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, Horia Maior, and Max Wilson and the GAIN (Generative AI at Nottingham) Lab through my interests in large language models, but my primary affiliations are to the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies (CHART) research group and the Mixed Reality Lab. I am also technically associate to the CS Education group due to being in a teaching-focused academic role and the Law and Tech Research Centre through my collaborations with Natalie Leesakul. On top of that, I occasionally collaborate with the School of English on projects related to the use of machine learning to improve health communication and/or the privacy-preserving analysis of language. It’s a lot of different things, but being in a teaching-focused role allows me the opportunity to explore many research interests without having to tie myself down to a specific research agenda.

PhD students

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.

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.
• Xin Yu Liew (2021 – 2025) – A Human-Centred Approach to Social Media Analysis for Decision Making.

If you want to work with me

I am open to supervising PhD students, but you should be warned that there is little internal funding available (it changes every year but you can find it on UoN’s studentship page) for home students and basically no funding at all for international students, so you should either have your own funding (e.g., government funding) or come with a plan to get external funding (some funding bodies provide PhD studentships).