Professor of Computer Science and Society
Professor of Computer Science and Society
I read Physics at the University of Delhi, and Computer Science at the University of Cambridge before gained my PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (2003). After Postdoctoral research at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge, I took up my first faculty position at the University of Aberdeen in 2009 before joining the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in 2017 as a Reader.
My research intersects Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, facilitating societal access to information by mining, simplifying and summarising complex texts and by communicating data through language. I develop socially responsible AI technologies that bridge the divide between professional scientists and lay public, facilitate meaningful public engagement with science and foster attitudinal and behavioural change, particularly around biodiversity issues. I am the academic lead for three citizen science projects at the OU:
My current research investigates science learning within such citizen science projects, especially how citizens can learn alongside artificial intelligence from data. More details of my projects can be found at the Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence group pages.
Funder: EPSRC
Dates: 2021-2024
Sensory Explorations of Nature in School Environments. This project seeks to augment nature observation outdoors through developing variable-friction haptic interfaces that allow you to feel texture when touching an image on the screen... Read more
Partners: Imperial College London, University of Edinburgh, Learning through Landscapes.
Funder: NERC
Dates: 2020-2022
Delivering Enhanced Biodiversity Information with Adaptive Citizen Science and Intelligent Digital Engagements. This project seeks to construct good biodiversity models generated from available data, communicate these models well, and preferentially target effort to add records from times and places that optimally improve the model outputs...Read more
Partners: Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (Lead), University of York, University of Warick, et al.
Funder: EU H2020
Dates: 2019-2023
Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud. This project aims to design, prototyped and implemented services that address the Open Science challenges shared by Citizen observatories of biodiversity, based on the experience of participating platforms such as iSpot Nature...Read more
Partners: Agencia estatal consejo superior deinvestigaciones cientificas (Lead), Conservation education and research trust, et al.
Funder: EPSRC
Dates: 2019-2022
This project explores the potential for collaborative learning between humans and machines within the framework of environmental citizen science....Read more
Partners: Imperial College London, University of Aberdeen, Learning through Landscapes, St Alban's CoE Primary School.
Funder: National Geographic
Dates: 2019-2021
X:Polli-Nation (pronounced cross-pollination) is a biodiversity citizen science project embedded in primary schools...Read more
Partners: Imperial College London (Lead), University of Aberdeen, Learning through Landscapes, St Alban's CoE Primary School, Natural History Museum of Maremma.
Ao, S., Rüger, S and Siddharthan, A. (2024) CSS: Contrastive Semantic Similarities for Uncertainty Quantification of LLMs, 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2024), Barcelona, Spain
Colucci-Gray, L, Hancock, J, Islam, R., Sharma, N., Manches, A, Bowers, L, Lakeman-Fraser, P, Mozier, S, Newman, J, Reuger, S and Siddharthan, A. (2024) Seeing with hands and touching with eyes: recovering sensorial attention to nature in primary schools, First International Conference on Embodied Education, Danish School of Education (DPU), Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark
Sharma, N., Colucci-Gray, L, Lakeman-Fraser, P, Robinson, A, Newman, J, Wal, R, Rüger, S and Siddharthan, A. (2024) Image Recognition as a 'Dialogic AI Partner' within Biodiversity Citizen Science - an empirical investigation, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, pp. (In press)
Dodd, M, Döring, M, Valentine, C., Siddharthan, A. and Ansine, J (2024) Updating Species Dictionaries in the Citizen Science Platform iSpotnature.org with the Help of Its User Community and ChecklistBank, Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 8
Hancock, J, Colucci-Gray, L, Siddharthan, A., Manches, A, Sharma, N., Islam, R., Bowers, L, Reuger, S, Lakeman-Fraser, P, Newman, J, Mozier, S and Barry, R (2023) 'We felt the textures from nature and it gave us new ideas': Investigating sustainability education through primary school children's natural and digital haptic touch explorations, SERA Conference 2023, Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, United Kingdom
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Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
