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New Scientist: Deep Mind's Gato AI
Expert in conversational, agentic, and embodied AI. Collaborative projects with Amazon, PAL robotics, Softbank, BMW, UNICEF, NHS, France Telecom, and Broca hospital (AP-HP).
I'm Professor of AI and former Academic Co-Lead at the UK's National Robotarium. I work in generative AI, machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and interactive robotics , and am the Director of the Interaction Lab in the Dept of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. I previously worked at Stanford and Edinburgh Universities.
I am an ELLIS Fellow in Multimodal Learning Systems (elected 2024).
I was a faculty advisor for teams in the Amazon Alexa Challenge -- we were finalists in 2017, 2018, and 2023!
I am an Action Editor of TACL: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (MIT Press) and an ARR area chair.
Follow me on BlueSky @oliverlemon.bsky.social
Publications : [Google scholar] [ACL Anthology]
News:
News:
Keynote speaker: Turing Connections 2026
Reviewer for DFG (2026)
Invited tutorial: AILC Lectures on Computational Linguistics June 2026, Bolzano
Organiser: Generative AI for Robotics, Summer School, Edinburgh 2025 and 2026
Reviewer for ERC and EC IHI proposals (2025)
External PhD examiner: Sorbonne (2025); Uppsala (2025)
Action Editor for the Transactions of ACL (TACL) (since 2022)
Elected as ELLIS Fellow in Multimodal Learning Systems (2024).
ACL rolling Review (ARR) Area Chair / meta reviewer (2024 onwards)
Expert reviewer for EC proposals in healthcare AI (2024)
Scientific Reviewer of INRIA (Paris) research team (2024)
Co-organiser special session "Human -- Large Language Model Interaction" HRI 2024
Reviewer for UK AI Safety Institute (AISI) 2024
Invited speaker : Hi! PARIS Symposium on Robotics, AI and Society, 2024
Area Chair, NAACL 2024; reviewer for COLM 2024
Invited speaker: European Conversational AI Summit, 2024
Invited speaker at Cambridge Language Sciences Annual Symposium 2023
IEEE Spectrum article: on LLMs for speech interaction, 2023
Invited speaker: healthcare technology; Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2023
Invited participant in UK Government Foundation Model Taskforce (2023)
Editor: IEEE Transactions on AI, special issue on conversational AI (2023)
Panelist Scottish AI Summit: march 2023
Invited attendee: Apple NLU workshop: february 2023
Co-organiser: CHI 2023 workshop "Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for Intelligent Data-Driven Health Interfaces to support Ongoing Care"
Invited talk, Winter School on Human-Robot Interaction, Ghent, "Conversational HRI - coordinating human-robot teams with Natural Language", December 2022
Invited talk at MIRMI, Technical University of Munich (TUM), July 2022: "Conversational AI for human-robot healthcare teams"
General Chair of SIGDIAL 2022
My discussion of DeepMind's Gato AI in New Scientist, May 2022
I participated in the 2021 Dagstuhl "Conversational Agents as Trustworthy Autonomous Systems" (Trust-CA)
Keynote speaker on Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI) 2021
BBC News: Coronavirus Robot Doctor (2020)
Invited speaker: first Apple Siri Workshop on Conversational AI, Cambridge, 2019
EC H2020 project funded on conversational robotics: SPRING: 2020-2024
In conversation with James Allen, Elisabeth André, Philip R Cohen, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Ronald Kaplan, and David Traum, "Challenge Discussion: Advancing Multimodal Dialogue", 2019 [link]
Organised SICSA workshop on Conversational AI, December 2018
Guest on Tomorrow's World Live November 2018
Invited speaker at BBC Voice+AI conference, Nov 2018
Article in The Scotsman, "The Future will still be human", Oct 2018
Faculty advisor for team Alana in the Amazon Alexa Challenge 2018
BBC documentary: "The Joy of AI" with Jim Al Khalili , 2018
Discussion panel for Royal Bank of Scotland on conversational AI in finance (2018)
Keynote speaker at SIGDIAL 2017 [slides]
New Scientist: chatbots learn to negotiate (June 2017)
Area chair for ACL 2017
Amazon have selected our team to enter the Alexa Challenge 2017!
EC Horizon 2020 project "MuMMER" on Social Human-Robot Interaction
Programme Committees 2016: ACL, SemDial, RE-WOCHAT
EPSRC project funded: BABBLE (2015): domain-general methods for learning natural spoken dialogue systems
EPSRC project funded: DILIGENT (2015)
Area Co-chair EMNLP 2015: Discourse, Dialogue, and Pragmatics, EMNLP 2015
Invited talk at Nuance, California 29/5/13
Advisory Board: Dialog State Tracking Challenges (2013 - ongoing)
Steering Committee: RefNet EPSRC network
Member of UK-Health Data Analytics Network (2015 - )
Oliver Lemon and Olivier Pietquin (eds.) "Data-driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems: Computational Learning for Conversational Interfaces", Springer, October 2012 [buy from Amazon] [buy from Springer]
"Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems: A Data-driven Methodology for Dialogue Management and Natural Language Generation" Book Series: Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing , Springer, 2011 (Amazon)
Invited speaker at ENLG 2011, ECAI 2012 (MLIS)
YouTube: Multimodal Interfaces
Editorial Board of Dialogue and Discourse
Research projects:
Research projects:
SPRING (H2020): conversational robots in healthcare (2020-2024)
MuMMER (H2020): multimodal mall robot
Conversational AI for the Amazon Alexa Challenge
JAMES (FP7) : socially intelligent multimodal Human-Robot Interaction
SpaceBook (FP7) : spatially-aware mobile speech interfaces
Help4Mood (FP7) : virtual characters for health applications
STAC (ERC) : non-cooperative strategic dialogue agents
PARLANCE (FP7) : incremental mobile statistical spoken dialogue systems
SpeechCity (EPSRC Impact Acceleration) : mobile speech apps for city users
EPSRC: BABBLE project: domain-general methods for learning natural spoken dialogue systems (Principal Investigator), Grant number EP/M01553X/1, (2015-2017, Co-I Arash Eshghi)
ECHOES: ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning
CLASSiC: http://www.classic-project.org (Coordinator, EC FP7, 2008-2011) "Computational Learning in Adaptive Systems for Spoken Conversation"
TALK, EC FP6, 2004-2007, Scientific Coordinator
Advanced Dialogue Tools ("DUDE"): Scottish Enterprise (Principal Investigator) (2008-2009)
EPSRC: End-to End Statistical Dialogue Systems ("StatDial"): (Principal Investigator) (2007-2009, Co-I James Henderson) , Grant number EP/E019501/1
EPSRC: "Scaling up Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems for real user goals using automatic belief state compression" (2009-2011, Co-I: Paul Crook) Grant number: EP/G069840/1 (Principal Investigator)
Previous PhD students:
Previous PhD students:
Bhathiya Hemanthage
Ioannis Papaiounnou
Igor Shalyminov
Jose Part
Yanchao Yu
Ioannis Efstathiou
Heriberto Cuayahuitl (2nd supervisor)
Matthew Frampton
Srini Janarthanam
Ivan Meza-Ruiz
Dave Toney (2nd supervisor)
University roles and duties
University roles and duties
Recruitment and interviewing for senior CS positions
Academic Lead, National Robotarium (2023 - 2026)
National Robotarium user group - HRI lab design team lead (2018-2021)
GRID building design team (HWU) 2016-2018
RMAS user group (Worktribe)
Robotarium Management Committee
Edinburgh Centre for Robotics/CDT
Open days: speech tech and robotics demos.
Mentoring / probation: 2 Lecturers
REF return 2013: internal reviewer
Postgraduate Induction events
Scottish Crucible
Interview panels and Hiring committees
Exam moderator: Critical Thinking
Internal reviewer: EPSRC and EC grant proposals
Student Recruitment Committee
ESPRC ICT Capability consultation 2015
ESPRC "Human-Like Computing" meetings 2016
Global Research Institute and Research Leaders Forum (HWU) 2016-2018
I was an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, and previously of ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and on the editorial board of Dialogue and Discourse.
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