Verena Rieser

Verena Rieser [ˈveːʁena ˈʁiːzɐ] is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she founded the VOICES (Voices-of-all in alignment) team within the GenAI Unit. Her team’s interdisciplinary approach focuses on enhancing the safety and usability of frontier models for diverse communities. With over two decades of experience, Verena’s work has significantly shaped data-driven multimodal Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation. Her research spans conversational RL agents, faithful data-to-text generation, spoken language understanding, evaluation methodologies, and applications of AI for societal good. Verena earned her PhD from Saarland University (2008), and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh. She is an honorary professor at Heriot-Watt University (where she previously held a full professorship and directed the NLP lab), has served as Director for Ethics at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, and held a Royal Society Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.