Graham Wilcock

About

Graham Wilcock is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, spoken dialogue systems, and conversational AI, whose work has fundamentally shaped how we think about natural communication between humans and social robots. He is perhaps best known for developing and implementing WikiTalk, an innovative open-domain spoken dialogue system that enables robots to engage in fluid, information-rich conversations drawing directly from Wikipedia content — a contribution that has proven remarkably durable across nearly a decade of his research. Wilcock's highly cited work, including his influential 2012 and 2013 papers on multimodal conversational interaction with the Nao humanoid robot (each attracting over 50 citations), demonstrated how robots could move beyond scripted exchanges through the integration of speech, gesture, gaze, and non-verbal cues. His subsequent research expanded WikiTalk's capabilities into multiple languages, enabling robots to dynamically switch linguistic registers to accommodate different users. More recently, his 2022 work on conversational AI and knowledge graphs signals an ambitious forward-looking agenda, bridging social robotics with modern graph-based data systems. Collectively, Wilcock's contributions have established essential frameworks for evaluating and improving authentic, multimodal human-robot dialogue across diverse real-world contexts.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Investigating the use of Non-verbal Cues in Human-Robot Interaction with a Nao robot

   57 citations · 2012
2. 2
   Multimodal conversational interaction with a humanoid robot

   57 citations · 2012
3. 3
   Multimodal Open-Domain Conversations with the Nao Robot

   54 citations · 2013
4. 4
   Integration of gestures and speech in human-robot interaction

   53 citations · 2012
5. 5
   Dialogues with Social Robots

   53 citations · 2016
6. 6
   Conversational AI and Knowledge Graphs for Social Robot Interaction

   27 citations · 2022
7. 7
   Constructive Interaction for Talking about Interesting Topics

   25 citations · 2012
8. 8
   Expectations and First Experience with a Social Robot

   20 citations · 2017
9. 9
   Evaluation of WikiTalk – User Studies of Human-Robot Interaction

   17 citations · 2013
10. 10
    Multilingual WikiTalk: Wikipedia-based talking robots that switch languages.

    13 citations · 2015

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links