World-class data experts

We are a multi and interdisciplinary Institute, bringing together expertise in analytics and data science from across our University.

Our academics and researchers are leading the way internationally in advanced analytics and data science. We're shaping new thinking, accelerating discovery and nurturing bright ideas to improve lives.

Our experts

Core institute members

Professor Haris Mouratidis

Director of IADS and Professor

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Research interests: Security and privacy requirements engineering, cybersecurity risk prediction and management, cybersecurity threat intelligence, privacy by design, data security and privacy, internet of things (iot), 5g/6g and cloud computing security

Dr Spyros Samothrakis

Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of IADS

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Research interests: Reinforcement learning, machine learning, neural networks, role playing games.

Professor Alejandro Quiroz Flores

Reader and Chief Scientific Advisor

Department of Government, University of Essex

Research interests: Political economy, politics and economics of natural disasters, leader survival, econometrics

Dr Lina Barakat

Postdoctoral Fellow IADS

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Research interests: Decision making under uncertainty, service-oriented systems, optimisation algorithms, trust and reputation mechanisms, incentive engineering, machine learning, multi-agent systems, provenance of data, semantic modelling

Dr David Clark

Postdoctoral Fellow IADS

School of Life Sciences, University of Essex

Research interests: Quantitative ecology, microbial ecology, macroecology, modeling and statistics, bioinformatics, next generation sequencing

Dr Kitty Kioskli

Postdoctoral Fellow IADS

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Research interests: Cybersecurity, digital therapeutics, psychosocial and human factors, behaviour change, e-health, personalised behavioural medicine, long-term conditions, cognitive and psychological assessment and interventions

Dr Annalivia Polselli

Postdoctoral Fellow IADS

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Research interests: Econometric methods for panel data models, jackknife method, machine learning, labour and gender economics.

 Naomi Biggs

Executive Officer/Institute Administrator

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

Alumni

  • Professor Maria Fasli - Founding Director of IADS.
  • Dr Amanda Cole - sociolinguistics, language attitudes, language variation and change.
  • Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill - biological machine learning, computational palaeobiology, quantifying evolutionary convergence.
  • Dr Ana Matran-Fernandez - Brain-Computer Interfaces, machine learning applied to biomedical signals, Event-Related Potentials (ERPS), memory, decision-making, algorithmic fairness, neural engineering.
  • Dr Sefki Kolozali - internet of things, machine learning, semantic web, signal processing, time series analysis, internet of things in healthcare.
  • Dr Haider Raza - big data and analytics, Brain-Computer Interfaces, deep learning, transfer learning, non-stationary learning and domain adaptation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, EEG and MEG signal processing, AI in decision making for healthcare.

Visiting researchers

  • Dr Shitharth Selvarajan, Kebri Dehar University, Ethiopia
  • Professor Antonio Santos-Olmo Parra, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
  • Professor Luis Enrique Sánchez Crespo, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Honorary appointments

  • Professor Stephen Kavanagh QPM DL, Executive Director of Policing, Interpol.

Bioinformatics and biomedical scientists

Computer and electronic engineering scientists    

  • Professor Luca Citi - machine learning, learning from biological signals and data (EEG, etc).
  • Dr Adrian Clark - computer vision and its applications, including robot vision, vision in a 3D world, and astronomy, automatic construction of vision systems using machine learning and evaluation of algorithms, data visualisation and augmented reality.
  • Professor David Crawford - analysis of huge data generated by new multimedia and broadcast formats like high frame rate/extended dynamic range/multiview and ultra-high definition TV.
  • Dr Michael Fairbank - neural networks, adaptive dynamic programming, game artificial intelligence, financial forecasting.
  • Professor Maria Fasli - agent-based modelling, simulation, analysis of structured/unstructured data, machine learning, adaptation, semantic information extraction, ontologies, recommendation technologies.
  • Professor John Gan - machine learning for data modelling and analysis, dimensionality reduction and feature selection in high-dimensional data space.
  • Dr Michael Gardner - learning analytics, socio-technical issues, data visualisation.
  • Professor Dongbing Gu - applying data processing tools to process heterogeneous sensory information for robot navigation and control.
  • Professor Klaus McDonald-Maier - embedded systems and system-on-chip design, cybersecurity and advanced computer architectures, AI and data analytics.
  • Dr Udo Kruschwitz - natural language processing, analysis textual/unstructured data, information retrieval.
  • Dr Maria Kyropoulou - algorithm game theory, design and analysis of algorithms, and approximation algorithms. 
  • Dr Spyros Samothrakis - reinforcement learning, machine learning, neural networks, role playing games.
  • Professor Edward Tsang - applied AI, constraint satisfaction, computational finance and economics, agent-based simulations.
  • Professor Stuart Walker - large scale (4/8k) video data compression and streaming, self-service infrastructure containers for data intensive applications, hypercube-based code generation strategies for secure communications.
  • Professor Kun Yang - wireless networks, future internet architecture, network virtualization, cloud networking and applications.

Economists, finance and business experts       

Health and social care experts

Digital humanities experts

  • Dounia Bissar - new technologies for learning and teaching.
  • Dr Claire Delle Luche - experimental methods, such as eye-tracking, in psycholinguistics.
  • Dr Laetitia Vedrenne - technology-enhanced language learning.
  • Dr Laurel Lawyer - cognitive neurolinguistics, 'big data' approaches to EEG and fMRI, statistical methods in linguistics, stochastic and computational models of language. learning and usage, speech perception, automatic speech recognition, linguistic corpora.
  • Ignazia Posadinu – Technology and language learning, Computer aided translation and interpreting.

Legal, ethics and human rights experts

Statisticians and mathematicians

  • Dr Georgios Amanatidis - algorithmic game theory; graph theory; discrete optimization, operational research.
  • Dr Chris Antonopoulos – complex networks, complex systems, chaos theory, dynamical systems, computational neuroscience.
  • Dr Oludare Ariyo – medical statistics, applied statistics.
  • Dr Joseph Bailey - mathematical biology/ecology, individual and group movement, random walk theory, movement and time-series data analysis, mathematical education.
  • Dr Yanchun Bao – longitudinal data analysis; survival analysis; mendelian randomization; causal method (instrumental variable method, structural mean model); covariance modelling, machine learning.
  • Professor Edward Codling – animal movement and dispersal; random walks and diffusion; analysis of movement data; collective behaviour; human crowd behaviour; animal social network analysis; fisheries modelling, assessment, and management; modelling population dynamics.
  • Dr Louise Corti - quality assessment of big data, provision of access to large-scale datasets for research including licensing and privacy issues.
  • Professor Hongsheng Dai – bayesian statistics, computing intensive methods, survival and longitudinal analysis, graphical models and mixture models, machine learning, statistical forecasting.
  • Dr Tolulope Fadina- financial derivatives, risk measures, motality risk.
  • Dr. Vasileios Giagos - bayesian statistics, computing intensive methods, statistical applications.
  • Dr Stella Hadjiantoni - numerical methods for the development of recursive regularisation and machine learning algorithms, data science.
  • Dr Andrew Harrison - bioinformatics, scientific big data, cloud computing, sources of bias and errors in data, data sharing within the developing world.
  • Dr Junlei Hu - optimal robust insurance; actuarial and financial modeling and optimisation.
  • Professor Berthold Lausen - data science, biostatistics, clinical research, computational statistics, data analysis, epidemiology, public health, systems biology.
  • Dr Peng Liu - teaches: survival analysis (ma216); capstone project: data science and analytics (ma838); advanced capstone project: actuarial science, data science or mathematics (ma930).
  • Dr. Jianya Lu - applied probability, financial mathematics.
  • Dr Osama Mahmoud - medical statistics; biostatistics; causal inference; data science; clustering and classification; statistical modelling.
  • Dr Felipe Maldonado - supply chain & logistics - machine learning approach, operational research.
  • Dr. Yassir Rabhi - nonparametric statistics, survival analysis, time series.
  • Professor Abdellah Salhi - optimisation mathematical programming and heuristics (evolutionary computing, nature-inspired algorithms, the strawberry algorithm); numerical analysis data mining (big data) bioinformatics.
  • Dr Dmitry Savostyanov - high-dimensional problems using  low-rank tensor, modern numerical mathematics.
  • Dr Alexei Vernitski - machine learning in mathematics; reinforcement learning applied to knot theory.
  • Professor Spyridon Vrontos - actuarial and financial modelling, asset-liability management, evaluation of funds performance, predictability, risk management.
  • Professor Matthew Woollard - research integrity (replication/validation) of big data, curation and access to large-scale datasets for supporting research, ethical issues relating to the use and access to these data.
  • Dr Jackie Wong Siaw Tze - machine learning in actuarial science.
  • Dr Xinan Yang - dynamic programming, operational research.
  • Dr Jingjing Zhang - machine learning and causal inference.

Social and political scientists

  • Professor Tarek Al Baghal  - questionnaire design, quantitative methods, cognitive psychology, mobile data collection, social media data.
  • Dr James Allen-Robertson - data scraping, text mining, algorithmic power, practical big data ethics, digital culture.
  • Professor Nick Allum - survey methodology, analysis large-scale data, public understanding of science, social psychology of risk, social and political trust.
  • Professor Michaela Benzeval - collection and analysis of large-scale data, applied health research, health inequalities across lifecourse, biomarkers.
  • Professor Pete Fussey - uses, impacts and regulation of surveillance technology, the use of technology for social control, modes of urban digital governance (including smart city initiatives).
  • Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou - police and tech ethics, digital policing, surveillance.
  • Professor Meena Kumari - biomarkers and genetics data.
  • Professor Philip Leifeld  - social, political, and economic networks, computational social sciences, complex systems, comparative public policy and governance, agent-based modelling, regression models for network datasets.
  • Dr Sergio Lo Iacono - social trust; collective action dilemmas; web scraping; agent-based modelling.
  • Professor Peter Lynn -survey design, survey.
  • Dr Tara Mahfoud - intersections between science, technology and medicine.
  • Professor John Preston - artificial intelligence and further education.
  • Dr Carlos Solar - cybersecurity and cyber defence.
  • Professor Paul Whiteley - electoral behaviour and public opinion research, electoral forecasting using opinion poll data.

Human behaviour experts

Institute Research Fellows

Combining research innovation and career development

Are you passionate about your research field? Are you ambitious to develop your academic career? Do you aspire to make a difference? Join us on our unique research fellowship programme!