Training

Aislinn is a PhD student in the Centre for Language Evolution. Her research combines behavioural experiments and agent-based modelling to investigate the role of language production biases in the emergence of linguistic structure. She is proficient in Python, R and JavaScript and is passionate about the use of simulation-based techniques for experimental design and data analysis.

Bhargavi is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, doing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophy, computer science and public policy. She is affiliated with the Center for Technomoral Futures and the UKRI Research Node on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance and Regulation. She has worked at non-profit research organizations and government institutions, where she studied the impact of housing policies on marginalized groups. In her doctoral research, Bhargavi is developing frameworks to guide the governance and regulation of autonomous systems and decision-making algorithms in various fields including health, robotics and finance. 

Brian Tsz Ho Wong is a PhD candidate (East Asian Studies) in the School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures. His research explores the networks of capital and power elites in the wartime Japanese Empire, and the use of private capital to fuel imperial ambitions. He is passionate about using digital tools (Gephi, QGIS and Google Earth) in his research. At CDCS, he is excited to teach and support the use of Gephi in humanities and interdisciplinary studies.

Chris is a PhD mathematics researcher with the MAC-MIGS Centre of Doctoral Training, who is affiliated with the Institute of Genetics and Cancer. His work is interdisciplinary and involves combining causal inference with genomics. He loves teaching individuals on how to get the most out of ‘big data’ by using data analysis techniques appropriately and accurately, and most importantly how to implement these in Python and R.

Fang Jackson-Yang is based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. Fang researches how people communicate prominent information in transitive events (e.g., “Jerry kicked the oil lamp”). She uses eye-tracking techniques to investigate when and how listeners make predictions of the endpoints of such events (e.g., the lamp fell on the floor). She also uses laboratory and digital corpus data to investigate how speakers use various sentence structures and other linguistic means to describe such events in different settings and what factors influence their choices.

James Besse is a PhD student in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. James’ research is on the implementation of e-ID systems, specifically looking at the EU Settlement Scheme. He uses text mining alongside social surveys and interviews to understand user experience with the EUSS. Broadly, James is interested in the social impacts of new technologies, and how digital methods can help to understand them. He is happy to provide assistance with R, statistics, web scraping, data visualisation and research design.

Ki is a PhD candidate at the Advanced Care Research Centre studying ways to enhance greenspace accessibility for older adults. She is a landscape architect with professional experience delivering construction projects and landscape assessments. Besides an interest in using QGIS and ArcGIS for geospatial visualisation and analysis, she expanded her exploration with aggregating geospatial data and performing further analysis with R to study the correlation between environmental variables and urban density. 

Martin Disley is a practice-led design researcher based at the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His critical engineering studio practice blends artistic inquiry and investigative computing, producing outputs in software, film, installation, and text. His PhD research explores adversarial design and investigative aesthetics as Research through Design methods for explainability and interpretability of generative computer vision.

Prior to pursuing his PhD, he worked as a software developer for a music technology startup and as a research engineer at the University of Edinburgh.

Rhys is based at the School of Health in Social Sciences.

Rhys is a psychologist researching adaptive behaviours and mental health in elite sports. His research makes use of statistical modelling with survey data, particularly investigating interactions to determine how context shapes the efficacy of “adaptive” behaviours. His preferred coding language is R, and he is passionate about using data visualisation techniques to communicate and simplify research findings.

Sarah Schöttler is a PhD candidate at the VisHub lab in the School of Informatics. Her research explores responsive visualization with a focus on geographic data and visualization. She is active in the visualization community and has previously worked as a visualisation and map developer for clients such as the PeaceRep consortium at the Edinburgh Law School. At CDCS, she is excited to teach and offer support with data visualization and mapping, web development, and general programming skills.

Sarah van Eyndhoven is based within the school of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, where she has recently finished her PhD in historical sociolinguistics. Her project explored the use of Scots language features in eighteenth century Scottish correspondence, sourced from the National Library of Scotland. Combining Handwritten Text Recognition models to automatically transcribe a large collection of written letters, with corpus software and statistical modelling, Sarah was able to uncover the influence of different social and political factors in predicting Scots usage in an underexplored area of historical Scots scholarship.

Xan Cochran (they/them) is a Research Masters’ student in Informatics, with supervisors in Informatics and Philosophy. Their research concerns the metaphysics of ‘levels’ in scientific discourses, and combines philosophical analysis with the computational modelling of epistemic communities. They hold degrees in English Literature and Developmental Linguistics, and have for the last decade been working as a tutor for the University, having tutored in the Schools of Informatics; Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences; Social and Political Sciences; Biological Sciences; Design; Music; Physics and Astronomy; Mathematics; Economics; and Geosciences. In their spare moments, they paint and write science fiction.