I spend most of my time organising workshops, making podcasts, and running the School of Cybernetics 2021 PhD cohort program these days, so most of my research is in fact driven by my fantastic students. I see my supervisory role as that of a guide — someone who’s job it is to help them find their way through the sometimes winding landscape that describes most research projects (and careers).
There are some themes to my current work, though. I have an interest in creating trustworthy autonomous systems that remain trustworthy even when deployed far from where they were originally created. This can mean many things, and is always contextual. What matters for a voice assistant might not matter quite so much for an autonomous vehicle, but there are still commonalities in the way we tease out what matters, and why, and what that means for what we create.
I also have a fascination for how humans work with technological systems to achieve their goals, probably stemming from my time in nuclear physics. All my work there was made possible by fairly complex technological systems, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how the design of those systems shaped what we thought we knew. I’m exploring this more through Human Machine Collaboration 2022, a workshop some colleagues and I are planning for the end of this year.
I think transdisciplinary education (which my supervisor sometimes describes as a cake baked with many knowledges) is becoming increasingly essential in this complex world we live in, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what this looks like and how to do it well. This builds on my experience creating the hands-on half of the School of Cybernetics Masters of Applied Cybernetics with John Debs way back in 2019. I’ll be presenting at EGU 2022 on some of the work colleagues and I have been doing in the School of Cybernetics and beyond on this topic in May.
And finally, I still have some publications from my life in nuclear physics trickling through the long pipeline that is nuclear physics research. It’s a fun chance to connect with former colleagues and keep up with what’s going on in a landscape I once knew so well.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, please reach out. I am not taking on new PhD students right now, but I’m always looking for collaborators.