About

I’m a professor in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, UK. My work focuses on data visualisation and analytics, data ethics and ethical systems design, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. I borrow from philosophy, biology and other disciplines in order to feed into the design and theory of such systems.

My 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. I was an intern at Xerox PARC before starting work as a researcher at Xerox EuroPARC, where I worked on information visualisation and early ubicomp systems, e.g. BirdDog, Xerox’ first Active Badge system. I left Xerox to start up an information visualisation group at UBS Ubilab, in Zurich. I then had a brief fellowship at U. Hokkaido, Japan, before starting at U. Glasgow in 1999. Within the university, I’m in the working group on ethical use of student data, the gender action plan working group, and I was on the project boards for GDPR and for the new enterprise service management system for the university. I’m the co-lead for the equality/diversity group in my school. I do lecture courses on Java programming (where I feel, in practical terms, sadly ancient and inadequate) and on advanced HCI (where I feel that HCI/CompSci is, in conceptual terms, sadly ancient and inadequate).

I am associate editor for ACM ToCHI, and was associate editor for the journals Information Visualization, CSCW, PACM IMWUT, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and BMC Bioinformatics. I think that I might still be on the editorial board for the Information Visualization book series from Springer Verlag, although it’s been a bit quiet for the last decade or two.

I’ve been an associate chair for CHI, workshop chair for ECSCW, demo/poster chair for UIST, doctoral colloquium chair for Pervasive, and panels chair for Ubicomp. I’m on, or have been on, the paper committees of ACM UIST, ACM CSCW, the biannual BCS conference, ECSCW, IEEE Information Visualization, Ubicomp, Pervasive, ECIR, CKIM, PerCom, WWW and… others. Along with Tim Kindberg and Eric Paulos, I edited a special issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing. I have also reviewed papers and books for the Journal of Object Technology, ACM OOPSLA, SIGGRAPH, EICS and TOCHI, Ubicomp, IEEE Visualization, Computer Graphics & Applications, Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics, Trans. Neural Networks and Trans. Man, Systems & Cybernetics, J. CSCW, J. Documentation, the Conference on Spatial Information Theory, the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, the HCI Journal, the European Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, the Intl. Symp. on Wearable Computing, SAICSIT, Spatial Cognition and Computation, Pattern Recognition Letters, Parallel and Distributed Computing, the BCS Computer Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Virtual Reality, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, British HCI… and others.

A number of people have worked for or been supervised by me, and then gone on to other things, including: Louise Barkhuus (U. Stockholm), Marek Bell (Snook), Barry Brown (Mobile Life), John Ferguson (independence), Areti Galani (U. Newcastle), Malcolm Hall (hedonism), Matthew Higgs (DataLab), Julie Maitland (Populus), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Stuart Reeves (U. Nottingham), John Rooksby (Northumbria U.), Kerry Rodden (YouTube), Jose Rojas (er… China), Greg Ross (ngmoco), Scott Sherwood (Dynamically Loaded), Paul Tennent (U. Nottingham), and Robert Villa (U. Sheffield). (Got to update/expand this list soon!)

Also, I was a Projektleiter in the Swiss Perform Space project, exploring the theory and practice of performance art, city spaces and new media, and was a judge at VIPER Basel 2003, an international festival for film, video and new media. I’ve done several seminars and panels in the area of contemporary art and new media, for example at Architecture Parallax in Barcelona.

I was one of the authors of the UK BCS/UKCRC Grand Challenge on ubiquitous computing. I was one of the panelists at the HCI 2020 event, and a VIP Guest at Microsoft TechFest. I’m in the EPSRC Peer Review College, was the external examiner for the MSc course on ubicomp/multimedia at University College Dublin, was a panel member reviewing German (DFG) Graduate School and Cluster of Excellence proposals, and have reviewed research grant proposals for funding bodies in Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, India, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, USA and the EU. I was an external referee for the ‘Intuitive Human Interface for Organizing and Accessing Intellectual Assets’ project based at the Meme Media Laboratory of U. Hokkaido in Japan. I am a referee for the Einstein Center Digital Future, in Berlin. I was the leader of the SICSA Future Cities theme. I was leader of a delegation funded by the British Embassy to represent British HCI to Japan in 2008, and in 2010 organised a JSPS/Embassy–funded return visit by a Japanese delegation. I’ve done keynotes at the British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD); Ubimob, the francophone conference on ubicomp; IHM, the francophone conference on HCI; and two of the Japanese 21COE Symposia on Ubiquitous Knowledge Networks.

My Erdös number is 4, as far as I know. (Paul Erdös → Ernst Specker → Karl Lieberherr → Paul Dourish → me.)