I n t r o d u c t i o n

Fabrice Maurel is an HDR Assistant Professor in Natural Language Processing at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Caen Normandy (France) and develops his research activities at the CNRS GREYC UMR 6072 Laboratory.

His research interests include (1) Morpho-dispositional Semantics, (2) Web Accessibility and (3) Enactive Design of Interactive Systems. In (1), his main studies focus on taking into account layout and typography information for the improvement of natural language processing (Text To Speech Systems, extractive summarization and visualization of documents, Web Page clustering). In (2), he works on multimodal access to web pages by the blind without loss of contents and cognitive efficiency. In (3) he develops haptic and concurrent speech interfaces to encourage the emergence of high-level non-visual reading strategies.

Fabrice Maurel received his PhD from the Toulouse Institute for Research in Computer Science in 2004. In 2005, he started his academic career at the University of Caen Normandy as Assistant Professor in the Human Language Technology team of the CNRS GREYC UMR 6072 until today. Fabrice Maurel received his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) from the Université de Caen Normandie in 2022.

Fabrice Maurel was Director of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Caen Normandy from 2015 to 2016, then Co-Director of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Caen Normandy from 2016 to 2022. Then Director of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Caen Normandy from 2022 to present.

Short CV

A giant panda goes into one of those expensive and pretentious restaurants serving French/Asian fusion cuisine and takes a table for one. The surprised waiter for that table explains unctuously that his name is Marcel, he will be your server tonight, and we 'ave a number of specials (he is French), etc., etc. The panda listens impassively to the list of $27 chili- pepperencrusted swordfish specials and so on, and then orders a delicately flavored dish of young bamboo tips and mixed greenery served with steamed jasmine rice. On finishing his meal, the panda gets up, reaches into his fur for a handgun, brings down the waiter with one shot, and calmly heads for the door. The head waiter is near the door and exclaims in shock, "Oh, monsieur, what 'ave you done? You 'ave killed Marcel! Why 'ave you done zis, monsieur? You 'ad some problem? Ze service was not acceptable?" The panda scowls at him and says, "I'm a fucking panda. Go look it up." He stalks out into the night. The baffled staff huddle round the compact encyclopedic dictionary that they keep on the premises, and turning to Panda, giant, they read this: Panda, giant. Large bear-like animal, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, with distinctive black and white markings, related to raccoon family. Rare; found only in bamboo forests of Tibet and western China. Eats shoots and leaves.
Excerpt from the novel that inspired the title of the humorous punctuation book Eats, Shoots and Leaves.