Promoted colleagues, Alia Abdelmoty, Federico Cerutti, Martin Chorley

This event has ended.

Alia Abdelmoty

Title: Using Place for Profiling Users on Social Networks

Bio: I received a PhD in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh in 1994 on the topic of deductive and object-oriented databases for Geographic data handling. I was a lecturer in GIS in the university of Glamorgan between 1995 and 2000. I joined Cardiff in 2001 where I continued to work in the areas of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning and geographic data modelling. Through the years I was fortunate to work with many postgraduate students and colleagues in this area and managed to co-author over 70 research papers.

Abstract: Knowledge of users’ visits to places is one of the keys to understanding their interests. Combined with user activity on social networks, location adds an important layer of semantics that can be used for profiling users. On one hand, location data may be treated in a similar manner to other types of data collected on these networks, e.g. tags or reviews, using co-occurrence methods to find correlations in the data. On the other hand, the nature of our association with place provides some interesting properties that could be used to improve the analysis of this data. In this talk, I will give an overview of current approaches and highlight some challenges and open research questions.

Federico Cerutti

Title: Augmenting Human Sensemaking

Bio: After receiving my PhD in 2012, I worked at the University of Aberdeen as a post-doc research fellow. In 2015 I joined Cardiff University as a lecturer. In 2017 I led the successful proposal for a task in the DAIS-ITA program, a research initiative funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Army Research Laboratory. In the same year, ArgSemSAT—a solver of problems in abstract argumentation, whose development I led—was awarded as the winner of a track of the second International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation. In 2018 I was appointed as senior lecturer.

Abstract: My research aims at augmenting human sensemaking abilities to achieve causal insights. In this talk, I will first discuss how knowledge representation approaches dealing with qualitative uncertainty—such as argumentation theory—are useful to address such a research goal. I will then illustrate our current efforts for capitalising on it to achieve non-academic impact in the domain of international criminal justice. Finally, I will conclude discussing our current research towards uncertainty-aware approaches to augment human sensemaking. In a world that is (perceived as?) stochastic, we need a careful assessment of the distribution of random variables to then quantify the quality of the inferences we can draw from the causal relations we discover in our sensemaking analysis.

Martin Chorley

Title: So, you have a lecture and a lab…

Abstract: Research has demonstrated that active learning offers significant benefits to students over traditional passive delivery. These benefits can be realised with very simple adjustments to teaching style and planned activities. It is also possible to go further and remove the passive element from teaching contact time entirely. In this talk I will discuss some of the current research on teaching methods and student learning, and reflect on my personal experiences and experiments with flipped learning over the last five years.