Interaction Lab, Heriot-Watt University (iLab)

Description

The Interaction Lab is a research group in the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, working on conversational artificial intelligence, natural language processing, multimodal machine learning and human-robot interaction. It develops systems that use language to collaborate with people across speech, vision, gesture and text, spanning spoken dialogue systems, natural language understanding and generation, data to text, summarisation, question answering, and grounded and situated interaction with robots. A stated strand of its work addresses ethical approaches to natural language processing and conversational artificial intelligence, and the bias, fairness and safety of generative models used in language and robotics systems.

The application areas it names are conversational assistants, healthcare and assistive technology, and human-robot collaboration; its teams reached the finals of the Alexa Prize in 2017 and 2018 and of the Alexa Prize SimBot challenge in 2022 and 2023. The lab runs a seminar series, has held projects funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Union framework programmes, supervises doctoral students through a centre for doctoral training in artificial intelligence and robotics, and collaborates with the National Robotarium in Edinburgh.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2009

Contact details

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Categorisation

Type

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University affiliation(s)

Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh

Partner Universities

University of Edinburgh

Additional Partnerships

National Robotarium; Edinburgh Centre for Robotics; Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA); NHS; Toshiba; Amazon; BMW; Honda Research Institute; PAL Robotics; SoftBank; UNICEF