University

PhD Student Ongoing

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. I moved to Pōneke Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2024. My degrees are:

• MA (Hons) from the University of Edinburgh
• MSc Language and Communications Technology (with a specialization in Computational Linguistics) from Saarland University

To contact me, email: richard.littauer at ecs.vuw.ac.nz or richard at this website.

I actively publish and work in several different areas:

• ornithology, avian bird flu, and community science
• taxonomic nomenclature
• using open source to further open science
• linguistics

A full list of my work is given below.

My Thesis

Building Tools for Community Science Datasets to Model Bird Populations and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Aotearoa New Zealand

Supervisors

Kris Bubendorfer, Markus Lukzac-Roesch

Proposal Abstract

Community science platforms have enabled the creation of global observational datasets which afford unprecedented insights into natural biodiversity. The heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardisation, quality assurance, quality control, and workflow management. The goal of my research is to build tools that enable researchers to use these datasets with higher degrees of certainty, to develop workflows to allow for standardised, reproducible processing of the data, and to use case studies that offer meaning- ful insights into how community science can be used to understand epidemiol- ogy and population demographics, in order to inform public policy. I focus, in particular, on bird populations in Aoteaora New Zealand and Oceania, and on predicting the oncoming significant threat posed by Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI).

Societies

I try to be active in various academic societies. I’d be happy to talk to you about anything to do with:

• BirdsNZ
• Wellington Botanical Society
• Royal Society Te Apārangi
• SNAP
• Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Student Association
• IEEE
• The Carpentries
• Entomological Society of New Zealand
• Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain (ULAB)
• Linguistics Society of America (LSA)

Talks

I frequently give talks about my work. You can find my most recent presentations here.

My Publications

Open Science

Journal Articles

• Richard Littauer, Karthik Ram, Bertram Ludäscher, Bill Michener, Rebecca Koskela (2012). Trends in use of scientific workflows: Insights from a public repository and guidelines for best practices. In: International Journal of Data Curation, Vol. 7:2, pp. 92-100. doi:10.2218/ijdc.v7i2.232 bib slides
• Katz, D S, Choi, S-C T, Wilkins-Diehr, N, Chue Hong, N, Venters, C C, Howison, J, Seinstra, F, Jones, M, Cranston, K A, Clune, T L, de Val-Borro, M and Littauer, R (2016). Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). In: Journal of Open Research Software, 4: e7. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.85. bib

Book Chapters

• Christian Chiarcos, Steven Moran, Pablo N. Mendes, Sebastian Nordhoff, Richard Littauer (2013). Building a Linked Open Data Cloud of Linguistic Resources: Motivations and Developments. In: I. Ivenych and J. Kim, eds., The People’s Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Language Resources, pp. 315-348. Springer. bib

Proceedings

• Richard Littauer, Karthik Ram, Bertram Ludäscher, William Michener, Rebecca Koskela (2011). Trends in Use of Scientific Workflows: Insights from a Public Repository and Guidelines for Best Practices. In 7th International Digital Curation Conference Proceedings, Bristol, 7-9 December, 2011. bib slides

Book Contributions

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). Developing a toolkit for fostering open science practices: Proceedings of a workshop.

Ornithology

Book Chapters

• Richard Littauer (2025). Tristan Moorhen (Gallinula nesiotis), version 2.0. In: Birds of the World (G. M. Kirwan and N. D. Sly, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.trimoo2.02 bib

Short Notes

• Richard Littauer (2025). Renaming a bill type for Tundra Swan (Cygnus columbianus). The Wilson Journal of Ornithology: 1–3. 10.1080/15594491.2025.2498780 bib Paper

Posters

• Littauer, Richard (2022). A Proposal for Renaming Bill Types of Bewick’s Swans. Poster presented at the Centennial Meeting of the Association of Field Ornithologists, Plymouth, MA, October 11, 2022. bib

Taxonomic Nomenclature

Short Notes

• Richard Littauer (2025). Nomenclatural corrections for gender of species-group names for two Solomon Island birds. Emu – Austral Ornithology: 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2025.2551298 bib Paper
• Richard Littauer (2025). Helobdella serendipitous Saglam et al., 2018 is the available name (Annelida: Hirudinida). Zootaxa 5673(4): 598–598. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5673.4.8 bib
• Richard Littauer (2025). Corrections for agreement in gender in Notonectidae (Hemiptera: Heteroptera) under Article 31 of the Code. Zootaxa 5618(2): 287-288. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5618.2.8 bib
• Richard Littauer (2025). A nomenclatural issue related to Lopdells’ penguin Archaeospheniscus lopdelli. Notornis 72(1): 49–50. https://doi.org/10.63172/777144pbjhsf bib
• Richard Littauer (2025). First revision of karoro Larus dominicanus antipodum (Bruch, 1853). Notornis 72(1): 51–53. https://doi.org/10.63172/093633lrrwbq bib
• Richard Littauer (2025). Corrections for grammatical agreement in Ophiodermatidae. Zootaxa 5569(2): 400-400. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5569.2.11 bib

Data

• AviList Core Team (2025). AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2025. https://doi.org/10.2173/avilist.v2025

Linguistics

Journal Articles

• Richard Littauer (2012). Replicating Oliphant’s Saussurean Simulations. In: Canning, J., ed., Début: The Undergraduate Journal of Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies, 3(1). Online: LLAS. bib

Book Reviews

• Richard Littauer (2013). Review of F. Seifart, G. Haig, N. Himmelmann, D. Jung, A. Margetts, & P. Trilsbeek, eds., Potentials of Language Documentation: Methods, Analyses, and Utilization. In: Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 3. Online: University of Hawai’i Press. In: LINGUIST List, 24.2604. URL bib
• Richard Littauer (2012). Review of H. Schiffman & B. Spooner, eds., Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors: The Changing Politics of Language Choice. In: Brill’s Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages. Leiden: Brill. In: LINGUIST List, 23.3183. URL bib

Proceedings

• Richard Littauer (2022). On Tocharian Exceptionality to the centum-satem Isogloss. In: C. Wilson, ed., Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain 2012 Proceedings. Bristol, UK: online. bib
• Richard Littauer, Hugh Paterson III (2016). Open Source Code Serving Endangered Languages. In: C. Soria, L. Pretorius, T. Declerck, J. Mariani, K. Scannell, Eveline Wandl-Vogt, eds., In Proceedings of LREC 2016 Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages: Towards an Alliance for Digital Language Diversity (CCURL) Workshop. Portorož, Slovenia, 23 May, 2012. bib
• Richard Littauer, Sean G. Roberts, James Winters, Rachael Bailes, Michael Pleyer, Hannah Little (2014). From the Savannah to the Cloud: Blogging Evolutionary Linguistics Research. In: L. McCrohon, B. Thompson, T. Verhoef, H. Yamauchi, eds., The Past, Present and Future of Language Evolution Research: Student Volume of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pp.121-132. Tokyo, Japan: Evolang 9 Organizing Committee. bib
• Richard Littauer, Boris Villazon-Terrazas, Steven Moran (2013). Linguistic Resources Enhanced with Geospatial Information. In: C. Chiarcos, P. Cimiano, T. Declerck, J. McCrae, eds., Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2013): Representing and linking lexicons, terminologies and other language data, pp. 53-58. Pisa, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics. bib
• Richard Littauer, James Winters, Seán G. Roberts, Hannah Little, Michael Pleyer, Bill Benzon (2012). Academic Research in the Blogosphere: Adapting to New Risks and Opportunities on the Internet. In: Jan Christoph Meister, ed., Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts, pp. 268-269, University of Hamburg, July 16-22. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Bib
• Christian Chiarcos, Sebastian Hellmann, Sebastian Nordhoff, Steven Moran, Richard Littauer, Judith Eckle-Kohler, Iryna Gurevych, Silvana Hartmann, Michael Matuschek, Christian M. Meyer (2012). The Open Linguistics Working Group. In Calzolari, N., Choukri, K., Declerck, T., Doğan, M.U., Maegaard, B., Mariani, J., Odijk, J., and Piperidis, S., eds., Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12). Istanbul, Turkey, 23-25 May, 2012. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). bib
• Richard Littauer, Rory Turnbull, Alexis Palmer (2012). Visualising Typological Relationships: Plotting WALS with Heat Maps. In Proceedings of the European Association of Computational Linguistics 2012 Workshop on the Visualization of Linguistic Patterns. Avignon, France, 23-24 April, 2012. bib slides
• Richard Littauer (2012). The Evolution of Morphological Agreement. In Scott-Phillips, T.C. and Tamariz, M. and Cartmill, E.A. and Hurford, J.R., eds., The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9), pages 484-485, Singapore, 2012. World Scientific. bib
• Richard Littauer (2012). Re-dating the Loss of Laryngeal Air Sacs in Homo Sapiens. In Scott-Phillips, T.C. and Tamariz, M. and Cartmill, E.A. and Hurford, J.R., eds., The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9), pages 486-487, Singapore. World Scientific. bib
• Littauer, Richard (2012). A Reanalysis of Anatomical Changes for Language. In 6th Language at the University of Essex PG Conference Proceedings, Essex, 15-16 June, 2011. bib slides

Other fields

Peer-reviewed Proceedings

• Richard Littauer, Antonia Scheidel, Marc Schulder, Sibel Ciddi (2012). Crowd sourcing the classroom: Interactive applications in higher learning. In Gómez Chova, L., Candel Torres, I., López Martínez, A., eds. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN12), pp. 1473-1481, Barcelona, Spain. International Association of Technology, Education and Development (IATED). bib

Non-Peer-reviewed Publications

• Richard Littauer (2025). Audio observation of a Wellington Tree Wētā Hemideina crassidens defense stridulation. The Wētā, 58, pp. 55-57. Link. bib

Other contributions

I also frequently facilitate discussions. Some of those are listed here:

• Moderator of a Panel on the role of Open Source in Open Science, June 27-29, 2023 at the 2023 ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability.