My Research

I am a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Information Systems and a member of the Computational Intelligence lab (in the Centre for Advanced Computer Science) at Manchester Metropolitan University, where I continue my research into Conversational Agents and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (see below).

Find me on ResearchGate and Google.

Oscar Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System

I was awarded my doctorate in December 2011. My PhD research (EPSRC funded) was within the Intelligent Systems Group at MMU and was titled Personalising Learning with Dynamic Prediction and Adaptation to Learning Styles in a Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System. The research involved the design and development of Oscar, an online Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System which aims to mimic a human tutor by dynamically predicting and adapting to an individual’s learning style whilst directing a tutoring conversation. Oscar delivers an ORACLE SQL revision tutorial for undergraduate students, and is integrated into the Data Engineering and Advanced Database Applications units currently delivered in the School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology at MMU.

Oscar Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System

See the Oscar Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System in Action!

A Conversational Expert System for Bullying and Harassment Policies

The project involved the development of a web-based expert system to support a Bullying and Harassment policy. A Bullying and Harassment policy was knowledge engineered into a knowledge tree representation, and a dynamic GUI developed to allow users to investigate their area of interest non-laterally. A conversational agent was included to allow natural language questions to be asked. The expert system was generalised so that other knowledge trees designed within specified restrictions could be ‘plugged in’ to the system.