Nina Dethlefs is a Professor of Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Loughborough University, heading up the new Language and Data research group, and leading recruitment and talent pipeline activities for two EPSRC/NERC funded CDTs in Offshore Wind Energy. Previously to joining Loughborough, she spent almost 10 years at the University of Hull building and leading the wonderful Big Data Analytics Research Group. Nina was a postdoctoral researcher at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, between 2011-14, focusing on incremental dialogue systems (now called conversational AI) on the EU FP7 Parlance project. Nina holds a PhD from the University of Bremen, Germany, (2013) and was lucky enough to be sent on two research visits to Australia during her PhD, to the University of Melbourne in 2009 and Macquarie University in Sydney in 2010.
Research areas
Nina is interested in research and knowledge transfer at the intersection of AI, natural language processing and sustainability. Her research interests lie particularly in data-to-text generation, text mining, (spoken and multimodal) dialogue systems, sentiment analysis and social media analysis. A central theme of her research is how information can be extracted from disparate data sources, including text, images, numeric and machine data, social media etc. and presented in a human-accessible, intuitive way that is reliable, ethical and data efficient. More recently, she has made contributions in applying technologies in NLP and AI to research questions in renewable energy, sustainability, environment and climate resilience. A central question here is how AI systems can help mitigate climate change, and/or inform resilience building.
Nina has led multiple KTP projects in the past, including the creation of a novel smart speaker architecture for residential care with IoT/internet business Connexin; an AI-driven model for stability prediction of chemical formulations with Reckitt; and a natural language platform to increase productivity and automate workflows with Spencer.
Other active collaborations are with the ORE Catapult, Toshiba Research, IBM, Cefas and the Environment Agency.
The EPSRC-NERC CDTs in Offshore Wind Energy and the Environment (CDT I) and Sustainability and Resilience (CDT II) also involve partner engagement.