Dr. Paul Leemans
The Computer Science Department recently awarded its ninth Ph.D. degree to Paul Leemans. The advisor was Lee Becker.
On April 9th, 2001, Paul successfully defended his thesis in public before his Ph.D. committee, consisting of Profs. David C. Brown, Stanley M. Selkow, and Norman Wittels.
His thesis, "VIL: A Visual Inter Lingua", is concerned with a computer-based iconic communication language, that allows people to communicate with each other when they share no common language. It allows a user to construct sentences, without actually having to type in words, i.e. solely relying on icons. The goal is to make the system language independent so that it can be used universally. This should allow system users to be able to construct sentences irrespective of the languages known by the users.
Paul is currently a manager at KPMG CT in the Netherlands. Information about VIL and iconic communication languages can be found at www.cs.wpi.edu/~nemleem/