Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
Paul is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor and Director of Research in the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University .
Paul holds first-class degrees from the Universities of Tilburg and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He studied computational linguistics (Logic & AI pathway) and philosophy (both at Tilburg) and the philosophy of linguistics and cognitive science (Amsterdam). He gained his PhD in 1998 at the Institute for Perception Research (Eindhoven University and Philips Research) with his thesis entitled Logic, Information & Conversation. After 7 years as a Research Fellow at the Information Technology Research Institute in Brighton, he joined the Open University in 2005, where he is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computing.
Paul's research focuses on Natural Language Generation, Dialogue Modelling, and Argumentation, and has been published in journals (including Artificial Intelligence, Synthese, Journal of Logic, Language & Information, and the Journal of Pragmatics), conference proceedings (including ACL, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, IVA, and NAACL) and as (invited) book chapters. He has given invited keynotes at ALLT 2024, CID, MOG and SEMDIAL, supervised 9 PhD students to successful completion and has been examiner for a further 6 PhD students.
Currently, he leads the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) project Digital Thinking Tools for Education and Depolarisation, a Toshiba-OU EPSRC DTP CASE project and the Digital Thinking Tools in Action joint project with Hong Kong Metropolitan University (HKMU). He is co-lead of a large multi-site EPSRC-funded project on AI for second order Theory of Mind reasoning. Previously, he has led several projects funded by EPSRC (the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and NESTA (the UK innovation agency for social good), most recently the Opening Up Minds (OUM) project (2020−2023), part of the EPSRC Responsible Natural Language Processing for Intelligent Interfaces programme. OUM developed AI tools that help navigate conversations across ideological divides. Paul is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.
Currently Paul leads the BSc Qualification in Computer Science with AI and is module team chair of a new OU Stage 3 module entitled AI in Practice.
Paul's teaching includes both undergraduate and postgraduate modules. He led the development of a free course on Digital Thinking Tools (co-authored with Richard Walker), which includes a session on From Thinking Tools to AI. His work on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning won the 2023 eSTEeM Scholarship project of the year prize (with Simon Savage). At the 2024 eSTEeM conference, his poster (with Cecilia Domingo and Richard Walker) was voted best poster winner. He is recognised by Advance HE as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).
Paul has chaired two large undergraduate Computing and IT modules:
and written course materials for these and other Open University modules including course materials on:
He has undertaken several research and scholarship projects related to his teaching:
Paul has led the development of two resources for OpenLearn:
Paul's research is complemented by several initiatives that translate the results from this work into tools that help people navigate, communicate, reason with and use information more effectively. Following up on the EPSRC CODA project, the Papworth Trust commissioned videos that were generated from their information leaflets for service users using CODA Monologue-to-Dialogue technology; the videos were available on the Papworth Trust's YouTube Channel.
Additionally, Paul has been involved in several public engagement activities, including:
Paul was AISB committee member responsible for the public understanding of artificial intelligence from 2018 to 2024.
Paul has edited special issues of journals such as Discourse Processes, the Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Language & Computation and Discourse & Dialogue, and co-chaired several workshops and conferences, including:
In 2019, he was area chair for generation at ACL. In 2020, he was remote presentations co-chair for COLING2020. Also, from 2019 to 2024, he was an elected committee member of AISB (responsible for the public understanding of AI). Paul is a member of the editorial board of the Dialogue & Discourse journal and editor for the PhilPapers category on Inferentialist Accounts of Meaning and Content.
Paul is involved in an ongoing collaboration with Prendinger Lab at the National Institute for Informatics in Tokyo.
