Glasgow, UK, pp. IAA-08-A4.2.05

Elliott, J. (2008) Detecting the Signature of Intelligent Life: in proceedings of the 1st conference on "Searching for Life's Signatures", Paris, France

Elliott, J. (2006) A Semantic ‘Engine’ for Universal Translation: in proceedings of the 57th International Astronautical Congress, Valencia, Spain, pp. IAA-06-A4.2.06

Elliott, J. (2005) A Post-Detection Decipherment Matrix: in proceedings of the 56th International Astronautical Congress, Fukuoka, Japan, pp. IAA-05-A4.2.10

Elliott, D., Elliott J., Atwell, E and Hartley, A. (2005) Using corpora to automatically detect untranslated and “outrageous” words in machine translation output in proceedings of CL2005: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, University of Birmingham.

Elliott, J. (2005) A Relational Matrix for Language Decipherment: in proceedings of the IPSI-2005 M.I.T conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Elliot, J. (2005) Calculating the Intelligence of Dolphins: Innovation North Research Conference, Leeds, UK.

Elliott, J. (2004) Unsupervised Discovery of Language Structure in Audio Signals: in proceedings of IASTED International Conference on Circuits, Signals, and Systems (CSS 2004), Clearwater Beech, Florida USA.

Elliott, J. (2004) Detecting Language Structure in Audio Signals: in proceedings of International Conference on Computer, Communication and Control Technologies (CCCT '04), Austin, Texas.

Elliott, J. (2004) An Electronic 'Ear' on the Signal Universe: ICT+2004 conference, Leeds, UK.

Elliott, J. (2004) Using Comparable Corpora for discovering Universals in Surface Structure: in proceedings on LREC workshop on "The Amazing Utility of Parallel and Comparable Corpora", Lisbon, Portugal.

Elliott, J. (2003) A Human Language Corpus for Interstellar Message Construction: in proceedings of the 54th International Astronautical Congress, Bremen, Germany, pp. IAA-03-IAA.9.1.04

Elliott, J. (2003) Unsupervised learning of word classes using function word constraints: in proceedings of International Conference on Computer, Communication and Control Technologies (CCCT '03), vol. V, pp. 143-148.

Elliott, J. (2003) The Human Language Chorus Corpus: in proceedings of CL2003, vol. 16 part 2 pp. 201-210: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, Lancaster, UK.

Elliott, J. (2002) The Filtration of Inter-Galactic Objets Trouvés and the identification of the lingua ex machina hierarchy: in proceedings of World Space Congress - The 53rd International Astronautical Congress - pp. IAA-02-IAA.9.2.10.

Elliott, J. (2002) Detecting languageness: in proceedings of 6th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI 2002), vol. IX, pp. 323-328.

Elliott, J. (2002) The SETI Challenge: in proceedings of the 5th Annual CLUK Colloquium: Computational Linguistics in the United Kingdom, (CLUK 2002, University of Leeds, UK), pp. 50 -57 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Atwell, E & Elliott, J. (2001) A corpus for interstellar communication: in proceedings of CL2001: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, pp. 31-39; Rayson, P, Wilson, A, McEnery, T, Hardie, A & Khoja, S (editors).

Atwell, E & Elliott, J. (2001) Corpus linguistics and the design of a response message: in proceedings of IAC'2001 - the 52nd International Astronautical Congress - pp. IAA-01-IAA.9.2.08.

Elliott, J & Atwell, E. (2001) Visualisation of long distance grammatical collocation patterns in language: in proceedings of IV2001: 5th International Conference on Information Visualisation, pp. 297-302.

Elliott, J, Atwell, E & Whyte, B. (2001) A toolkit for visualisation of combinatorial constraint phenomena in linguistically interpreted corpora: in proceedings of the 4th Annual CLUK Colloquium, Computational Linguistics in the United Kingdom, pp. 90-95.

Elliott, J, Atwell, E & Whyte, B. (2001) First stage identification of syntactic elements in an extraterrestrial signal: in Proceedings of IAC '2001 - the 52nd International Astronautical Congress - pp. IAA-01-IAA.9.2.07.

Elliott, J and Atwell, E. (2000) Is anybody out there: the detection of intelligent and generic language-like features, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 53, pp. 13-22. ISSN: 0007-084X.

Elliott, J, Atwell, E & Whyte, B. (2000) Language identification in unknown signals: in proceedings of COLING'2000 - 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1021-1026 Morgan Kaufman. ISBN: 1-55860-717-X (2 volumes).

Elliott, J., Atwell, E & Whyte, B. (2000) Increasing our ignorance of language: identifying language structure in an unknown signal: in proceedings of CoNLL-2000 - International Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 25-30 Association for Computational Linguistics; Daelemans, W (editors).

Elliott, J & Atwell, E. (1999) Language in signals: the detection of generic species-independent intelligent language features in symbolic and oral communications: in proceedings of the 50th International Astronautical Congress, pp. IAA-99-IAA.9.1.08: International Astronautical Federation.

Journals

Elliott, J. (2007) A Post-Detection Decipherment Matrix: Acta Astronautica, Journal of the International Academy of Astronautics Elsevier Science Ltd, England, AA2853.

Elliott, J & Atwell, E. (2000) Is anybody out there: the detection of intelligent and generic language-like features, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 53, pp. 13-22. ISSN: 0007-084X.

Books

Elliott, J and Atwell, E. (due 2009) Chapter 18, "Decomposing bodies - Corpus Linguistics and Reply Messages", in: Between Worlds, MIT Press, USA

Elliott, J. (2002) The Action Hero Handbook, Chapter 3: How to Communicate with an Extraterrestrial, Quirk Books, USA. Borgenicht, D and Borgenicht, J. (Editors).

Links
International Academy of Astronautics: SETI Permanent Study Group
Member of Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board
Member of the Tomorrow Project
Runner-up in 1998 for National Institute of Discovery Science

email: j.elliott@leedsmet.ac.uk