Douglas A. Jones

Dr. Douglas A. Jones is a senior staff member in the Human Health and Performance Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he has worked since December 2001. His primary research area is leveraging the inherent structure of linguistic patterns for the design of applied human language technology systems, with a particular focus on military standards of foreign language proficiency. Jones is working to develop a common measure for both human language learners and machine translation technology in order to facilitate foreign language communication tasks.

In 2010, Jones was part of the U.S. Southern Command and the Joint Task Force-HAITI team that responded to the earthquake in Haiti, an experience that reinforced his desire to apply research on low-resource languages to humanitarian goals. He is also actively involved in the research and development of foreign language learning technology.

Jones has held research positions in the U.S. government with the Department of Defense, where he specialized in machine translation for world minority languages, and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he helped launch a Chinese-English cross-language information retrieval study. He completed postdoctoral work on computational theories of verb structure at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Jones holds a PhD in linguistics from MIT, with a specialization in Hindi syntax, and BA and MA degrees in linguistics from Stanford University, with a focus on computational phonology. He has published numerous papers in the fields of computational linguistics, human language technology, and human language technology evaluation.