Frank Drewes

Frank Drewes is a Professor and Head of the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University. He is affiliated with the Foundations of Language Processing research group, focusing on formal methods, computational linguistics, and AI-driven multimodal analysis of media content.

• Role: Head of Department
• Location: MIT building, 4th floor, room MIT.C.444

His research centers on integrating finite-state techniques (automata, grammars) with continuous vector representations for multimodal semantic analysis and AI document generation. He explores structural representations like graphs and automata for processing semantic sentence structures (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representations) and media analysis. Earlier work included grammatical image generation, resulting in a book in the Springer EATCS Texts in Theoretical Computer Science series.

Frank supervises active PhD students and has mentored five doctoral candidates to completion: Johanna Björklund, Christina Igasto, Martin Berglund, Arezoo Hatefi, and Adam Dahlgren Lindström. He developed the TREEBAG system for structured media analysis. Outside academia, he breeds poison dart frogs and practices photography, with personal websites dedicated to these hobbies.