Michael McTear (mf.mctear@ulster.ac.uk) is a professor of knowledge engineering at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, where he has been an active researcher in spoken language technologies for more than 15 years. He is author of the book Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward the Conversational User Interface (Springer Verlag, 2004) and has been involved in a number of research projects in spoken dialog technology. In December 2006 he presented an invited tutorial at the IEEE/ ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology in Aruba and in June 2007 he presented an invited tutorial on Spoken Dialogue Systems at the ACL conference in Prague.