Christian Dugast, Ph.D., is the Lead Scientist Architect for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) at AppTek, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based speech and language technologies. Christian received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Toulouse in France and brings a deep background in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Information Extraction. Prior to AppTek, Christian worked at Phillips Research, Nuance, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).