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 led and participated in several Innovate UK research projects:

• Consultant. "Privacy-preserving LLMs for customer service applications". December 2024 - November 2026. Total: £596,140. Partnering with a german cybersecurity company and a UK AI startup, this project will deliver privacy-preserving LLMs for secure customer service automation, particularly targeting regulated industries.
• Principal Investigator. "Responsible AI Candidate Screening for the Air transport Sector". September 2024 - December 2024. Total: £48,951: this project will deliver an AI recruitment solution for the Aviation industry that mitigates bias.
• 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".

In addition, she has:

• BPACHS Innovation Grant. Start Date: May 2024. End Date: July 2024. Total: £3,000. This small grant funded the development of an LLM-based chatbot prototype that uses internal and external knowledge to support auditing tasks in the healthcare and social care industry.
• 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