Julie Carson-Berndsen is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Speech Technology at the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin (UCD) and a Principal Investigator at the ADAPT SFI Research Centre. She holds a Dr. Phil. from the University of Bielefeld and since 1998 she has led a research group at UCD focussing on phonetic-feature based approaches to speech recognition, expressive speech synthesis and modelling native and non-native speech patterns in interactions with language learners and virtual agents. Julie has been a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College Oxford and a Visiting Professor at the Exzellenzcluster “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” at the University of the Saarland. She became an SFI Investigator in 2002 and was one of the founding Principal Investigators of the SFI-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation, where she led the sub-track on Speech Technology. Julie has provided senior leadership in graduate education for many years as UCD Dean of Graduate Studies and Deputy Registrar, and she is currently the UCD Lead of the SFI Centre for Research Training in Digitally Enhanced Reality.