About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham. This site serves as a point of contact to find me.

Throughout my admittedly short career I have had the chance to work in several teams and interact with people of many backgrounds: software engineers, computer scientists, petroleum geologists, education researchers, linguists, and many I am forgetting. This has given me a strong taste for interdisciplinary, collaborative research. If you share this taste and are looking for a collaboration, feel free to get in touch with me.

Research

My scientific interests revolve around applied interdisciplinary research involving machine learning. I am particularly interested and open to collaborative work in the following topics: interpretable machine learningdigital humanities (argument mining, social media mining, disinformation detection), and digital health (physiological data, mental health).

I am part in the Brain Data Group through joint work with Johann Benerradi, but my primary affiliation is to the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies (CHART) research group and the Mixed Reality Lab.

I am currently co-supervising the following PhD students:

  • Dan Heaton (2020 start) – hybrid qualitative/quantitative approaches to investigate public discourse around automated decision-making algorithms.
  • Giovanni Schiazza (2020 start) – the design of an ethical tool for the study on online political internet memes.
  • Xin Yu Liew (2021 start) – human-in-the-loop approaches to misinformation detection in social media.
  • Jialin Chen (2022 start) – digital twins for human-assistive robotics.

My previous PhD students:

  • Johann Benerradi (2019 – 2024) – machine learning and fNIRS data for mental workload classification.

About letters of recommendation

I have a bad case of referral fatigue so I will look for any excuse to avoid writing them. Here are a few tips you can use to trick me into writing them:

  • Politely ask for them. If I receive a request from a university about an application I never heard about before, I will ignore it and you will look bad.
  • Don’t ask for too many of them. I take pride in my work, whether it is teaching or research, so letters of recommendation take time. Show me that you respect my time by asking for a couple of references instead of bombarding my name on a dozen of them.
  • Make sure that I know you. Me teaching a module is not enough, even if you got a good grade (a good grade is not indicative that you will be fit for a Masters or a PhD). Sending me your previous transcripts from high school is also not very convincing.
  • Show me that you know me. If you are asking me to write a reference letter for an engineering school, I will know that you have not even spent a minute researching what I do and what I am qualified to comment on. If you can’t do that little amount of research, how can I recommend you for something as significant as a postgraduate degree?