• Baxter Research Robot at the University of Edinburgh

About

  • I am currently a Research Engineer at Alana AI developing visual dialogue applications for blind and partially sighted users. Previously, I was a Research Associate at Heriot-Watt University between December 2018 and September 2021. During that time, I first worked on the EPSRC funded project SoCoRo and then, on the Horizon 2020 project SPRING.
  • I hold a PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems jointly awarded by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. I carried out my doctoral studies at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, part of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. My research topic was on lifelong object learning for domestic robots. Previously, I was awarded an Electronics Engineering degree by the National University of Rosario (Argentina), and an Erasmus Mundus Master in Vision and Robotics (VIBOT) jointly awarded by the University of Burgundy (France), the University of Girona (Spain) and Heriot-Watt University (UK). My Master thesis was on visual servoing for collaborative tasks with a humanoid robot and it was carried out in the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour (IPAB) at the University of Edinburgh. I also hold a Master in Robotics and Autonomous Systems awarded as part of my doctoral training.

Publications

Journals

  • G. I. Parisi, R. Kemker, J. L. Part, C. Kanan and S. Wermter, Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review, in Neural Networks, 2019. [doi] [bib]

Conferences

  • N. Gunson, D. Hernández García, J. L. Part, Y. Yu, W. Sieińska, C. Dondrup and O. Lemon, Combining Visual and Social Dialogue for Human-Robot Interaction (Demo Submission), in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), Montreal, Canada, October 2021. [doi] [bib]
  • N. Gunson, W. Sieińska, Y. Yu, D. Hernández García, J. L. Part, C. Dondrup and O. Lemon, Coronabot: A Conversational AI System for Tackling Misinformation, in Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT), Rome, Italy, September 2021. [doi] [bib]
  • J. L. Part, D. Hernández García, Y. Yu, N. Gunson, C. Dondrup and O. Lemon, Towards Visual Dialogue for Human-Robot Interaction (Video Submission), in Companion Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Boulder, CO, USA, March 2021. [doi] [bib] [video]
  • P. E. McKenna, I. Keller, J. L. Part, M. Y. Lim, R. Aylett, F. Broz and G. Rajendran, "Sorry to Disturb You": Autism and Robot Interruptions (LBR Extended Abstract), in Companion Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Cambridge, UK, March 2020. [doi] [bib] [video]
  • J. L. Part and O. Lemon, Towards a Robot Architecture for Situated Lifelong Object Learning, in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, November 2019. [doi] [pdf] [bib] [video]
  • A. Vanzo, J. L. Part, Y. Yu, D. Nardi and O. Lemon, Incrementally Learning Semantic Attributes through Dialogue Interaction, in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Stockholm, Sweden, July 2018. [pdf] [bib]
  • J. L. Part and O. Lemon, Incremental Online Learning of Objects for Robots Operating in Real Environments, in Proceedings of the 7th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EPIROB), Lisbon, Portugal, September 2017. [doi] [pdf] [bib]
  • J. L. Part and O. Lemon, Teaching Robots through Situated Interactive Dialogue and Visual Demonstrations (DC Extended Abstract), in Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Melbourne, Australia, August 2017. [pdf] [bib]

Workshops

  • D. Hernández García, Y. Yu, W. Sieińska, J. L. Part, N. Gunson, O. Lemon and C. Dondrup, Explainable Representations of the Social State: A Model for Social Human-Robot Interactions, in AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human Robot Interaction (AI-HRI), Washington, DC, USA, November 2020. [pdf] [bib]
  • P. McKenna, F. Broz, I. Keller, J. L. Part, G. Rajendran and R. Aylett, Towards Robot-Assisted Social Skills Training for Adults with ASC, in Workshop on the Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Glasgow, UK, May 2019. [pdf] [bib]
  • I. Papaioannou, A. Cercas Curry, J. L. Part, I. Shalyminov, X. Xu, Y. Yu, O. Dušek, V. Rieser and O. Lemon, An Ensemble Model with Ranking for Social Dialogue, in Workshop on Conversational AI at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Long Beach, CA, USA, December 2017. [pdf] [bib]
  • J. L. Part and O. Lemon, Incremental On-Line Learning of Object Classes using a Combination of Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Networks and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, in Workshop on Bio-inspired Social Robot Learning in Home Scenarios at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Daejeon, Korea, October 2016. [pdf] [bib]

Others

  • I. Papaioannou, A. Cercas Curry, J. L. Part, I. Shalyminov, X. Xu, Y. Yu, O. Dušek, V. Rieser and O. Lemon, Alana: Social Dialogue using an Ensemble Model and a Ranker trained on User Feedback, in Proceedings of the 1st Alexa Prize, Las Vegas, NV, USA, November 2017. [pdf] [bib]