Verena Rieser

"Verena Rieser is a Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, where she leads the NLP lab and is affiliated with the Interaction Lab and the Edinburgh Center for Robotics. Verena holds a PhD from Saarland University (2008) and did her PostDoc at the University of Edinburgh (2008-2011). She also has 2 children.

Verena's work was also recognised with a number of prizes, including the Dr-Eduard-Martin Prize for outstanding research, winner of the SemEval 2016 Shared Task on Arabic Sentiment Analysis, and runner-up for the Amazon Alexa Prize 2017 and 2018. In 2019 alone, Verena was invited to be the keynote speaker of 7 international conferences and workshops. Verena's outreach activities have been recognised with the EPSRC Public Engagement Award 2018, a Herald Higher Education Award 2018 for Heriot-Watt's ""Year of Robotics"", as well as with a nomination as one of ""12 Women Shaping AI"" by NESTA, ""One to Watch 2019"" by FutureScot and as ""Pioneering Women in AI"" by The Telegraph, 2019."