Dr Aylett is currently teaching the Conversational Agents course from January at Heriot-Watt with Oliver Lemon and Gavin Abercrombie. It’s a great course very close to my research interests. It is project based so students get a chance to build and evaluate some conversational systems using state-of-the-art components.
The course aims to give students the opportunity to develop:
-
An extensive, detailed and critical knowledge of design, implementation and evaluation techniques for conversational agents and spoken language processing.
-
An awareness of current research and emerging issues in the field of conversational agents and spoken language processing.
-
A range of interdisciplinary research methods and specialised practical skills involved in building working conversational interfaces.
This course covers current and emerging topics in conversational agents, spoken language processing, and multimodal interfaces, including:
-
Introduction to research areas, such as spoken dialogue systems, multi-modal interaction, natural language processing, and human-robot interaction (HRI).
-
Spoken input processing and interpretation.
-
Interaction Management.
-
Output generation, multimodal fission, speech and gesture synthesis
-
System development and evaluation.