We are pleased to announce that Henk van den Heuvel has joined the CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors ( ) on 1 October 2023. He will take over from Antal van den Bosch, who was a member of the CLARIN BoD from March 2022. Van den Heuvel will be working with the other BoD members and the executive director Darja Fišer on the development and implementation of the CLARIN strategy and policy.
Currently, Henk van den Heuvel is the director of the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) and Head of the Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands), where he also holds the position of Research Data Manager (data steward) for the Faculty of Arts.
Henk van den Heuvel is an expert in Language and Speech Technology, specifically the transcription of speech, automatic speech recognition and language learning. To this end, he has been involved in the collection, compilation and validation of many spoken and written language resources, which are used to train computers to recognise and transcribe speech. This in turn is vital to the development of resources for language learners and people who have experienced language attrition.
Henk van den Heuvel has been involved with CLARIN in many ways: At the national level, he has worked on the data curation services of CLARIN NL, and currently is involved with CLARIAH-NL efforts to improve speech recognition of dialect speech and data curation. For CLARIN ERIC, he is actively participating in the CLARIN Resource Families, specifically those for oral history, sign languages and corpora of speech disorders. The CLARIN K-Centre ACE, on atypical communication, is hosted at CLST at Radboud University. In addition, he has organised multiple workshops and training activities on the usability of corpora of disordered speech and the implications of data privacy.
