Teaching

I teach at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

Student Projects (UG and PGT level)

My projects typically focus on HCI and therefore involve people, but in these times your project should be practical while following social distancing guidelines. Typical activities in a human-centred computing project include

  • Requirements gathering through interviews or ethnography, to inform your design,
  • Testing your design with users, for example through trialling your prototype with users,
  • Evaluation of your design through analysis of system use or user feedback.

 

Cat Royale 

Cat Royale is an artist-led experience designed to critically reflect on the role of Artificial Intelligence in our lives, described here. The project involves a robotic arm to engage cats in play, and computer vision to track the movement of cats, and classify their behaviour and “happiness”. 

If you are interested in robotics and computer vision this project could be of interest to you. In your work you could design, develop and test robotic and computer vision components that could be used in the project. 

 

The Carbon Budget

The UK government has set the target for the country to achieve “Net Zero” carbon emissions by 2050 to tackle the climate crisis. To reach this goal, we may need some radical and disruptive interventions. The idea of the Carbon Budget is simple: every person has a carbon budget that they can spend each month.

In this project you will design, develop and test an App that lets people manage their carbon budget, called the Carbon Budget Wallet. The Carbon Budget Wallet (CBW) should have a user friendly interface (web and mobile) for people to enter the carbon-emitting activities undertaken and products purchased/consumed. The app will then calculate the impact on the budget and update the budget on the basis of the items entered. The app could also have smart features such as forecasting and advice, predicting when the monthly budget will be depleted, and provide advice on which products and activities have a lower carbon footprint. The app could make use of information visualisation to allow users to monitor and inspect their budget ‘transactions’ that allows them to examine the impact of their consumer choices over time.

Note this project is linked to an ongoing 2nd year group software development project, and should build on and extend what the group has built. 

 

Chatty Car –  voice interaction for autonomous vehicles. 

In this project you will create a voice interaction prototype to allow in-car interaction with the autopilot of an (semi-) autonomous vehicle. The prototype is envisioned to provide ‘explainable AI’, and go beyond current in car voice control of in-car entertainment and navigation. For instance the prototype should allow the in-car occupants to query decisions of the autopilot. This is a human-centred design project, not a pure software engineering project. Thus it will involve working with ‘users’, for instance to develop design requirements and to evaluate the system in use.

The project will relate to the national centre UKRI-funded Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (tas.ac.uk), which involves multidisciplinary research from Engineering (esp. Human Factors), Computer Science (e.g., HCI), Social Sciences and Law.

Interested MSc students should study CS, CS(AI) or HCI and have an interest in Human-Computer Interaction and some experience in voice/chatbot design and development. An interest in ‘explainable AI’ and participating in the Human-AI interaction module is a bonus.

 

Voice UX

Voice user interfaces (VUI) are becoming a pervasive feature on mobile devices, in cars, and in standalone “smart speakers”, yet, the user experience (UX) of these is often lacking.  Potential project can focus on design and evaluation, or on studying and critiquing Voice UX. This may draw on existing platforms such as Google Speech API, Amazon Alexa Skills, etc. Projects may focus on

  • User-centred design and evaluation of a VUI of your choice,
  • Study a pre-existing VUI and critique it in depth, with “implications for design”,
  • Explore how to support Voice UX designers’ practices.

 

Social media sentiment analysis 

How trustworthy are autonomous systems such as robots, driverless cars, and contact-tracing apps? This project involves making use of NLP (Natural Language Processing) to analyse `sentiment’ of publicly available statements by the news media and the general public, such as from Twitter or Facebook. Such a project involves,

  • obtaining a data set that includes relevant data for your topic;
  • pre-processing of the data, such as to ‘clean’ the data;
  • develop appropriate (context/domain-specific) classification model for the data (e.g., feature selection);
  • analyse the sentiment of the data following machine learning-based techniques.

 

Modules

Human-AI Interaction (COMP3074).

I am convening this Level 3, 20 credit module every autumn, starting in 2020/21. It is also open to MSc students in the School of Computer Science with a background in Programming. 

Previous teaching

I have previously convened Design Ethnography in 2019/20, 2018/19, 2017/18, in 2016 (spring and autumn), and and together with Andy Crabtree in the spring semester 2015.

I have also co-convened Understanding Users in Computer Science (G54MET) together with Andy Crabtree in the fall semester 2014.

 

PhD Supervision

I’m currently co-supervising Xin Liew, Daniel Heaton, Kathryn Baguley, Andriana Boudouraki, Teresa Castle-Green, Gisela Reyes Cruz, and Elaine Venancio Santos.

Past students include:

Gustavo Berumen (graduated in 2022). 

Tommy Nilsson (graduated in 2020). 

Martin Porcheron  (graduated in 2019).

Huseyin Avsar (graduated in 2017).

Wenchao Jiang (graduated in 2016).

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