School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Research Fellow in a recently launched ERC Advanced Grant project called WARSHARE, where we are trying to engage generative AI on to Telegram channels of Ukraine war coverage to parse and answer questions. We are setting up a research team with PhD scholars, MSc researchers and other technological groups. This project will grasp the new ways and the new scale at which an array of actors can participate in warfare, via the massive growth in use of digital apps, services and platforms. But at the same time, it will experiment with an accelerating revolution in machine-learning and AI methods which enable not just the mining and measuring of online behaviour at scale, but also to interrogate the multiple modes of communication (messages, images, video, memes and emojiis) that together shape participation and meaning in warfare. This project will innovate through experimental testing of research questions in using emergent developments in AI. These enable new modes of mining, aggregating, representing and analysing the content and interactions on multimodal social media platforms, and how they are exploited for war. 

My background is computer science and informatics but I have been involved with Peace and Conflict technologies analysis for quite some time now, having worked on PeaceTech in the Edinburgh Law School research group PeaceREP as a Marie Curie Fellow. My areas of research and teaching being geomatics and geo-spatial technologies, I work towards intelligent geospatial analytics merging remotely sensed data, navigation technologies, informatics and GIS together, which are proving a strong platform to progress towards sustainable smart societies, through research, development and teaching. Previously, I was a Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow on data-driven innovation at Edinburgh University under TRAIN@ED project working with peace-building processes compiling spatial data collected online, using AI, NLP and geo-visualization. This was aimed towards setting up a data centered research centre “PeaceTech Edinburgh” to aid United Nations peace-building tasks through geospatial intelligence. Detailed work background can be found here.