EPSRC Doctoral Award Fellowship

I’m really very pleased to be able to say that I have been awarded a 2013 EPSRC doctoral award fellowship. This means I’ve been given an opportunity to spend 12 months from October this year working independently on a research project of my own choosing. I’ll be looking at the connection between places and personality, analysing the large dataset collected through the Foursquare Personality app to try and build towards a recommendation system for places that uses personality as one of its key input signals.

I think this is a really interesting research project, and I’m hoping for some good results. The basic question I’m asking is: if we know where someone has been (i.e. from their Foursquare history) then can we predict what their personality is? If we can do that, then maybe we can do the reverse, and from someone’s personality, infer where they might like to go. This could lead to a shift in the way that place recommendation systems are built, utilising not just the knowledge of where someone has been, but also why someone has been there.

This is a great opportunity -  while it has been really good to work on the last two EU projects I’ve been involved in, the overheads (especially the deliverables) have sometimes been a distraction and have sometimes gotten in the way of the research. With this project I’ll be able to plough on with the research without having to worry about those kinds of administrative overheads. It’s also a great stepping stone on my academic career path, and should give me the opportunity to generate some high quality outputs that will help with moving on to the next stage.