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 work on machine learning methods for intelligent and adaptive multimodal interfaces, including Spoken Language Understanding, Dialogue Systems, Natural Language Generation, and Human-Robot Interaction. Please see my publications (bibtex here).
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:
- 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"
- Social Human-Robot Interaction
- Programme Committees 2016: ACL, SemDial, RE-WOCHAT
- New EPSRC project funded: BABBLE (2015): domain-general methods for learning natural spoken dialogue systems
- New EPSRC project funded: DILIGENT (2015)
- Area Co-chair: Discourse, Dialogue, and Pragmatics, EMNLP 2015
- Robotarium kick off event, 2014.
- 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
Recent research projects:
- 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
PhD Supervision
Currently (co-)supervising 6 PhD students (Papaioannou, Part, Shalyminov, Sheppard, Xu, Suglia)
Previous PhD students:
- Yanchao Yu
- Ioannis Efstathiou
- Heriberto Cuayahuitl (2nd supervisor)
- Matthew Frampton
- Srini Janarthanam
- Ivan Meza-Ruiz
- Dave Toney (2nd supervisor)
Dept/School duties
Robotarium user group - HRI lab design team lead (2018)
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
