Verena Rieser is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, where she is affiliated with the Interaction Lab and the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Verena holds a PhD from Saarland University (2008) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh (2008-11). Her research focuses on statistical learning techniques for conversational AI, i.e. spoken dialogue systems and language generation. She is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received several awards for her research. She has served the research community in a number of leadership roles, as well as scientific advisor to government and public agencies. For the past two years, Verena and her group have been the only UK team to reach the final of the Amazon Alexa Prize.