Team EMMA is part of the Interaction Lab which hosts around 30 researchers across NLP, Conversational AI and HRI. The group is also affiliated with the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, a joint venture between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh which has established itself as one of the largest and most prominent robotics research centers in the UK — including the recently established National Robotarium and the Center for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems annually recruiting around 15 PhD students.
Faculty advisor: Alessandro Suglia
Amit P. — Team leader
Amit is second-year PhD student focusing on understanding, uncovering, and modifying hidden preferences during natural language discourse. I have a BSc in Mathematics, Statistical, and Actuarial Science and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with Speech and Multimodal Interaction, during which I completed a dissertation on grounding natural language in scene graph representations. Additionally, I was the project manager for Aye-saac and was directly involved with developing the distributed architecture of this visual dialogue system.
Hemanthage Supun B.
Hementhage is a second year PhD student at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Centre for Doctoral Training, jointly offered by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. His current research focuses on visually grounded conversational agents with emphasis on scene graph structures. He holds an MScRes from the University of Moratuwa, where he worked on the thesis, Dialogue State Tracking for Low Resourced Languages. He also possesses several years of experience as a Senior SE at the R & D division of CodeGen International. Recently, he was a winner of the Multimodal Response Generation track of Facebook SIMMC 2.0 challenge.
Maria-Vasiliki (Malvina) N.
Malvina is a second year PhD student in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Heriot-Watt University. Malvina's research interests fall within vision and language to facilitate human-robot interaction. Malvina's current research aims to bridge Continual Learning and Visual Dialog to develop agents that can incrementally learn new concepts and skills. Prior to that, Malvina worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signals.
Georgios Michail P.
Georgios is a first year PhD student in the CDT of Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Heriot-Watt University. Georgios's research interests are within transparent multimodal agents for human-robot collaboration. Prior to that, Georgios completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with Speech and Multimodal Interaction at Heriot-Watt University. Georgios's past experience also includes developing systems as a Machine Learning Engineer for Speech Emotion Recognition.
Alessando Suglia — Faculty advisor
Alessando Suglia is a tenure-track Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University. He is deeply interested in studying machine learning methods for natural language processing and information filtering.
