Projects

In this page I centralise all there is to know about my projects. If you want to know how to write your own project proposal so that it is not completely terrible, click here. If you are looking for the list of projects I am interested in supervising, click here.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Projects

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1. Read this first

If you contact me and it is obvious from your e-mail that you did not read this page, I will ignore your request.

Because 2020 and 2021 were a dumpster fire, and the world does not seem to be going in an upward direction, I am progressively shifting my focus to supervising projects for social good, i.e. projects which have a net positive or at the very minimum a net neutral ethical footprint. What that means in practice for you as a potential student, is that I will not supervise the following types of projects:

On the other hand, I am particularly interested in projects which bring a net positive to the world, such as tackling disinformation/misinformation, helping mental health professionals, or anything related to text and language. I may be convinced to supervise something outside of my area of expertise if it is incredibly cool (e.g., building a VR game) but keep in mind that lacking any expertise in it, my assistance will be limited to general project management and writing/reading.

2. Proposing your own idea

If you want to propose your own idea, which you think fits in my overall themes (or is just so cool you might just convert me), I am giving you an easy 7 step format to structure your idea into a decent project. This is not the only way to do things well, but it is a way that does things well consistently, and therefore I am more comfortable in sharing it. The goal is to structure your idea in a way that helps you structure your actual project. At the start you should be confident in your understanding of point 1 and 2, and work your way into answering the rest of the questions.

Step 1. There is a problem in the world:

Step 2. That problem is important because:

Step 3. A cursory search shows me other people who tried to fix this problem:

Step 4. A better way to solve it would be to do:

Step 5.

Step 6.

Step 7.

Projects

Projects are usually idea blurbs, meaning that they are negotiable and can be discussed to reduce/expand scope or propose alternative ways of solving them. Successful projects will potentially lead to publications to which the student can take part in after submission of the dissertation. It is very rare that projects deemed publishable get a grade under 80%.

[Open investigation] Misinformation/disinformation detection

Type: research

In this project, you will investigate the detection of misinformation in a novel angle. This is a very general topic and I expect you to come talk to me with your take on it. Keep in mind that the space of potential research questions is bound by the availability of public data, and your capacity to acquire it.

[Open investigation] Code-mixed text classification in the languages of Malaysia

Type: research

Code-mixing is the mixing of vocabulary and syntax of multiple languages in the same sentence. It is a common practice in multi-cultural countries, and there is relatively little research on the building of effective language and classification models in a code-mixed context. In this project you will investigate code-mixed text classification in a Malaysian context.

[Applied] A transcription software for GDPR-compliant qualitative researchers

Type: software engineering

Regulations on privacy force qualitative researchers as well as therapists to rely on transcribers to turn their recorded interviews into usable text ready to be coded, due to the automated solutions not being GDPR-compliant. In this project you will build an application that uses an offline voice-to-text model such as DeepSpeech to help those researchers in quickly transcribing their interviews. The system will allow for the (1) import of a model as well as its (2) finetuning to the researcher’s voice by allowing them to read a specified text aloud, and offer a review mode to fix the model’s mistakes.

This project will build on the codebase of a previous project.

[Applied] Embodied Large Language Models and Where to Find Them

Type: research and software engineering

Large Language Models have come around and overtaken a large part of the public discourse about artificial intelligence due to their uncanny ability to generate seemingly human-like text. In this project, we want to investigate the relationship of embodiment and perceived intelligence on the acceptability of an embodied AI deployed in a higher education context.

[Applied] An Inoculation Game against Fake News

Type: research and software engineering

Note: This project will be supervised by me, in collaboration with Dr Tina Seabrooke from the department of cognitive psychology in the University of Southampton

Large efforts in reducing the nefarious effects of misinformation have focused on finding ways to inoculate people against it. One approach to do so is through the use of gamified exposure to fake and real news, in order to teach people to recognise one from the other. The goal of this project will be to develop and evaluate a fake news inoculation game using the latest evidence in cognitive psychology.

[Applied] Smart Ring Project

Type: software engineering

TBD - waiting for news from the manufacturer about accessing live data from their smart rings.