Verena Rieser facts for kids

Verena Rieser is a brilliant computer scientist from Germany, born in 1979. She is an expert in teaching computers to talk and understand human language. This field is called natural-language processing. She helps create computer programs that can have conversations with people. She also studies how the way a computer talks might accidentally show biases, like those related to gender.

Professor Rieser works as a professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. There, she leads a special lab. This lab focuses on making computers better at understanding and using human language.

Her Journey in Science

Verena Rieser started her university studies learning about books and stories. But she soon found her true passion in language itself. She switched to studying linguistics, which is the science of language.

University Studies

• In 2003, she earned her first master's degree. This was from the University of Regensburg in Germany. She studied how language is used and how information works.
• She then moved to Scotland. In 2005, she earned a second master's degree. This was in computer science from the University of Edinburgh.
• She continued her studies and earned her Ph.D. in 2008. This was in computational linguistics from Saarland University in Germany. This field combines computers and language.

Becoming a Professor

After finishing her studies, Verena Rieser returned to the University of Edinburgh to do more research. In 2011, she became an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University. Her hard work paid off! By 2017, she was promoted to a full Professor of Artificial Intelligence.

Starting a Company

In 2020, Professor Rieser helped start a company called ALANA AI. This company uses her knowledge to create smart computer programs. She works there part-time, continuing her amazing work in artificial intelligence.

Her Book

Verena Rieser also wrote a book with another scientist, Oliver Lemon. The book is called Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems: A Data-driven Methodology for Dialogue Management and Natural Language Generation. It was published in 2011.

This book is about how to make computer systems that can learn to have better conversations. It helps computers understand what people say and respond in a helpful way. It's like teaching a computer to be a good conversational partner!