Verena Rieser

Timeline

1. 2003–2008

   Linguistics to a Saarland PhD

   She begins university in literature, switches to linguistics, and earns a master's degree in applied linguistics and information science at the University of Regensburg in 2003. After a computational linguistics summer school, she takes a second master's in informatics at the University of Edinburgh in 2005, supervised by Johanna Moore, and completes a PhD in computational linguistics at Saarland University in 2008.

2. 2011

   Joining Heriot-Watt University

   In 2011 she joins Heriot-Watt University as an assistant professor, after a postdoctoral post at the University of Edinburgh. With Oliver Lemon, she co-authors the Springer book Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems in 2011, on data-driven dialogue management and natural language generation.

3. 2017

   Alana in the Alexa Prize finals

   In 2017 she is promoted to Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Heriot-Watt University. As co-lead of the What's Up Bot team with Oliver Lemon, she helps the Alana system finish third in Amazon's Alexa Prize in 2017, the only UK university in the final three. The team reaches the finals two years in a row.

4. 2020

   Co-founding ALANA AI

   She co-founds the company ALANA AI in 2020 and works for it part-time, alongside her professorship at Heriot-Watt.

5. By 2021

   A Royal Society fellowship

   By 2021 she holds a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, awarded for her work on multimodal conversational systems.

6. April 2023

   Joining Google DeepMind

   In April 2023 she joins Google DeepMind, where she leads interdisciplinary research on integrating diverse viewpoints into large language models to improve their safety and alignment. She arrives after serving as a full professor at Heriot-Watt from 2017, where she directed the NLP lab.

7. 2025

   ACL keynote on pluralistic alignment

   In July 2025 she gives an ACL keynote, "Whose Gold? Re-imagining Alignment for Truly Beneficial AI", as a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. She founded VOICES (Voices-of-all in alignment), a Google DeepMind team that is a core contributor to Gemini and works to make models safer and more usable for diverse communities.

8. As of October 2026

   Research Lead at DeepMind

   She is a Research Lead at Google DeepMind, where she directs research on responsible alignment for frontier models. In July 2026 she gives an invited talk at ICML, "From Behavioural Guardrails to Principled Agency", on how agents can make safe autonomous decisions in complex environments. She is also an honorary professor at Heriot-Watt University.