Oliver Lemon
I'm Professor of AI and 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]
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.
News:
PhD position: Embodied Collaborative AI
Reviewer for ERC (2025)
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 research team (2024)
Co-organiser special session "Human -- Large Language Model Interaction" HRI 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
Action Editor for the Transactions of ACL (TACL) (ongoung)
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:
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:
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)
Dept/School duties
Academi Lead, National Robotarium (2023 - )
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
