Oliver Lemon is a Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and Director of the Interaction Lab, which focuses on conversational AI, NLP, machine learning approaches to spoken and multimodal interaction, and Human-Robot Interaction. He was previously a research fellow at Stanford and Edinburgh universities, and holds a PhD from Edinburgh (1996). He has led several national and international research projects funded by EPSRC and the European Union. He is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, and a standing reviewer for TACL and the ACL Rolling Review (ARR). He was a faculty advisor of Heriot-Watt's Alexa-prize team, which was a finalist in both 2017 and 2018.
. He is the Chief AI Officer of the Conversational AI spin-out company Alana AI.
He works on machine learning methods for intelligent and adaptive multimodal interfaces, including Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation, and Human-Robot Interaction. He has also applied this work in Technology Enhanced Learning using Virtual Characters. See publications (bibtex here).
He is a standing reviewer for TACL and the ACL Rolling Review (ARR), 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.