After working at AT&T Research Labs and Lockheed Martin in the USA, she returned to the UK in 2007 and took a post at Heriot-Watt. Helen's research interests lie in the areas of statistical dialogue systems, natural language generation, evaluation and HRI and she has 80 peer-reviewed publications and 2 patents in these areas. She was previously the co-ordinator for the EC FP7 project Parlance on data-driven spoken dialogue systems for interactive search and is currently working on projects funded by the UK Ministry of Defence.