Currently, I am involved in organising the first dedicated SETI Conference, which will be hosted by the International Academy of Astronautics (22-26 September 2008, Searching for Life Signatures, Paris, France) and I will be chairing the SETI. II session at the Iinternational Astronautics Congress in Glasgow. In addition to conference organisation, I am the editor of a forthcoming special edition of the journal "Acta Astronautica" on SETI.

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.

“…. I believe your work is of great importance and hope it results in some positive findings in my life time.” (Sir Arthur C Clarke, private correspondence)

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.

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;

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

Academic Background

2008 to date: Reader (Professor) of 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.

Publications

Conference papers

Elliott, J. (2008) A Post-Detection Decipherment Strategy: in proceedings of the 57th 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. (TBC) 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).