Research Projects
GRANTS
2024: Embedding Accessibility into Higher Education Courses and Programmes (Principal Investigator, PTAS grant)
2024: Understanding and Shaping Generative AI Integration in Computer Science Education (Collaborator, PTAS grant)
2020: Delivering Agile Research Excellence (DARE) on European e-Infrastructures (Collaborator)
CURRENT PROJECTS
Embedding Accessibility into Higher Education Courses and Programmes
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately one in five individuals worldwide live with a disability, totalling around one billion people globally. By 2050, the number of people who need assistive tools is expected to rise to over 3.5 billion. In the UK, it was estimated that 16 million people had some form of disability in 2021/22, which represents 24% of the population.
Therefore, teaching accessibility in Higher Education (HE) in the era of digital transformation, especially within schools like Informatics, Education, and Health in Social Science, is critically important. It can promote equity, help meet legal requirements, foster innovation, enhance user experience, fulfil social responsibilities, and prepare students for their future careers whilst making them more employable. Teaching accessibility is not only a moral imperative but also a practical necessity in today's diverse and interconnected world.
This project aims to investigate how we can embed teaching accessibility into courses and programmes within the School of Informatics (SoI), School of Education (SoE) and School of Health in Social Science (HISS) at our university.
Our research is driven by the following research questions:
RQ1: What are the perceptions, attitudes and specific challenges that educators, teaching support providers (TSPs) and learning technologists (LTs) in the SoI, SoE and HISS encounter when attempting to embed accessibility into courses and programmes, and what support mechanisms do they require to overcome these challenges effectively?
RQ2: How do HE students and alumni in the SoI, SoE and HISS perceive the incorporation of accessibility principles in their learning experiences, and what suggestions do they have for enhancing these aspects within courses and programmes?
RQ3: What are the perspectives and expectations of representatives from professional bodies (e.g., Teach Access, BCS) and relevant support groups in the university (e.g., Disability and Learning Support Service) regarding the integration of accessibility into courses and programmes in the SoI, SoE and HISS?
Understanding and Shaping Generative AI Integration in Computer Science Education
This project focuses on enhancing the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI (GenAI), into Computer Science (CS) programmes. Through an internal survey and collaboration with faculty and students from schools that include CS programmes (the School of Informatics, School of Mathematics and Business School), we will identify applications, challenges, and best practices specific to CS Education.
The project involves compiling internal case studies, conducting surveys, and focus groups, as well as developing recommendations on using GenAI in teaching based on the experience of our different communities. Our goal is to empower Schools, staff and students, to navigate the dynamic landscape of AI in education responsibly and innovatively.
Potential research questions:
1. What are current perceptions and attitudes of faculty and students from the Schools of Informatics, Mathematics, and Business School towards GenAI integration in CS programmes?
2. What approaches have so far been used by faculty towards this integration, and how have they been perceived by their students?
3. What challenges have faculty and students identified, or foresee, in integrating GenAI into CS programs, and how can these challenges be addressed?
4 What are best practices/ recommendations for effectively incorporating GenAI into CS Education?
PAST PROJECTS
OPS
The Optometry Pilot Study (OPS) investigated the socio-technical, professional and organisational aspects of optometry in Scotland, focusing on the potential for service innovation in ocular healthcare becoming possible through advances in AI methods for ocular image interpretation. The research was conducted between February and July 2021 and was funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) as part of its build-back-better campaign*. This required a local focus and short duration.
18 optometrists and 5 ophthalmologists were interviewed to: (1) identify their expectations and concerns about the establishment of the national image research repository and the deployment of AI-decision support tools in practice, as well as; (2) gather their suggestions about how eye healthcare services might be improved by using these digital tools. The main goal was to clarify aspects of primary eye healthcare conducted by optometrists as this is less well studied. A smaller sample of ophthalmologists were interviewed to better understand their working relationships with optometrists and their perceptions regarding a national image research repository and the use of AI-decision support tools.
Our investigation of attitudes focusing on optometrists’ roles in eyecare is novel. The following dominant findings were consistent with studies of ophthalmology and other medical disciplines:
near universally positive attitudes to applying AI and digital tools in biomedical
research to improve ocular healthcare.concerns related to the time spent on training, cost of equipment, but also impact of
the use of future digital infrastructure and AI decision-support tools on optometrists’ practices.
Our study revealed opportunities and potential innovations not previously foregrounded:
Respondents, particularly optometrists, anticipated transforming service delivery using digital infrastructure and tools.
They also envisaged changes to practice, standards, roles and responsibilities.
*This funding is administered and supported by the Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) centre in the University of Edinburgh https://ddi.ac.uk/.
Delivering Agile Research Excellence (DARE) - Usability Study
DARE is a project aiming to build a platform to help researchers in the fields of seismology, volcanology and climate to upload and download their data, share data, process data, implement their workflows, use external services to process their data, move data from one environment to another.
The aims of our usability study are to:
1. evaluate the ease of use;
2. evaluate the user satisfaction;
3. collect usability problems;
4. discover the impact of the platform on researchers’ productivity.
This project is a feasibility project focused on developing a prototype for a technology-based tool to support children on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to express their creativity during the idea generation within the Participatory Design process. Due to the weaknesses in communication inherent in ASD, asking these children to speak about their experience in using the system is challenging. Therefore, our project aims at embedding learning analytics into the prototype to operationalise the experiences of children with ASD when working with it.
Shared decision making (SDM) is increasingly considered as the best way to reach a treatment decision in a clinical environment. However, the use of SDM in practice can be obstructed by a number of factors, such as time constraints or lack of applicability due to patient characteristics. Our project, PrepDoc, explores how a Virtual Training Doctor (VTD) can help patients overcome some of these obstacles to effective SDM during doctor's visits. My role was to evaluate the PrepDoc tool with 65+ people around Scotland. The goal of this evaluation was to identify the reactions of this audience to the PrepDoc system, evaluate its suitability within Scotland, and elicit suggestions to improve it.
The ENVRIplus project focuses on developing common capabilities including software and services for environmental Research Infrastructures (RIs). In this context, the ENVRI Reference Model[1] (RM) has been created to help RIs cope with their complexity and to facilitate interoperability and resource sharing across environmental science domains.
My main role within this project has been to understand the use of the ENVRI RM with the purpose of improving the communication about it to various audiences. Over 9 months, I designed and conducted a series of studies involving researchers and RI experts which included: semi-structured interviews, observations at various research institutions in Europe, questionnaires, brainstorming and online surveys. I have developed a set of personas[2] to identify and describe the behaviours, attitudes, goals and motivations of different groups of the model's users. Based on that, I derived ways to improve and target communication about the model to each persona. In addition, I developed training materials adapted to different audiences to communicate and promote the reference model.
[1] A reference model is an abstract framework for understanding the entities of an environment and the relationships among them. It consists of a set of unifying concepts, axioms and relationships within a particular problem domain.
[2] A persona is a representation of a specific audience segment for a product or a service, and embodies users’ needs, goals and challenges
My postdoctoral position at the University of Bath was a great opportunity for me to further develop an authoring tool I had created during my PhD by addressing other groups of users (e.g. parents and children with ASD). My role there was to:
· design and conduct Participatory Design sessions with various groups of stakeholders
· conduct qualitative and quantitative data analysis
· elicit the system specification
· lead the design of the system (including low- and high-fidelity prototype),
· liaise with the programmer to implement the design specifications and subsequent iterative designs
· lead on the evaluation of the system from an HCI perspective (to complement the evaluation of the intervention)
· participate to the evaluation of the system effectiveness in addressing challenging behavior in children with ASD.
During this position, I employed a series of methods to include users in the design, development and evaluation of the tool (e.g. ethnographic studies, idea generation, low- and high-fidelity prototyping, as well as usability studies both with experts and users).
During my PhD, I focused on designing, implementing and evaluating an educational authoring tool to support practitioners who work with children with autism. Additionally, I investigated what roles might practitioners, and researchers play in the design and evaluation process, and how might their contributions differ. The methodology employed User-Centered Design, Participatory Design and Action Research, involving 75 practitioners and researchers in HCI, Education and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) across all stages of the design process. The methods included: interviews, focus groups, observations, constructive interaction, prototyping, and others.
The contributions of this research work to knowledge are as follows:
· The creation of a conceptual framework for social story interventions based on the empirical data and research literature with the aim of informing the design of a computer authoring tool for social stories;
· The design, development and evaluation of a computer authoring tool (ISISS, Improving Social Interaction through Social Stories) that helps practitioners write, present, and assess social stories for children with ASC;
· Empirical evidence from evaluation studies that using the authoring tool ISISS may improve practitioners work and the quality of the social stories produced with this tool;
· The exploration of the roles and contributions of different groups of participants in designing and evaluating educational tools.
Tactile widgets in mobile devices
As part of my MSc dissertation project, I developed an application with the purpose of exploring whether we can present contextual information to users in a low attention, ambient manner, through very short (<=300ms) tactile messages that encode information (Tactons).
Using Matlab and Audacity (a free open source digital audio editor), I created a set of waveforms, and I used a C2 Tactor produced by Engineering Acoustic Inc (https://www.eaiinfo.com) to transform them into Tactons. These Tactons were attached to keypresses on a virtual keyboard according to a pre-determined set of events.
To evaluate the system, I designed and conducted two studies involving 15 participants (students at the University of Glasgow). The participants were asked to identify the information transmitted through Tactons, while typing a text on a virtual keyboard. The evaluation revealed that the accuracy of identifying the information was increased with 10% compared with previous work (from 88% to 98%). The project involved statistical analysis on large data sets.
For more information visit the IDB Research Department website.