Paul A. Crook

Paul A. Crook, Research Scientist, Meta (Reality Labs).

You have reached my Heriot Watt University home page, where I was a Research Fellow until 2012, based in the Interaction Lab.

I'm interested in the application of statistical Machine Learning (ML) techniques, especially (but not exclusively) Reinforcement Learning. I focusing on the application of ML to dialogue/interaction management for spoken dialogue and multi-modal interaction systems.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Edinburgh looking into the effectiveness of adding active perception as an aid to a mobile robot learning a partially observable navigation task. My current work continues the theme of learning to select actions with uncertain observations. It involves learning optimal policies for multi-modal spoken dialogue systems. An application where the information about real world users' actions and utterances is always uncertain.

Heriot-Watt students looking for details of my proposed projects please have a look at the Honours and MSc Projects page.