Ruth S. Aylett is a British author, computer scientist, professor, poet, and political activist. She is a professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she specialises in affective computing, social computing, software agents, and human–robot interaction.
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
George Heriot's School is a private primary and secondary day school on Lauriston Place in the Lauriston area of Edinburgh, Scotland. In the early 21st century, it has more than 1600 pupils, 155 teaching staff, and 80 non-teaching staff. It was established in 1628 as George Heriot's Hospital, by bequest of the royal goldsmith George Heriot, and opened in 1659. It is governed by George Heriot's Trust, a Scottish charity.
Johanna Doris Moore FRSE is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.
Hiroshi Ishiguro is a Japanese engineer and director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. A notable development of the laboratory is the Actroid, a humanoid robot with lifelike appearance and visible behaviour such as facial movements.
Anna MacGillivray Macleod was a Scottish biochemist and academic, an authority on brewing and distilling. She was a professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She was the world's first female Professor of Brewing and Biochemistry.
Christina Cruikshank Miller FRSE was a Scottish chemist and one of the first five women elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Christina Miller was deaf from childhood and also lost the sight of one eye in a laboratory explosion in 1930. The Christina Miller Building within Edinburgh University's Kings Buildings is named in her honour, as is Christina Miller Hall at Heriot-Watt University.
Sir Godfrey Henry Oliver Palmer OBE is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a human rights activist.
Lillian Mary Pickford was a pioneering British neuroendocrinologist. She was the first woman to be elected to the Pharmacological Society and the first woman appointed to a medical professorship at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Paul William Jowitt is a British civil engineer, Professor of Civil Engineering Systems at Heriot Watt University, and executive director of the Scottish Institute of Sustainable Technology. On 3 November 2009, he became the 145th President of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to technology. He is currently President of the Commonwealth Engineers Council. He was elected in 2012 as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Sir Harry Work Melville, was a British chemist, academic, and academic administrator, who specialised in polymer research. He spent his early career in academia as a lecturer and researcher, before moving into administration as a civil servant and university college head.
Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and a judge on the BBC2 show Robot Wars. He is the Programme co-Director for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with the responsibility for defining and driving the institute's Robotics and Autonomous Systems agenda. He co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics in 2015 and was instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where is it a focus of research at the School of Informatics. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.
Maja Pantić is a Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London and an AI Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London. She was previously Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing University of Twente and Research Director of the Samsung AI lab in Cambridge, UK. She is an expert in machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection and tracking of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals and affective states.
Anne Neville was the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in emerging technologies and Professor of Tribology and Surface Engineering at the University of Leeds.
Mary-Anne Williams FTSE is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia (UNSW) based in the UNSW Business School.
Raffaella Ocone is Professor of Chemical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2006 she was awarded the title Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and in the 2019 New Year Honours she was appointed OBE.
Verena Rieser is a German computer scientist specialising in natural-language generation, including conversational modelling as well as studies of how gender cues in synthetic language can trigger biases in the people who interact with them. She is a professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she directs the Natural Language Processing Laboratory.
Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, is a conceptual general-purpose robotic humanoid under development by Tesla, Inc. It was announced at the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day event on August 19, 2021. CEO Elon Musk claimed during the event that Tesla would likely build a prototype by 2022. Musk is on record having said that he thinks Optimus "has the potential to be more significant than [Tesla's] vehicle business over time."
Fiona McNeill is a Reader in Computer Science Education at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She is co-chair of the British Computer Society's Scottish Computing Education Committee and represents the BCS in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Learned Societies’ Group.
Dr Frauke Zeller is a professor of HCI & Creative Informatics at Edinburgh Napier, co-creator of the first hitchhiking robot.
