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About

Emer Gilmartin is a prominent researcher specializing in spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, and multimodal communication. Her work sits at a compelling intersection of computational linguistics, social robotics, and conversational AI, with a particular focus on how humans naturally engage with robotic and artificial interlocutors. Gilmartin's most influential contribution — garnering 57 citations — involved implementing WikiTalk, an open-domain spoken dialogue system, on the Nao humanoid robot, pioneering multimodal conversational capabilities in social robotics. Building on this foundation, her work on the Joker project (36 citations) explored the nuanced role of humor and laughter in human-robot interaction, recognizing these social signals as critical markers of engagement and relationship-building. Her development of the Herme robot at Trinity College Dublin's Speech Communication Lab represents a landmark achievement in naturalistic data collection, capturing nearly 500 real-world interactions with gallery visitors and producing the Herme Database of Spontaneous Multimodal Human-Robot Dialogues — a valuable resource for the research community. Through projects like "Building a Chatty Robot," Gilmartin consistently champions the importance of casual, socially rich conversation in making robots genuinely approachable. Her body of work has meaningfully advanced understanding of how machines can participate authentically in human social life.