Dr Theodora Koulouri
Senior Lecturer

Research area(s)

Dr Koulouri’s research focuses on human-centred AI (developing intelligent systems that are both usable and transparent to their users), with a special interest in conversational AI, and it has been published in leading journals and conferences in the field. 

She has served as the Principal Investigator in three Innovate UK research projects, and CI in a KTP:

• Principal Investigator. "Regulatory compliant LLMs for customer service in banking, financial services and insurance". April 2024 - September 2025. Total: £577,032: this project will create a self-hosted LLM capability for customer service automation, enabling BFSI companies of any size to adopt this powerful technology in a secure and compliant way. 
• Principal Investigator. Innovate UK Smart Grant, “Algomo_2.0: Scaling conversational AI to 100+ languages”. February 2022 - July 2023. Total: £489,036: this project developed a truly multilingual conversational AI that can support over a hundred underrepresented languages.
• Principal Investigator. Innovate UK Smart Grant, “Tagomo: an AI-assisted text exploration and labelling platform”. July 2021 - June 2022. Total: £257,082: this project delivered an ML-powered, ‘human-in-the-loop’ text data exploration tool. 
• Co-Investigator. Knowledge Transfer Partnership, "Hygienic, usable, engaging public mid-air interactions" (see Research Projects below).

In addition, she has:

• worked with #techmums for the impact evaluation of their programmes
• held a parliamentary academic fellowship in the Research and Information Team of the House of Commons, leading a UX project to improve the services for MPs
• worked in a project, with Transport for London, which aimed to develop an AI-based traffic control system following a user-centred approach.

Research Interests

• Human-centred AI
• Conversational AI
• UX, usability and human factors
• Collaborative systems