Professor Helen Hastie

Theme Lead - Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction with Explainable AI


Professor of Computer Science - Heriot-Watt University
Director, EPSRC CDT in Robotics & Autonomous Systems (2019-2028)

Prof. Helen Hastie

Helen Hastie is a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University and a Leverhulme/RAEng Senior Research Fellow.

Prof. Hastie leads ORCA work package 3 and is an international expert on interactive systems and human-robot interaction (HRI), working on methods for natural communication between users and systems through speech and gesture. She has over 20 years of experience in designing, building and evaluating multimodal and HRI systems, focusing on data-driven techniques and working both in academia and industry.

Professor Hastie is also the Director for the recently renewed £18m EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CDT-RAS) at The Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR). The funding from EPSRC and industry will train 80 PhD students - in five cohorts - over the next eight years. Research will focus on safety and safe interaction between robots, people and their environments.

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Prof. Helen Hastie:

"We very much value our industry support and working closely with our industry partners because they allow us to understand what the real problems are that operators and users face, and create real solutions for these real problems and move the technology further."

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