Helen Hastie

Helen Hastie is the Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction and Multimodal interfaces. Hastie has undertaken projects such as AI personal assistants for remote robots, autonomous systems and spoken dialogue systems for sectors in defence and energy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Education In 1995, Hastie graduated with a M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. Following this in 1996 she graduated with MS in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Career In 1997, Hastie joined the University of Edinburgh as a research associate and tutor in which she taught modules such as Interaction Design, Web Design and Databases and Research Methods.

In May 2023, she was appointed as the new Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh, taking over from Professor Jane Hillston in August of that same year.

Media representation In July 2022, Hastie gave an interview to The Scotsman on the topic of human and robot relationships. Hastie discusses the challenges that comes with creating an emotionally intelligent machine that can build relationships and trust between the machine with there users. Hastie discusses the different scientific fields needed to build such relationships including, robotics, cognitive science, and psychology and how these fields are used to build a cognitive AI model.

During October 2022, Hastie was interviewed by the BBC on the topic of humanoid robots, specifically Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus. During the interview, Hastie noted that the work required for humanoid locomotion alone is difficult compared to wheels or quadruped locomotion. Additionally she stated that creating a humanoid robot can be detrimental and off putting to the users themselves. However, in response to the criticisms of the Optimus, she stated that the most important thing is that it is built for the use cases they will be required for.

Awards and recognition In 2022, RO-MAN named Hastie's paper "We are all Individuals: The Role of Robot Personality and Human Traits in Trustworthy Interaction" KROS Interdisciplinary Research Award in Social Human-Robot Interaction. In 2022 Hastie was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.