People

Alessandro Vinciarelli is Full Professor at the School of Computing Science and Associate Academic at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow.

His main research interest is Social Signal Processing, the computing domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions. Alessandro develops approaches that detect nonverbal behavioural cues (facial expressions, vocalisations, gestures, etc.) in data collected with multiple sensors and then apply Artificial Intelligence methodologies for making sense of the cues in terms of social and psychological phenomena (e.g., personality, conflict, cognitive and mental issues, etc.).

He has published more than 150 works that have attracted several thousands of Scholar citations. In adiditon to his role as Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents, Alessandro is or has been Principal and Co-Investigator of more than 15 national and international research projects, including a European Network of Excellence of which he has been the coordinator (the SSPNet, 2009-2014), a H2020 funded project (MuMMER, 2016-2020), and the EPSRC funded School Attachment Monitor (2015-2019) and Socially Competent Robots (2016-2020).

He has also been General Chair of more than 25 international events, including the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (2012) and the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interactions (2017).

Last, but not least, Alessandro has an established record of collaboration with industrial partners. In particular, he is Scientific Advisor of Neurodata Lab and co-founder of Klewel, a knowledge management company featured as an exemplary impact story by IEEE Multimedia.

His own website is here.

Monika Harvey is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow.

Prior to joining Glasgow, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, having obtained a degree in Psychology from the University of Bielefeld (Germany), followed by a PhD in Visual Neuropsychology from the University of St Andrews.

Her research interests fall in the area of cognitive neuroscience, especially in the relative contribution of the two main cortical visual streams (dorsal and ventral) towards perception and action. Beyond its relevance to informing brain function and the idea that visual processing is split into two separate but interrelated systems, her work has health applications in particular in relation to stroke rehabilitation.

In addition, her research speaks to and informs ease and constraints in our interactions with socially intelligent artificial agents. Dr Harvey has previous experience in managing Doctoral Training Centres, holding a position as Associate Director in the Scotland wide ESRC funded Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS) Doctoral Training Partnership (a partner of the Social AI CDT).

Dr Dale Barr is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. His main areas of interest are psycholinguistics, statistical methodology, and cognitive science. Most of his work consists of empirical investigations into the cognitive representations and processes underlying spoken dialogue. He has published work on various topics, including pragmatics, perspective-taking, lexical processing, cultural evolution, speech rhythm, disfluency, and multimodal signaling.

Much of his recent work has focused on how language users manage to integrate linguistic and situational information (such as interlocutors’ beliefs and goals) within the constraints of real-time dialogue. His work uses a variety of methodologies, from behavioral and neuroimaging techniques such as visual-world eyetracking, EEG, and MEG, to computational modeling and Monte Carlo simulation.

He has also contributed to statistical methodology, developing techniques for time-series analysis of visual-world eye tracking data, and developing insights into statistical methodologies though Monte Carlo simulation. In his teaching, he has worked to develop a curriculum promoting reproducible data analysis, and has developed software applications to make statistics teaching more effective.

He has been Associate Editor of the journal Behavior Research Methods since 2014.

Lawrence Barsalou is Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow, performing research in School of Psychology & Neuroscience. He received a Bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 (George Mandler, advisor), and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University in 1981 (Gordon Bower, advisor).

Since then, Barsalou has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, joining the University of Glasgow in 2015. Barsalou’s research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, and health cognition.

A current theme of his research is that the conceptual system is grounded in multimodal simulation, situated conceptualization, and embodiment. Specific topics of current interest include the roles of conceptual processing in emotion, stress, abstract thought, self, appetitive behavior, and contemplative practices. His research also addresses the dynamic online construction of conceptual representations, the development of conceptual systems to support goal achievement, and the structure of knowledge.

Barsalou’s research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation and other US funding agencies. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship, served as the chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and won an award for graduate teaching from the University of Chicago.

Barsalou is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Mind and Life Institute, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

He is a winner of the Distinguished Cognitive Science Award from the University of California, Merced.

Stephen Brewster, FRSE, is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the School of Computing Science. He leads the Multimodal Interaction Group, part of the Glasgow Interactive Systems Group. His research focuses on multimodal HCI, or using multiple sensory modalities and control mechanisms (particularly audio, haptics and gesture) to create a rich interaction between human and technology.

His work has a strong experimental focus, applying perceptual research to practical situations. His main research topics include interaction with mobile devices; physical and mental health applications; multimodal emotional engagement; accessibility; wearable devices and in-car interaction.

He holds an ERC Advanced Grant in the area of AR and VR in autonomous vehicles. He is a Member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

Matthew Chalmers is a Professor at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, UK. His work focuses on data visualisation and analytics, data ethics and ethical systems design, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. He borrows from philosophy, biology and other disciplines in order to feed into the design and theory of such systems.

His background is in Computer Science: a BSc (Hons) at U. Edinburgh, then a PhD at U. East Anglia in ray tracing and object-oriented toolkits for distributed memory multiprocessors.

He was a researcher in Xerox’ labs, before setting up an information visualisation group at UBS Ubilab, in Zurich. He then had a brief fellowship at U. Hokkaido, Japan, before starting at U. Glasgow in 1999. His (other) current projects include an EPSRC NetworkPlus on ethical systems design (Human Data Interaction), an ONR project on fast data visualisation, and a university-funded pilot project on ethically tracking mental health via phone sensor data. 

His own web site is here.

Mathieu Chollet is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Science. His research is focuses on virtual social interactions and social signal processing. In particular, his work deals with the generation of virtual humans’ socio-emotional behaviours and the assessment of their impact on users’ states and experiences, and with the automatic assessment of users during human-agent and human-human interactions through multimodal machine learning. His research is inter-disciplinary with a strong experimental focus, with application domains in social skills training, remote collaboration, and healthcare.

His background is in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, with a PhD at Télécom Paris (France) on socio-emotional behaviour planning models for embodied conversational agents funded as part of the EU FP7 TARDIS project.

Before joining the University of Glasgow, he was an assistant professor in computer science at IMT Atlantique in the LS2N laboratory (Nantes, France), after post-doctoral appointments at the UofG Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, and a short fellowship at the Tokyo National Institute of Informatics. His current projects include an ANR-funded grant on understanding psychosocial stress induction in virtual social interactions, an ANR-funded grant on pedagogical approaches for public speaking training with virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

His own web site is here.

Emily Cross is a Professor of Social Robotics and social neuroscientist based at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow, where she directs the Social Brain in Action Laboratory.

Using intensive training procedures, functional neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and research paradigms involving dance, acrobatics and robots, she leads a team who explores questions concerning how we learn via observation, motor expertise, and social influences on human-robot interaction.

She and her team are particularly interested in how prolonged experience with robots changes how we perceive and interact with these artificial agents at brain and behavioural levels, and how these relationships are manifest across the lifespan and in different cultures. These are the primary questions she and her team are exploring as part of the ‘Social Robots’ project, an ERC starting grant for which Emily serves as PI.

Emily received a BA in psychology and dance from Pomona College (USA), an MSc in cognitive psychology from the University of Otago (NZ) as a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth College (USA). She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Nottingham (UK) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Germany), and was previously an assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL) and a professor at Bangor University (Wales).

Her research has been funded by an eclectic mix of national and international organisations, including the NIH (USA), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Ministry of Defence (UK), the Leverhulme Trust (UK) and the European Research Council.

Dr Jeff Dalton is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He conducts research on search-oriented conversational AI and knowledge-aware information retrieval. His research is at the intersection of natural language processing and search, in particular automatic methods to construct knowledge graphs and their application in retrieval.

Specialized application domains include: health and biomedical, travel and food, digital heritage, science and engineering, and history. He completed his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with James Allan in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. Before Glasgow, he worked in Google Research on the Knowledge Discovery (Knowledge Vault), Pasteur Health Research, and the Google Assistant Response Ranking team in the Assistant Natural Language Understanding group. He organizes the Search-oriented Conversational AI workshop series.

He is the lead organizer for the TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) (http://treccast.ai) and previously organized the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval track. His research on conversational search systems is funded by a Google Faculty Research Award, 2018.

Lisa DeBruine is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. She runs the Face Research Lab and the KINSHIP project, a 5-year, €2M ERC Consolidator Grant to study “How do humans recognise kin?” Her empirical research focuses on kinship and how social perception of morphology affects social behaviour.

Specifically, she is interested in how humans use facial resemblance to tell who their kin are and how people respond to cues of kinship in different circumstances. She is also interested in meta-science topics such as teaching computational skills for reproducible research, large-scale collaboration (especially the Psychological Science Accelerator), and developing web-based resources for increasing reproducibility in data collection and stimulus generation.

Dr Fani Deligianni is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. She holds a PhD in Medical Image Computing (Imperial College London), an MSc in Advanced Computing (Imperial College London), an MSc in Neuroscience (University College London) and a MEng (equivalent) in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Aristotle University, Greece).

She was awarded an MRC Special Research Training Fellowship in Biomedical Informatics to explore links between structural connectivity as it is measured with Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) and functional brain connectivity captured with resting-state (rs)-fMRI. This work has been extended with simultaneous resting-state EEG-fMRI and microstructural indices obtained from neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging of the human brain.

She has also worked on developing contingent eye-tracking environments to investigate social skills in toddlers based on attention models. Her research area encompasses building statistical machine learning models to describe and characterise complex interconnections between multi-modal brain networks.

She has a particular interest in human-AI augmentation models via multi-modal neurophysiological wearable sensing and human motion analysis. Application of her work are focused in health-informatics, cognitive neuroscience and neuroimage analysis.

Dr Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing Science, and an Associate Academic within the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow.

Her main research goal is to build, deploy, and evaluate artificial characters—mainly robots—that people can interact with using natural, face-to-face conversation. Within this space, her primary research interests include human-robot interaction, social robotics, embodied conversational agents, conversational interaction, and natural language generation.

She is the coordinator of the MuMMER project, a European Horizon 2020 project in the area of socially aware human-robot interaction. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2007, and has previously worked at the Technical University of Munich and Heriot-Watt University.

Her own web site is here.

Tanaya Guhu is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before joining Glasgow, she was an Associate Professor in Computer Science, University of Warwick. She received a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, and subsequently was a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles.

Her research focuses on developing computational models to understand, recognize and predict human actions, emotion and behavior combining machine learning, computer vision and signal/speech processing. She is interested in application domains such as media informatics, healthcare and autonomous vehicles. She has published over 50 papers in leading venues in these areas. Her current research is supported by Ford and Intel.

She was an Area Chair for WACV2022, ICME2020, Interscpeech2016 and a Senior PC of ACII2017-2021. She is an elected member of IEEE Multimedia Systems and Applications Technical Committee and an Executive Committee member of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC).

Her own website is here.

Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Science and an associate of the Institute of Biodiversity Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, Univeristy of Glasgow. Having been one of the early founders of the Animal-Computer Interaction field, Ilyena is a pioneering expert in methods and building technologies for animals. Her research builds novel devices for animals to use computers, investigating how animals use these devices and how we can design and build methods to capture this interaction. Ilyena leads the Animal-Computer Interaction group at Glasgow. She is interested in how animals can control technologies and access the internet to connect to people and each other.

Rachael Jack is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glagsow. Jack’s research has produced significant advances in understanding facial expression of emotion within and across cultures using a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines psychophysics, social psychology, dynamic 3D computer graphics, and mathematical psychology. Her work has challenged the dominant view that six basic facial expressions of emotion are universal, leading to a new theoretical framework of facial expression communication that is now being transferred to digital agents to synthesize culturally sensitive social signals.

Jack is currently funded by the European Research Council (ERC), previously funded by the ESRC Future Research Leaders award, ESRC Open Research Area, and British Academy. Jack’s work features in several high-profile scientific outlets (e.g., Annual Review of Psychology, Current Biology, Psychological Science, PNAS, TICS). Jack is recipient of several awards including the British Psychological Society (BPS) Spearman Medal, the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) Innovation award, and the American Psychological Association (APA) New Investigator award.

Jack is Associate Editor at Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and several Editorial Boards including Emotion, Affective Science, and JPSP: Attitudes and Social Cognition. Jack serves on the conference committees/boards of the Society for Affective Sciences (Chair 2021), IEEE Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (Area Chair, Special Sessions Co-Chair, PC Co-Chair), Intelligent Virtual Agents (General Co-Chair), and the Vision Science Society (Abstract Review Board), and is Chair of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Internationalization Committee.

Dr Mohamed Khamis is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Science. His research interests are at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing and Security. In particular, he published 65+ research papers at top conferences and journals in these areas:

Usable Security and Privacy: He contributed to both: (1) understanding threats to user privacy that are caused/facilitated by ubiquitous technologies, such as thermal attacks (CHI’17, Honorable Mention), and shoulder surfing (CHI’17, MUM’17, INTERACT ’19, ETRA’20), and (2) inventing novel ubiquitous systems for protecting user privacy and security on mobile devices (CHI’20, CHI’19, ICMI’17, MTI), public displays (IMWUT, ETRA’19, PerDis’17), and in VR (IEEE VR’19, USEC’17).

Designing Gaze-based Systems: He contributed to comprehensively understanding and addressing challenges of gaze interaction on ubiquitous devices, such as mobile devices (CHI’18, MobileHCI’18) and public displays (UIST’17, UbiComp’16, MUM’16), as well as proposing novel concepts that employ gaze to address problems on public displays (CHI’18, IMWUT, PerDis’17), and mobile devices (ICMI’17). He published survey papers that reflect on prior work and set the agenda for future research in eye tracking on mobile devices (MobileHCI’18) and eye tracking for security applications (CHI’20).

His own website is here.

Dr Martin Lages is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. His main areas of interest are cognition, perception, and statistical methods. Most of his published work relates to empirical investigations into motion perception, cognition and decision making as well as visual illusions and awareness. He has published work on various topics such as binocular 3D motion perception, after-effects, motion-induced blindness, perspective-taking, visual memory and sequential effects in decision making.

In his recent work he has focused on task-switching but also cognitive bias of jurors and forensic examiners. In his research he uses a variety of methodologies, from behavioural response times, eye-tracking, computational modelling to neuroimaging techniques such as EEG and fMRI.

He has contributed to statistical methods, developing a decomposition technique for pair comparison data and a hierarchical signal detection model for binary data.

In his teaching, he has helped to shape the MSc Research Methods of Psychological Science at UofG and in a EU-funded consortium developed software applications to improve teaching statistics (TquanT, QHelP).

He has been associate editor for Frontiers in Psychology and Testing, Psychometrics and Methodology.

Dr Emma Li is a Lecturer in Responsible & Interactive Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computing Science and an affiliated staff at School of Engineering, University of Glasgow.

She is interested in data-driven AI design and experiments in robotics systems for a variety of applications, e.g., social and health care, industry, service, etc. Her research goal is to accelerate human-robot partnership into industry and society. She has successfully delivered 6 projects and published 50 peer reviewed papers. Her recent work on robot behaviour-based user authentication received a best workshop paper award in IEEE INFOCOM 2021.

She leads the interactive and trustworthy AI lab, working on human-robot interaction and cyber security. Her lab has access to the state-of-the-art industrial tele-robotic arm platform (e.g., Franka Emika and UR3e Robots) and mobile robot platform (e.g., HUSKY and Jackal unmanned ground vehicles).

Dr Craig Macdonald is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, with research interests widely in information retrieval and recommender systems. He has worked on effective & efficient models and approaches for a variety for information retrieval tasks, as well as social media tasks such as tweet analysis, and venue recommendation.

His early research focused on models for identifying persons with relevant expertise within organisations. He has embraced research on effective-yet-efficient web-scale retrieval, particularly through applications of query efficiency predictors. He also publishes in the area of social sensing from user generated content (blogs, tweets, check-ins, comments etc.), as well as venue recommendation, learning to rank and information retrieval evaluation.

He has previously organised evaluation forms on Blog search and Microblog search at TREC conference, run under the auspices of NIST, USA. His research has been funded by the European Commission (FP7 & H2020), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, as well as industry and national governments. He has a PhD from the University of Glasgow.

Dr Marwa Mahmoud is a Lecturer in Socially Intelligent Technologies at the School of Computing Science at University of Glasgow, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests focus on computer vision for social signal processing and multimodal signal processing, especially within the context of affective computing, behaviour analytics, human behaviour understanding and animal behaviour understanding. She applied her research in the areas of automotive applications, mental healthcare, and animal welfare. She pioneered research directions on affective gestures analysis (especially hand-over-face gestures and self-adaptors/ fidgeting behaviour) as well as vision-based AI for automatic detection of signs of pain in the facial expressions of sheep for early diagnosis of disease. To date, she has published 33+ research papers at top conferences and journals (with more than 1070 citations according to Google Scholar).

She is interested in ‘AI for Social Good’, combining computer vision research with health for human well-being and animal welfare applications.

She is an elected Executive Committee (EC) Member of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), Network Member of Cambridge Trust & Technology Initiative and a member of Cambridge Neuroscience.

Stacy Marsella is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience and director of the Centre for Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, he was a professor at Northeastern University in the College of Computer and Information Science with a joint appointment in Psychology and, prior to Northeastern, a research professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and a research director at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT).

Professor Marsella’s multidisciplinary research is grounded in the computational modeling of human cognition, emotion and social behavior as well as the evaluation of those models. Beyond its relevance to understanding human behavior, the work has seen numerous applications, including health interventions, social skills training and large-scale social simulations of disaster response.  This more applied work has been facilitated by his team’s development of frameworks for large-scale social simulations as well as techniques and tools for creating virtual humans, facsimiles of people that can engage people in face-to-face social interactions.

Professor Marsella received an ACM SIGART career award for his contributions to agent research and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. He served on the board of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems and is on the steering committee for Intelligent Virtual Agents.

He is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the International Society for Research on Emotions.

Dr Philip McAleer is Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow.  His primary research interests are how personality is portrayed through our voices, and the influence this has on those we interact with, studied both behaviourally and with fMRI. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2002 (B.Sc. Psychology) and completed his Ph.D. in 2006, in the PACo Lab, University of Glasgow, on “Understanding Intentions in Animacy Displays Derived from Human Motion”. He then worked on two post-docs looking at intent perception by people with ASDs, and by CCTV operators. From there Philip spent two years as a post-doc in the Voice Neurocognition Lab, University of Glasgow, looking at perceived personality in voices. He has been a Lecturer since 2012, mainly lecturing in Statistics and Research Methods – and if it cannot be related to cycling then it just is not worth talking about!

Alice Miller is Professor at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and has supervised 14 PhD students since 2007. She has expertise in formal verification, notably the detection and exploitation of symmetry for model checking, and combinatorial search. Her formal verification research includes probabilistic modelling for UAV strategy generation and using abstraction and embedded C code to model a biologically inspired reinforcement learning algorithm.

Earlier work in this area includes model checking techniques for concurrent software, induction and abstraction, and symmetry reduced model checking for non- probabilistic and probabilistic systems. Recent research in combinatorial search includes proving optimality results for problems in graph theory using symmetry breaking and Boolean Satisfiability solving. Prof Miller is a member of the London Mathematical Society, the IET, & a Chartered Engineer. She leads the School’s ‘Understandable Autonomous Systems’ theme and is the School’s Transnational Education Lead.

Helen Minnis is a Professor at the School of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow. In addition, she is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with a longstanding interest in the mental health problems of abused and neglected children. This has included a focus on social signalling in this group, especially in children with Reactive Attachment Disorder and in abused/neglected children with neurodevelopmental problems like Autism. She has also collaborated with AI experts on development of automatic play-based tools for measuring attachment patterns in young children.

Lars Muckli is Professor of Visual and Cognitive Neurosciences at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. He is also the Director of fMRI at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNI), in Glasgow and Co-chair of 7T-Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) MRI. He has worked for 20 years in the field of fMRI and multi-modal brain imaging. His work focuses on brain imaging of cortical feedback, investigation of layer specific fMRI, and multi-level cross –species computational neuroscience. His lab was previously funded by ERC consolidator grant on ‘Brain reading of contextual feedback and predictions’.

Since 2016, Lars is member of the Human Brain Project (HBP), leading a work package on rodent and human neuroscience on ‘Context-sensitive multisensory object recognition a deep network model constrained by multi-level, multi-species data’. Lars is now member of the HBP board as co-lead for System & Cognition Neuroscience.

The Human Brain Project is one of the two largest scientific projects ever funded by the European Union (€500 million), and creates a research infrastructure for Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Analytics and Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics.

Dr Gethin Norman is a Senior Lecturer at Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and previously a senior post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. A focus of his research is the theoretical underpinning of quantitative formal methods, particularly for systems exhibiting probabilistic and real-time behaviour, and he has published over 100 papers in this area. He is a key contributor to the probabilistic verification tool PRISM – the most widely-used software tool for verification of probabilistic systems.

He has developed many of PRISM’s modelling case studies across a wide range of application domains, finding several faults and anomalies. These included a number of real-world protocols and were taken from a wide range of application domains including autonomous systems, communication and multimedia protocols, power management systems, reliability models and security. Probabilistic verification provide a means of producing quantitative guarantees on the correctness of a system (e.g. “the control software can always safely stop the vehicle with probability at least 0.99, regardless of the actions of other road users”), where the required behavioural properties are specified precisely in quantitative extensions of temporal logic. It also addresses the closely related problem of strategy synthesis constructing an optimal strategy that guarantees a property is satisfied.

His recent work has focused on stochastic game-models which arise when modelling autonomous systems, due to the presence of both competitive and collaborative behaviour and uncertainty in the environment.

Professor Iadh Ounis is a Full Professor at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He is a leading Information Retrieval (IR) academic (+200 publications, H-index 48, +9000 citations). Prof. Ounis specialises in large-scale IR with his research being at the intersection of information retrieval, data science/big data analytics, and sensing systems (e.g. social and physical sensors). Prof. Ounis is the leader of the Terrier Team, a group of 4 academics and 12 researchers working on cutting-edge data mining and search applications.

Over the years, he has supervised over 15 PhD students, over 15 postdoctoral research assistants and hosted many visiting IR researchers. He has chaired a number of major international information retrieval-related events and initiatives such as ESSIR 2007, ECIR 2008 and CIKM 2011, and the TREC Blog and Microblog tracks (2006-2012). He has been the principal investigator of numerous EU and UK projects (e.g. CROSS, ReDiTes, SMART, SUPER, BigDataStack).

He has a long experience and a rich track record of participating in multi-disciplinary projects (e.g. the recent ESRC Urban Big Data Centre and the ESRC Electoral Violence projects with Social & Political Scientists) and successfully participated in several knowledge transfer projects (e.g. TNA, Yandex, Skyscanner, Trip.com).

He is board member of the SFC DataLab Innovation Centre, and a former Deputy Director/Director of Knowledge Exchange at the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA).

Dr Esther Papies is a Reader at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. She also directs the Healthy Cognition Lab at the University of Glasgow. She and her team study the cognitive processes underlying the regulation of health and consumer behaviour and behaviour change, especially in the domain of healthy and sustainable eating and drinking. Her research uses mainly social cognition methods and focuses on the cognitive processes of how behaviour is regulated as a function of cognitive representations shaped by personal goals, previous experiences, and environmental cues that trigger and shape these cognitive representations.

The Healthy Cognition Lab addresses questions such as: how are appetitive stimuli represented cognitively, and how does desire for them develop? How can we leverage these processes to promote healthy and sustainable consumer behaviour? How can we design digital health behaviour interventions that optimally integrate personal motivation and environmental factors to promote healthy habit formation? Esther collaborates closely with key stakeholders for healthy and sustainable consumer behaviour, such as Danone and The World Resources Institute.

Esther received her PhD in 2008 at Utrecht University, and after working at Utrecht University as Assistant and Associate Professor, she joined the University of Glasgow in 2015. Currently, her work is funded through various ESRC Research Grants and PhD studentships.

Dr Marios Philiastides is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow, and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the University of Glasgow. He received his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and his doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University in 2007. Dr. Philiastides’ research group is interested in the neurobiology of human decision making. More specifically, his lab is involved in characterising the neural correlates of perceptual, value-based and social decision making, including reinforcement-guided learning and reward-related activity in the dopaminergic system in health and disease.

He uses a multimodal approach, which combines various forms of neuroimaging and interventional techniques (EEG, fMRI, simultaneous EEG/fMRI, MEG, TMS/tDCS) along with computational modelling and multivariate data analysis techniques to expose the relevant brain networks and the mechanistic details of the underlying neural computations. The computational techniques used in his lab are motivated by classical problems in signal processing, machine learning and statistical pattern recognition and are designed to expose distributed neural representations and decipher how information flow through “networks” can lead to changes in behaviour.

In addition, his lab is involved in the development of (neuro)physiologically-informed Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to enable collaborative decision making between humans and artificial agents. This work draws directly from new insights gained through the lab’s main theoretical and experimental interests in order to exploit neural and systemic physiological information, together with affective cues from facial features and posture/gait to infer latent cognitive and emotional states of humans interacting with AI agents in collaborative decision-making tasks using immersive VR technology.

His research is supported by generous contributions from a number of external sources including grants from the BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, the British Academy, ERC and the Royal Society.

Frank Pollick is a Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in the psychology of human interaction with AI. He also has a broad interest in human cognition and multisensory perception, especially as it relates to how the brain turns observations of others into an understanding of their intentions and emotions.

He is currently working with Qumodo on research to optimise performance of human-AI teams. This research investigates the calibration of trust between humans and AI as well as ways to use AI to mitigate psychological impact in individuals who analyse distressing imagery as part of their job. His methodological approaches include the techniques of psychophysics, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), realtime fMRI neurofeedback and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). In collaboration with researchers in computing science he has used these techniques to explore information need (Best Paper Awards at SIGIR 2016 and ECIR 2013), perception of humanoid robots, multisensory warning signals for drivers (Best Paper Award at AutoUI 2014) and motion sickness in mobile VR environments.

Finally, he is interested in ways that development and expertise influence how the world is experienced and has performed research using dancers, drummers, CCTV operators and individuals with autism to understand the neural bases of differences in how these individuals perceive the world.

Dr Cassandra Sampaio Baptista is a neuroscientist and Lecturer at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. She graduated with a Msc and Dphil (PhD) in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. She currently heads the Plasticity Lab at University of Glasgow (PLUG).

Her group uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate and enhance functional and structural plasticity, from the cellular level to systems level, in healthy, ageing and clinical populations.

Her lab uses behavioural interventions and techniques to modulate brain activity to assess their effects on brain structure and function using multimodal MRI. She has an interest in fMRI neurofeedback and BCI as a tool to link brain networks to behaviour and as potential adjunctive interventions for motor disorders such as stroke.

Dr Christoph Scheepers is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. His main research interest include cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and statistics. Most of his work is concerned with empirical investigations into the cognitive architectures and mechanisms underlying spoken and written language comprehension and production.

He has published work on various psycholinguistic topics, including syntactic, semantic, and lexical constraints on sentence processing, syntactic priming, embodied cognition, and shared structural representations across language and mathematics. Much of his recent research has focused on emotionality in bilingual speakers’ first versus second language, and the role of ‘inner speech’ during written sentence comprehension. His work uses a wide variety of methodologies, from behavioural and neuroimaging techniques such as eye-tracking, pupillometry, EEG, and fMRI, to questionnaires, corpus research, and statistical modelling. He has a keen interest in grammar formalisms and theoretical linguistics, and also contributed to statistical methodology by developing ‘best practises’ for the analysis of experimental data. His teaching focuses mainly on the psychology of language, eye-tracking, and statistical analysis.

He currently teaches courses on multivariate analysis of psychometric data and on generalised linear mixed effects models. He is Associate Editor for the open access journal Collabra, and is on the editorial board for JEP:General, Cognition, and Frontiers in Psychology. He has been regular board member for the two most prominent international conferences in psycholinguistics, AMLaP (since 2003) and CUNY (since 2005).

A Professor at the School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow, Philippe G. Schyns, FRSE, Wellcome Senior Investigator, was trained at Brown University and MIT, is the founding Director of both the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology and at University of Glasgow.  His research analyses the information processing mechanisms of the brain.  His key contributions include establishing the functional role of diagnostic features in framing the brain as a dynamic information processing organ that strategically senses the external world and flexibly produces categorization behaviour.

Rosalind H. Searle is a Professor at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, and holds the chair in HRM and Organisational Psychology. She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS). She has a PhD from Aston University, and an MBA. Her research focuses on organisational trust and HRM, trust and controls, change and counterproductive work behaviours. She is co-editor for the Routledge Companion to Trust (2018) and serves on editorial boards of Journal of Management, Journal of Trust Research, and International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation (IPP).

Her research appears in leading international journals (e.g., Human Resource Management, Journal of Organisational Behavior, International Journal of HRM, and Long Range Planning) and in commissioned research for regulators (e.g., Professional Standards Authority), government (e.g., Welsh Audit, Scottish and English Governments) and private organisations (e.g., energy sector).

Dr Michele Sevegnani is a Lecturer at Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. His research activity focuses mainly on novel computational models such as bigraphs, their analysis, and their applications in real end-user scenarios. He leads a PETRAS research project on modelling perspectives in autonomous aerial and ground vehicles, and a research programme on formal methods for IoT device management platforms, with the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology, and was visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, modelling autonomous swarm systems.

He is the lead developer of BigraphER, a suite of open-source tools for rewriting, simulation and visual display of bigraphs. Recent research includes estimation techniques for networks of sensors with overlapping ranges, digital twinning for Mixed-Reality systems, and human-autonomy teaming in connected vehicular systems.

Sabina Siebert is Professor of Management at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, and conducts research in the area of management and organisation studies.  She employs a range of qualitative methodologies including discourse analysis, narrative analysis and organizational ethnography. Sabina has published in various journals such as Organization Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Sociology, and Work Employment and Society. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the European Management Journal. In her research inspired by Science and Technology Studies, she has been studying the ways in which technologies have been used to manage trust and distrust in organizations.

As a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Sabina is participating in research program Managing Digital Transformations, which also includes preparation of new courses on the potential role of AI in management of contemporary organizations.

Dr Simone Stumpf is a Reader in Responsible and Interactive AI at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. She gained a BSc in Computer Science with Cognitive Science and a PhD in Computer Science from University College London. She worked as a post-doc researcher at Oregon State University, USA, before joining City, University of London as a Lecturer.

She is currently the Chair of the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Steering Committee and one of the Program Chairs of IUI 2022, and contributes regularly to peer review committees of major international conferences and journals. She has been involved in the supervision of over 10 PhD students, and has been nominated for teaching and research supervision awards.

She has a long-standing research focus on user interactions with machine learning systems and has published extensively on this subject. Her research projects, which have received funding from research councils as well as industry, concentrate on designing and implementing self-management tools for people living with HIV, dementia, and Parkinson’s Disease, building solutions for AI for accessibility, and investigating systems to support fair AI decision-making. Her work has contributed to shaping the field of Explainable AI (XAI) through the Explanatory Debugging approach to interactive machine learning, providing design principles for crafting explanations. The prime aim of her work is to empower all users to use intelligent machines effectively.

Jane Stuart-Smith is a Professor at the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research expertise is in sociophonetics, the production and perception of speech with specific reference to how speech functions in society to construct and reflect personal, social, and regional identities, from individual speakers to larger social and cultural communities of speakers.

To date she has (co)managed 12 externally-funded projects on different aspects of speech and society resulting in 85 publications in print, including on the social mechanisms underpinning sound change (e.g. the Sounds of the City project), accent and ethnic identity (e.g. ‘Glaswasian’), and articulatory phonetics and social variation (e.g. the Dynamic Dialects project). Stuart-Smith has a specific interest in social interaction and speech accommodation, especially in contexts such as experiencing pre-recorded broadcast speech from e.g. TV, film, social media, without direct human interaction: she directed the first systematic investigation on the influence of the TV on speech (published in Language, 2013), and led the innovative Brains in Dialogue PhD project (Solanki, 2017), on speech and neural processing during collaborative talk.

Stuart-Smith also led the collaboration with researchers at the Clinical Audiology, Speech and Language Research Centre, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, to construct Seeing Speech, an online resource visualising speech production, which has attracted over 3million hits since 2014. Stuart-Smith currently (co)supervises 6 PhD students. Since 1999, she has (co)supervised 12 completed PhDs (100% completion rate), nine of which are/have been funded by competitive application to the ESRC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, or the Glasgow University collaborative Kelvin-Smith scheme.

Stuart-Smith’s research and contribution to increasing the public understanding of speech in society was recognized with a Fellowship to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018; she is currently the Deputy Chair of the REF2021 panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Gregor Thut is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Glasgow. He has an undergraduate and PhD-degree from the Swiss Institute of Technology-Zurich, and trained in Cognitive Sciences, Neuropsychology and human Neurophysiology.

His current research interfaces human electrophysiology (mostly EEG) and non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation (transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation: TMS, tDCS, tACS). He focuses on how dynamic network activity in the human brain, inferred from brain oscillations, relates to perception, attention and cognition. One emphasis is on using EEG readout of cognitive/brain states for guiding brain stimulation to enhance the effectiveness and specificity of the interventions. This to develop the existing non-invasive brain stimulation techniques into more powerful neuroscience tools and clinically effective protocols, to manipulate and better understand the brain-behaviour relationship and the neural processes driving it.

His research has been funded by BBSRC, Wellcome trust and currently by MRC. He serves/served in various panels and editorial boards (including for Brain Stimulation, European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience).