Dr Richard A. Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having co-written in 1978 the first virtual world, MUD, and for his Player Types model which has seen widespread adoption by the MMO industry. His 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, is the standard text on the subject, and he is an influential writer on all aspects of online design and development. In 2010, he was the first recipient of the prestigious Game Developers Choice award of Online Game Legend.

I am a member of the Language and Computation Group (LAC) at Essex (most recent 16th LAC Day: 5th October 2017; earlier events:15th LAC Day 2016, 14th LAC Day 2015, 13th LAC Day 2014, 12th LAC Day 2013, 11th LAC Day 2012, 10th LAC Day 2011).

My research interests are in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR) and the implementation of such techniques in real applications. The intelligent directory enquiry assistant (YPA) project is an example (going back quite a few years now ...) where the extraction of information from partially structured data together with engineering issues played major roles in making the YPA a usable online system. 

I am developing techniques that allow the extraction of conceptual information from document collections and the utilization of such knowledge in retrieval tasks. The type of documents can range from Web pages to newspaper articles or other forms of vaguely/partially structured data. For an example application that we had in place with BT's mobile workforce have a look at our log analysis study.

Massimo Poesio is a Professor in Computational Linguistics in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London. He is a cognitive scientist with a particular focus on Computational Linguistics, also known as Human Language Technology. His research interests include computational models of anaphora resolution; the creation of large corpora of semantically annotated data (an area in which he pioneered the use of games-with-a-purpose with the development of Phrase Detectives, http://www.phrasedetectives.org); semantic interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication in interaction; the study of conceptual knowledge using a combination of methods from human language technology and neuroscience; and the application of text analytics methods to real life problems, such as deception detection, or the identification of reports of human rights violations from social media.