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I am Associate Professor and a member of the Interaction Lab (video about what we do here) at the Department of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University. I am also Co-founder and Head of Linguistics at Alana AI.

My research involves looking at how people communicate in everyday conversation, e.g. how they build meaning together, how they understand spoken language in real-time, how they seek clarification and correct themselves & each other to  repair misunderstandings; why & when they nod, how they take turns to speak, etc. I spend most of my research time applying formal, computational & empirical methods from Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning & Cognitive Science to better understand and model these processes.

As such, my work also involves endowing Conversational AI (aka dialogue systems, conversational interfaces, or chatbots) with the same capabilities, thereby creating more intelligent, natural, and robust conversational systems. 

More recently I've been fascinated by what Large (multi-modal) Language Models can do. I therefore spend much time with my PhD students studying the capabilities of these models, and seeking ways of improving them with new data tailored to target specific capabilities such as dealing with miscommunication.

Here's my Google Scholar page.