News

Year of Robotics Parliamentary Reception 

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 10/11/2017 - 16:21

Academics and students from the Centre along with guests from industry attended a reception hosted by Gordon MacDonald, MSP for Edinburgh Pentlands, at the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday 8th November to celebrate Heriot-Watt’s ‘Year of Robotics’.
Professor Oliver Lemon, Director of the Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt University, outlined how the Centre’s research is contributing towards the UK’s drive to realise its industrial potential in the rapidly evolving robotic sector. He also shared the University’s success in the Amazon Alexa Challenge to date. 

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar keynote at IGD Leaders Forum

Submitted by Colette Bush on Fri, 13/10/2017 - 13:45

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar will be a keynote speaker at the IGD Leaders Forum on 18th October in London. The topic for discussion will be Artificial Intelligence in the food industry and will comprise of the following:

Automation is accelerating in food and grocery. Will this promote productivity and prosperity or will it feed the fires of discontent and rebellion?

- Is AI about to transform the business world?

- Is it any different to previous waves of technology?

- What ethical challenges will it present?

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.