Research Interests
Intelligent User Interfaces, Personalization, Persuasive Technology, Recommender Systems, Evaluation of Adaptive Systems, e-Health, Sustainable Transport, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Affective Computing
Current Research
Personalization and Group Adaptation. My broad area of research is personalization (how to tailor information to users and their context). In particular, my research on adapting to groups has had a great impact. On this topic, I have recently collaborated with Amra Delic and Francesco Barile, looking at the influence of group relations.
Adaptive E-Learning and Emotional Support. My PhD was on an artificial domain-independent teacher, which adapts its teaching to individual learners. More recently, we have investigated how to adapt performance feedback and emotional support (Matt Dennis PhD, Muhammad Adamu PhD), exercise selection (Juliet Okpo PhD), and learning material recommendation (Manal Alhathli PhD) to learners' performance, effort, cognitive style, personality, and cultural background. We also investigated the adaptation of emotional support in other settings (such as carers and community first responders; Kirsten Smith PhD, Peter Kindness PhD). We are also investigating adaptation for collaborative learning (group formation, Chinasa Odo PhD, and group monitoring and feedback, Adetunji Adeniran PhD).
Digital Behaviour Intervention, Persuasion and Trust. An application domain of my research is digital behaviour intervention: using technology to motivate and persuade people to change their attitudes and behaviors (e.g. live more healthily and sustainably). I am investigating how to optimize this persuasiveness. For example, I am investigating how to motivate users to walk more (Hien Nguyen PhD, Virtual Health Trainer project), to study more (Matt Dennis PhD), and to use transport more sustainably (EU projects Sustainable and Persuasive Human Users Mobility in future cities project – SUPERHUB and MyWay). My Virtual Health Trainer project with a Diabetes clinician has adapted our existing walking coach for Diabetes patients and subsequently performed a clinical trial. My research in the Technology to support Older adult Personal and Social interaction (TOPS) project (Gillian Dowds and JP Vargheese PhDs) and the Using digital technologies to prompt and support self care for melanoma patients: Achieving Self-directed Integrated Cancer Aftercare in rural areas (ASICA) project is also related: motivating elderly people with chronic pain to have social interactions and motivating patients to self-monitor for skin cancer. I have co-edited a special issue for the UMUAI journal on Personalization and Behaviour change. I have also started investigating the modeling of user trust. PhD projects on behaviour change for healthy eating (Rosemary Josekutty Thomas), and mental health (Ana Ciocarlan) are ongoing, as is a large reseach project on Digital Behaviour Change for Cyber Security.
Explanations in Recommender Systems and Autonomous Systems. Recommender systems suggest items to purchase or examine based on users' preferences. They may also provide explanations. Together with my former PhD student Nava Tintarev, I have investigated the effectiveness of such explanations, and the impact of personalisation on this effectiveness. A large Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project Scrutable Autonomous Agents applied the idea of explanations to distributed autonomous systems, in order to make these systems scrutable by humans. We have also started working on Package Recommendations and explanations for package recommendations (Agung Toto Wibowo).
Diagrammatic Reasoning. Together with Dr. Gem Stapleton and Dr. Jean Flower, I have worked on diagrammatic reasoning, in particular automated theorem proving using Euler-based diagrammatic languages.
Interactive Television. I have worked on adaptation of TV programmes to groups of users (see group adapation above). Together with PhD student Sanaz Fallahkhair and Dr Lyn Pemberon, I have worked on education via ITV. With Dr Pemberton, I started the European ITV conference series (which has now become the ACM TVX conference), and for a decade served on its steering committee. I also organized the UxTV conference with Microsoft in 2008. I have also co-chaired workshops on the usability of ITV, personalized learning via ITV, universal access of ITV, and have been on the program committee of a series of workshops on personalization of ITV.
Evaluation of Adaptive Systems. Together with Dr. Alexandros Paramythis and Prof. Stephan Weibelzahl, I have organized a series of workshops and tutorials on the design and evaluation of adaptive systems. A journal article on this topic has appeared in the UMUAI journal.
Computational Linguistics. Together with Dr. Ivandre Paraboni and Prof. Kees van Deemter, I have conducted experiments to measure how effective a refering expression is from a hearer's point of view.
IUI for the Medical Domain. I used to do a lot of work on this when employed by Philips Research. More recently, together with my former PhD student Wendy Moncur, I have investigated how best to communicate and adapt medical information to the social network of parents of babies in intensive care. We have also investigated how to support interactions with their social network for carers (Kirsten Smith PhD) and elderly patients with chronic pain (Gillian Dowds PhD), and how to prevent and alleviate stress in first aiders (Peter Kindness PhD).