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MY RESEARCH

Working Together: Collaboration, Cooperation and Technology for Positive Change

I'm passionate about understanding how people cooperate to solve everyday, real-world, social dilemmas, and how technology can help people work together for positive change.

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My research focuses on participation in - and collaboration across - networked technology. I use mixed methods to explore how technology design, and the resulting use of technology, affects social processes and organisational systems. I examine how to design technology to help groups cooperate to create and share resources, and to advance their own empowerment aims: Through applied research, I generate insights to inform the design of useful and responsible systems. I also examine fundamental questions at the intersection of human behaviour and digital technology to improve scientific understanding of computer-mediated and collective behaviour. 

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Currently, I'm a researcher in the Future of Work group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK).  My research explores innovative approaches for applying Machine Learning (ML) to support knowledge management in large organisations. My current work (Enterprise Knowledge) investigates how AI can become a useful vehicle to help workers better utilize the knowledge that exists within organisations. Taking a human-centred approach, and utilizing qualitative and design methodologies, I study how we can create useful, interpretable and actionable ML insights that have the potential to help work become more effective and collaborative; and can empower workers to work the way that they want. Related to this, I recently published an article in ACM Interactions magazine: Designing AI Systems That Make Organisational Knowledge Actionable

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Prior to my work at Microsoft, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter (UK). I worked as part of the Household-Energy Supplier Markets (HoSEM) project, which explored how blockchains can support the decentralisation of the energy market. My research used interviews, focus groups and quantitative surveys to examine the general public's perceptions of the current energy market and their aspirations for the future. I explored how peer-to-peer platforms should be designed to help people participate in the decarbonization process and advance their aims for the future of energy in the UK. Earlier this year I published a paper about my work in ACM CHI Conference, which was awarded the Honorable Mention award (top 5% of submissions): Peer-to-Peer Energy Markets: Understanding the Values of Collective and Community Trading.  

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For my PhD, I examined how social media can affect collective action and social change. My research used experimental methods to test how features in the interface, ways of presenting information, and beliefs about interactions with social media affected users' social cognitions and willingness to participate in collective action. I also used qualitative methods to explore how Twitter was used during the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement to manage different social change aims.

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ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE

Current work

We have a limited understanding of how AI can help people and organizations utilize the large amount of data that exists in the enterprise. Answering questions about how people currently work with knowledge - and how they can start to partner with AI to share, find and reuse knowledge in the enterprise - is essential for creating systems that are innovative, useful and responsible.

Image by Fré Sonneveld

FUTURE ENERGY MARKETS

2017-2019

Working with computer scientists, software engineers, privacy experts and industry stakeholders, I developed insights for the design of peer-to-peer electricity markets, underpinned by blockchain. I published this research in CHI, which is the premiere international conference on human-computer interaction. The paper received an Honorable Mention award (top 5% of submissions).

Image by Clay Banks

SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISM

2014-2018

To get a better understanding of how social media affects activism, I used a series of lab-based and online experiments to test how different aspects of the interface and different interactions affect participation, and how social identity processes mediate and moderate these effects. I developed insights for responsible design of social media platforms, and a framework for harnessing social identities to support activism. I published this research in the British Journal of Social Psychology, Computers in Human Behaviour, and Psychology of Popular Media (forthcomming).

Research: Research
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