I am a Lecturer at Centre for Argument Technology (ARG-tech) at the University of Dundee. I joined in May 2017 as a post-doc, to work on applications of argument analytics to enhance everyday complex communication in real time. My research combines computational linguistics, manual and automatic analyses of argumentation, data analytics and interactive visualisations, with a special interest on applications in political communication (e.g. political interviews, election debates, public deliberations). I am part of the ADD-up: Augmented Deliberative Democracy project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

 

Before coming to Dundee, I was at The Open University‘s Knowledge Media Institute, working in the Election Debate Visualisation (EDV) project. My in EDV combined computational linguistics, collective intelligence, political communication and design, with the aim of improving democratic citizenship by coupling TV election debates with interactive visualisations of complex analytics. The project team includes Dr Anna De Liddo from The Open University, and Prof Stephen Coleman, Dr Giles Moss and Dr Paul Wilson from the University of Leeds.

For my PhD, I worked on computational models of non-cooperation in political interviews, with Dr Paul Piwek and Dr Richard Power from The OU’s Computing and Communications Department.

Other research interests include software verification, verbalisation of formal specifications, computational humour, virtual humans and argumentation.

“When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second…”

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot