Andy Edmondson, PhD student at The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University.

I am a PhD Student on the EPSRC Robotics and Automated System CDT at The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. My focus is improving the decision-making of automated robot agents in high-stakes scenarios such as search and rescue.

My PhD supervisor is Professor Ron Petrick, a Professor in the School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences and the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics at Heriot-Watt University, and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh.

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Publications

Detecting agreement in multi-party dialogue: evaluating speaker diarisation versus a procedural baseline to enhance user engagementConversational agents participating in multi-party interactions face significant challenges in dialogue state tracking, since the identity of the speaker adds significant contextual meaning. It is common to utilise diarisation models to identify the speaker. However, it is not clear if these are accurate enough to correctly identify specific conversational events such as agreement or disagreement during a real-time interaction. This study uses a cooperative quiz, where the conversational agent acts as quiz-show host, to determine whether diarisation or a frequency-and-proximity-based method is more accurate at determining agreement, and whether this translates to feelings of engagement from the players. Experimental results show that our procedural system was more engaging to players, and was more accurate at detecting agreement, reaching an average accuracy of 0.44 compared to 0.28 for the diarised system.

Accepted at the workshop on advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots aDaptive behaviour (GROUND), 2023

Carefully Connected - Towards Designing More Equitable Digital Services, 2025

Part of the UKRI Protecting Minority Ethnic Communities Online (PRIME) project.

A. Edmondson and R. Petrick. (2025). Navigating Errors: The Tolerance of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms to Misleading Heuristics. AAAI 2025 Workshop on Generalization in Planning (GenPlan).

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