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I am a Research Fellow in the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. Before this, I worked in the Robotics and Embedded Systems Group at the Technical University of Munich and in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
My primary research interest is embodied communication. In particular, I am interested in designing, implementing, and evaluating practical systems supporting embodied interaction with human users, such as embodied conversational agents and multimodal and human-robot dialogue systems.
I am currently working on the ECHOES II project (EPSRC/ESRC TEL; 2009-present), which has the goal of developing a technology-enhanced learning environment in which both typically developing children and children with Asperger's Syndrome can explore and improve social interaction and collaboration skills.
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I previously worked on two EU-funded projects: on the JAST project (2006-2009), which investigated the cognitive, neural, and communicative aspects of joint action, I coordinated the development and evaluation of a human-robot dialogue system; on the COMIC project (2002-2005), I worked on the output-generation and user-modelling components of an embodied multimodal dialogue system.
Selected recent publications
- Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, and Alois Knoll. Comparing Objective and Subjective Measures of Usability in a Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore, August 2009. acl:P09-1099 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Evaluating Description and Reference Strategies in a Cooperative Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of IJCAI-09, Pasadena, California, July 2009. http://ijcai.org/papers09/Papers/IJCAI09-302.pdf [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster. Automated metrics that agree with human judgements on generated output for an embodied conversational agent. In Proceedings of INLG 2008, Salt Fork, Ohio, June 2008. acl:W08-1113 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Corpus-based generation of head and eyebrow motion for an embodied conversational agent. Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 41, Numbers 3--4, pages 305--323, December 2007. doi:10.1007/s10579-007-9055-3. [ Bib | Pdf (unofficial preprint) ]
Please see my full list of publications for more details.
Personal
Anyone wanting to stalk me can probably find out all they need from my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and my blog, so I don't think I need to write much more here. For now, I'll just include a list of links to other interesting pages on the net, along with some older pages that I created a while ago and keep around for sentimental interest.
People
- Dad
- Ron Petrick, my husband, currently working as a Research Fellow on the Paco-Plus project at the University of Edinburgh. Check out our wedding website!
Pastimes
- I enjoy running, cycling, and swimming, and triathlon.
- I maintain several packages in the Fedora Linux distribution.
- I currently sing with the Edinburgh Bach Choir
- I was the captain of the Edinburgh team on the 2001-2002 series. of University Challenge.

