Research

My research interests revolve around applied interdisciplinary research involving machine learning. I am particularly interested and open to collaborative work in the following topics: human-centred AI, interpretable machine learning, digital 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 and the GAIN (Generative AI at Nottingham) Lab through my own interests, 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:

• Pou Man (Leonie) Leong – A Corpus-Based Investigation of English Tenses and Temporal Meaning in American English: An Approach and Its Implications for Pedagogical Grammar and Language Teaching.
• Giovanni Schiazza – Designing an Ethical Tool for the Study of Online Political Internet Memes.
• Jialin Chen – Digital Twins for Human-Assistive Robotics.
• Xin Yu Liew – A Human-Centred Approach to Social Media Analysis for Decision Making.

My previous PhD students:

• Johann Benerradi (2019 – 2024) – machine learning and fNIRS data for mental workload classification.
• Dan Heaton (2020 – 2024) – hybrid qualitative/quantitative approaches to investigate public discourse around automated decision-making algorithms.

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?