News

Welcome to three new Centre academics

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 13/10/2017 - 13:23

We are delighted to announce the arrival of three new academics to our fast-growing centre. We would like to welcome Dr Lynne Baillie, Dr Hakan Bilen and Dr Thusha Rajendran and all of the experience and expertise they will bring to the Centre.

Dr Lynne Baillie

Lynne is based in the department of MACS at Heriot-Watt University. Her reseach interests are Health and Rehabilitation Technologies & Robotics, Mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robotic Interaction (HRI).

Welcome to Dr. Stefano Albrecht

Submitted by Zoe McGonigle on Wed, 11/10/2017 - 16:47

We would like to welcome Dr. Stefano Albrecht as a supervisor for the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics! He is the new Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in the areas of autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, machine learning, and game theory, with a focus on sequential decision making under uncertainty.

Welcome to Dr Ioannis Konstas

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Tue, 26/09/2017 - 15:22

Ioannis Konstas recently joined as an assistant professor at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh. His main research interest focuses on the area of Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation (NLG) with an emphasis on data-driven deep learning methods. 

Before that he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, collaborating with Prof. Luke Zettlemoyer (2015-2017). 

Welcome to Dr Sen Wang

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Mon, 04/09/2017 - 21:23

The Centre is delighted to welcome Dr Sen Wang to the academic team based at Heriot-Watt University. Dr Wang's research interests include localisation, navigation, robotic vision, SLAM, autonomy, robot learning.

 

Student team announced as only UK finalists in $2.5 Million Alexa Prize

Submitted by Anne Murphy on Mon, 04/09/2017 - 21:16

A group of PhD students from Heriot-Watt University are the only team from the UK to be chosen as one of three finalists in Amazon's $2.5 Million Alexa Prize. 

The six strong student group, from the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, were originally chosen from over 100 entries from 22 countries world-wide.

Helen Hastie Promoted to Professor

Submitted by Colette Bush on Thu, 20/07/2017 - 15:45

Helen Hastie has recently been appointed Professor at Heriot-Watt University. Helen was promoted to full Professor in the Computer Science Department of the School of Mathmatics and Computer Sciences (MACS). Helen is currently on a Leverhume fellowship looking into explainable AI and trust for interactions with autonomous systems. Congratulations Helen!

Verena Rieser Promoted to Professor

Submitted by Colette Bush on Thu, 06/07/2017 - 14:35

Congratulations to Verena Rieser who has recently been appointed Professor in the School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences (MACS). Verena was promoted to full Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, where she leads the NLP research group on Spoken Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation. She received her PhD in 2008 from Saarland University and joined Heriot-Watt University in 2011 as Assistant Professor/ Lecturer. She currently serves as a faculty advisor for the Amazon Alexa Challenge and as an area chair for ACL 2017.