Helen Hastie

Research interests include trust and transparency for robotics and autonomous systems through natural language interaction, human-robot interaction and various disciplines of Spoken Dialogue Systems. Specifically:

• Intelligent Interaction for Autonomous Systems
• Multimodal, Spoken Dialogue and Mobile Systems
• Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems
• Affective Computing and Human-Robot Interaction
• Natural Language Generation and Data to Text Generation
• Health Informatics
• Dialogue Act Recognition (PhD work)

Helen Hastie is a Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She is the Director of the  and has been a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction, in particular spoken dialogue, for a number for domains including health, defence and personal assistants. She was the coordinator of EC FP7 project PARLANCE on voice-enabled search and Co-I for the EC FP7 Emote project on empathic robotic tutors. Recently, she has received funding from the UK MoD for her work on explainable autonomy.  She has international experience in both academia and industry, having worked at AT&T Research Labs, NJ, USA where she obtained a number of patents, and Lockheed Martin, NJ, USA where she led the Interactive Systems group. Helen holds a PhD in Speech Recognition from the University of Edinburgh, an MS from Georgetown University and an MA from the University of Edinburgh. She has published over 80 papers and was a founding member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland.