I’m currently very interested in the understanding of educational methods (including the use of innovative teaching and assessment) particularly within STEM subjects, but also at the cross-disciplinary boundary. A focus of my current research is in the area of Computational and Data Journalism, including studying Data Journalism and Computer Science education.
I like doing research wherever computer science, IT systems and devices brush up against the real world, as things are far more interesting when people are involved. My research and scholarship is therefore cross-disciplinary. I’m very keen on investigating the use of computer science, social media, and data science and artificial intelligence within Journalism, as both a tool for improving communication and storytelling, and as an input and tool for data gathering, story creation and newsroom workflows. I have a background in high performance computing.
PhD Supervision
I am available to supervise PhD projects. At the current time I am most interested in supervising projects related to Computer Science education itself or that focus on the use of Computer Science within education. For more information on PhD projects within the School, including applying and funding, please see the School of Computer Science and Informatics Postgraduate research page.
Current PhD Students
Matthew Moloughney
Matthew is looking at the application of Automated Assessment Tools within Computer Science education, focusing on the use of such tools for providing feedback to and soliciting feedback from novice programmers at the early stages of their studies.
Past PhD Students
Nyala Noë
I was co-supervisor for Nyala Noë (mostly during the early stages of her PhD). She completed her thesis “Personality homophily and social-spatial characteristics in online social networks” in 2018.
Reviewing and Committees
I have served as reviewer and on committees for many journals and conferences.
Journals
I’m guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction: “Following User Pathways”.
I have reviewed for the following journals:
- Journal of Educational Computing Research
- Digital Journalism
- International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
- ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
- WWW
- Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
- Computer Communications
- Computer Physics Communications
- Journal of Computational Science
- International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
- ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Conference/Workshop Committees
I have served on various committees for conferences and workshops:
- I’m co-organiser of the European Data and Computational Journalism Conference, held in Dublin in 2017, Cardiff in 2018, Malaga in 2019 and Zurich in 2023.
- I was a member of the Organising Committee for the “Following User Pathways: Cross Platform and Mixed Methods Analysis in Social Media Studies” workshop, held at CHI 2016
- I’ve reviewed for WJEC 2019
- I’ve reviewed for CSCW 2016
- I’ve served on the Technical Program Committee for some conferences and workshops:
- Work In Progress section of CHI 2014 & CHI 2015
- Workshop on “Social Media World Sensors” (SIDEWAYS) at the International Conference on HyperText and Social Media (HT) 2015 & 2016
- Workshop on “Healthy and Secure People” (HSP) at the International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies (HCist) 2015 - 2018
- Publicity Chair for Social Computing and its Applications 2013
- Publicity Chair for Cloud and Green Computing 2013
- Co-Organiser and Technical Program Committee for Collective Social Awareness and Relevance workshop 2013
PhD Examining
Internal examining
- Lowri Williams - “Pushing the Envelope of Sentiment Analysis Beyond Words and Polarities” (2017). Supervised by Professor Irena Spasi ́c
- Ibrahim Al Kharusi - “Locality Data Properties of 3D Data Orderings with Application toParallel Molecular Dynamics Simulations” (2019). Supervised by Professor David Walker
Past Research
I was recently working on the Co-Growth project, looking at analysing, enabling and facilitating greater cooperation between breweries within Wales.
Other recent research has looked at issues of communication within and outside of the Journalism community. I have also been examining what social media can tell us about alcohol consumption.
Before I began work as a Lecturer I was working on a 12 month EPSRC Fellowship (2013 Doctoral Award Prize) examining the relationship between an individual’s personality (in terms of the OCEAN five-factor personality model) and the places they visit or check in to. This work has been published
Prior to my fellowship, I was working on the Recognition project, an EU FP7 project attempting to use relevance and human cognitive processes within IT systems to improve content dissemination and filtering. The work included areas such as how human decision making processes relate to twitter and micro-blogging, and examining the relationship between spatial places/venues and people in terms of both their personality and the expression they use towards the places they’ve been.
Before the Recognition project, I spent a year and a half working on the SocialNets project, another EU FP7 project concerning pervasive adaptation looking to improve mobile and ad-hoc systems using social network information and adaptive strategies.