Maria Aretoulaki is a Speech and Language technologies Consultant with a Post-Doc in Spoken Dialogue Management, a PhD in Automatic Text Summarisation, an M.Sc. in Machine Translation, and a B.A. in Linguistics. Maria is the founder and Director of DialogCONNECTION Ltd, a Voice User Interface (VUI) Design consultancy based in Manchester (UK) and specialises in user-centred and adaptive strategies for mixed-initiative dialogues focusing on spontaneous speech, but also persona design, usability testing and application tuning. In addition, Maria represents the US-based IVR Design Group (IDG) in Europe as an Associate, catering for application development for the English, German, Greek and French languages. Maria has worked for more than 20 organisations across 15 verticals in 6 countries, including Intervoice / Convergys, CapGemini, Barclays, the UK National Health Service and Vodafone. She has been working on multilingual and intuitive voice-to-text and speech self-service applications since 1996 and has been active in the language technology field for 20 years. Maria has acted as a Senior VUI designer in Pre-Sales and Professional Services teams of several players in the Speech Industry; as a Speech Technology Research Fellow and Technology Advisor for Investment Management firms; as a Trainer, Project Manager, and Product Development Team Leader, mentoring people of several different ethnic and expertise backgrounds. Maria has (co)authored several publications, including the Chapter on Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Oxford University Press "Handbook of Computational Linguistics". She has also served in several Advisory Committees of research projects, international conferences and scientific journals; and has been contributing to SpeechTEK with presentations on VUI Design issues. Originally from Greece, Maria has spent the last 18 years between the UK and Germany, and speaks 4 languages fluently.