Verena Rieser is a assistant professor in the Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt University Computer Science department, currently leading a team of 5 full-time researchers (2 RAs, 3 PhDs). Trained as a computational linguist, Verena has applied her expertise in machine learning and natural language processing to several areas of artificial intelligence, including spoken dialogue systems, natural language generation, sentiment analysis and computational sustainability. She also works closely with industry in bringing speech technology to the market. 

Verena received her PhD with summa cum laude from Saarland University, Germany, in 2008, winning the Dr. Eduard-Martin prize for outstanding research. Afterwards she moved to the UK for a research fellow position at the University of Edinburgh, and took up her faculty job at Heriot-Watt in 2011. In 2013 she spend 3 month as a visiting researcher at Nuance Communications, the market leader in speech technology.

Working Groups: Computing in Schools; Open Data