Oliver Lemon
I'm a Professor and Director of the Interaction Lab in the Dept of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, working in AI, machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). I previously worked at Edinburgh and Stanford Universities.
I was faculty advisor for the Alana team in the Amazon Alexa Challenge -- we were finalists in 2017 and 2018!
I am co-founder and Chief AI Officer of Alana AI
Follow me on Twitter @oliverlemon
Publications : [Google scholar] [ACL Anthology]
I work on machine learning methods for intelligent and adaptive multimodal interfaces, including Conversational AI, Spoken Language Understanding, Dialogue Systems, Natural Language Generation, and Human-Robot Interaction. Please see my publications (bibtex here).
I am on the Editorial Team of TACL: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. I am 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:
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 have become a reviewer for ACL Rolling Review (ARR) and the Transactions of ACL (TACL) (2021)
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, oct 2019
New 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 talk 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: 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
Recent research projects:
SPRING (H2020): conversational robots in healthcare (2020-2024)
MuMMER (H2020): multimodal mall robot
Alana: 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
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)
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
Previous PhD students:
Ioannis Papaiounnou
Alessandro Suglia
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
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
