STEM Faculty

I lead the Intelligent Systems and Data Science research group in KMi (https://isds.kmi.open.ac.uk). My work has a strong interdisciplinary element, covering Data Integration and Modelling, Human-Computer Interaction, and a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) areas, including Semantic and Language Technologies, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Intelligent Systems and Robotics.

My research currently focuses on three main areas of research:

Scholarly Analytics and Metascience. My research team (https://skm.kmi.open.ac.uk) develops AI methods and tools to analyse the research landscape, predict academic and industrial trends, support research work and inform funding and editorial policies.  Since 2014 this line of research has been supported by a grant from Springer Nature.

AI, Media and Democracy. Here, we are investigating new solutions to model media coverage of political discourse at scale. Initial results in this research include the first ontological formalization of the key concepts in this space, such as topic and viewpoint, which are needed to formally characterise media representations of political discourse (https://tinyurl.com/46mpe5jz). Building on this characterisation, we have then developed the first automatic solution able to capture accurately the representation of political viewpoints in the news. Our paper describing this work won the best research paper award at EKAW 2024 (https://tinyurl.com/4t2hnbp3).

Finally, another active area of research concerns hybrid architectures for cognitive robots (https://isds.kmi.open.ac.uk/smart-cities-and-robotics/), which integrate deep learning image recognition methods with common sense knowledge, to enhance the visual intelligence capabilities of autonomous robots. As we illustrated in a 2022 paper (https://tinyurl.com/37jv2upr), augmenting traditional object recognition methods with common-sense reasoning improves a robot’s sensemaking performance and enables them to carry out complex tasks, such as performing health and safety checks in real-world office environments. This innovative work is now feeding into our line of research on Smart Cities, investigating the deployment of cognitive robots in both work and urban environments. A recently acquired grant from Innovate UK builds on these results, through the deployment of cognitive robots carrying out support tasks at MK University Hospital.