Joseph Mariani’s research activities relate to language technology, multimodal human-machine communication, speech recognition, spoken language resources and evaluation. He was president of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), president of the European (now International) Speech Communication Association (ISCA), a member of the board of the European Network on Language and Speech (ELSNET) and the coordinator of the AUF FRANCIL Network. He was the director of the LIMSI CNRS laboratory from 1989 to 2001, and the head of its “Human-Machine Communication” department. He is since 2001 director of the “Information and Communication Technologies” department at the French Ministry of Research.