An inter-disciplinary team, involving students and academics from across Heriot-Watt University, took the CBBC channel by storm on Thursday 10th August with an appearance on the long-running magazine programme, Blue Peter.
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.
Students from Heriot-Watt joined Pudsey Bear last weekend for a major new outreach activity, forming part of the University’s Year of Robotics.
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!
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.
Researchers, end users and technology developers attended the International Workshop on Robotics (IWR 2017) which took place on 30th and 31st March at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), São Paulo, Brazil.
This workshop, with a theme of “Robotics and automation: uncovering recent developments and applications on energy, industry, environment, agriculture, health and social settings” was organised jointly by Dr Patricia Vargas from Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Professor Ely Carneiro de Paiva, from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Unicamp.
The Robotics and Interaction Labs at Heriot-Watt University hosted a joint Open Day on Wednesday 21st June. The Open Day included two keynote speakers: Dr Verena Rieser from the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt and Dr Mary-Ellen Foster, a Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Rieser discussed "Data-driven methods for spoken dialogue systems" and Dr Foster presented on "Face-to-face conversation with socially intelligent robots".
On Monday 19th June 20 participants joined Dr. Mauro Dragone for an interactive workshop focused on examining robotic and ICT solutions for healthy ageing and assisted living.
The Centre was delighted to welcome Mr. Hu Chunhua, Party Secretary of CPC Guangdong Committee, and Mr. Wen Guohui, Mayor of Guangzhou City, as part of a delegation visiting our facilities at Robotarium-East on Monday the 12th of June. Our Centre Director, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar, gave our distinguished guests a presentation including an overview of our research at the ECR and there were demonstrations of Valkyrie, our Humanoid Robot from our NASA partnership, our Husky UGV and our PR2 Humanoid.
The ERF2017 Organising Team is very proud to announce that they have been awarded the Outward Looking category in the 2017 Spirit of Heriot-Watt Awards. This award recognises the huge amount of effort the team put into organising and delivering the highly successful 2017 European Robotics Forum which reached over 800 delegates from academia and industry.
ERF2017 Organising Team: