Talking technology

What are some questions you’re trying to answer with your research?

My research explores how technology can help people with communication disabilities in everyday settings. There's a really wide variety of challenges people might have with language. This may range from understanding, so reading and listening; to producing language, that might be writing or speaking. I've mostly worked with people with aphasia, which is a stroke-related language disability which affects all these aspects of communication.

People use technology to all sorts of degrees to help their communication, but also can find some standard technologies, for example banking apps, really challenging. And so, there's this space to use technology to support people in everyday settings, but also to improve technology so that it's more accessible to people with a communication disability. This is the sort of space I work in mostly.

What sort of technology or platforms do you use to do this research? 

The technologies that we develop can be very low-fi, like E-ink smart badges, inspired heavily by the hidden disabilities lanyards you might have seen. But we also use higher tech stuff: we've explored, for example, VR and AR interfaces to support communication.I think what's really key to the research that we do is we are very technology agnostic. So we don't just say, “large language models (LLMs) are really exciting, let's do LLMs”. Whatever we do, we do it very much based on what the user needs are. We think of the problem first, and we explore lots of design solutions with users, thinking agnostically about technologies – imagining ‘magical’ future devices, then mapping those onto the realities of current practical solutions that might be possible.

Are there any recent technological breakthroughs which have changed the way you work?

I have changed my thinking mostly from being heavily involved with people. I am not sure that new technology is really what we need, but a better understanding of people and the challenges they face in an increasingly techno-centric world. I am generally technology agnostic and am not that excited by emerging technologies unless they demonstrate clear gains for the populations I work with.

How do you find the communities of people that you work with?

I work with different aphasia charities: one is called Dyscover, and the main charity that I work with is called Aphasia Re-Connect. This is a mostly London-based charity that runs drop-in sessions for people with aphasia, and me and my team volunteer at these charities every week.

This means we give back to the charity in the sense that we're helping out with running the charity, but also helping impart technological knowledge to them. More importantly, it means that we get to understand quite deeply what it is to have aphasia.

Every couple of months we also gather a team of people from these charities together and do some research with them. And often we spend a lot of time, rather than looking at the solution, actually understanding what the problem is. It's a very complex space, and so we spend a lot of time really figuring out what the challenges are that people experience.

Who else works with you on this research?

In my team we have six PhD students and two or three post-doctoral researchers (postdocs). A PhD student is someone who's graduated their undergraduate degree and continues doing a degree that's oriented around a research area. A postdoctoral researcher is then somebody who's finished their PhD generally and is working as a professional researcher.

And I, as an academic, oversee people doing these types of roles. And these are the bits of the job I really enjoy because they get to do their own exciting thing under the umbrella of my research, and I get to hear about it every week. They'll go off and do research at a charity, or they'll build a really exciting new technology and I'll get to go with them and explore the technologies with end users. And that's the part of this I really enjoy doing, being very hands-on with end users and actually seeing them experiencing what we're doing. That's the thing I find most motivating.

What is a typical day like in your working life?

It is cliche to say no day looks the same, but this is true. I can be in the office one day, having meetings with PhD students all day or, on other days, going out on fieldwork in London or further afield. As I was recently awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, my teaching is limited so I am mostly engaged in research activities.

I am a morning person, so I generally do anything which I know will require creativity or focus in the morning. I generally like being in the office to work and do so most days. On a typical day, I meet my PhD students, researchers, and talk with collaborators; it is super interesting to see what they have been up to that week. I try to spend some time to read the latest research papers in my field and review papers for conferences/journals. I am also heavily organised in running major conferences, so spend a lot of time doing this.

What did you enjoy at school as a teenager? 

Going to university was never really a given for me; it wasn't something that I was definitely going to do. I was really interested in music as a teenager, so I spent most of my time doing music stuff outside of school. I got generally quite decent grades in most subjects, but was far from studious. I was very lucky to have gone to university and would not recommend this approach to education! In school, I really enjoyed music, sciences (especially physics) and English literature – mostly because I simply enjoyed reading.

What attracted you to study computing in particular?

I went to the University of York to study an odd mix of electronics and music technology and I got quite a brutal awakening. I got a really big shock in my first year of my degree because it was very challenging and it required so much more work than I was expecting – an intensive mix of engineering mathematics, electronics and programming that really required a level of work I’d never put in before. But I really enjoyed that experience. During my third year, I got involved in a computer interfaces module that I got really into, and I then did my undergraduate research project in this space also.

I fell into my field, Human Computer Interaction, by taking this module during my undergraduate degree. This was the first topic during my education that I just ran with and put in a lot of effort. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to do something in this space [Human Computer Interaction] and saw the potential to be involved in research. This is what started me to focus, take my education seriously and begin to consider a career in academia or industry that involved research.

What advice would you give to young people interested in a career in computing? 

I think it's really important to just build things. A lot of people who come to university really get hit by programming theory and practice. They find it really hard just to go from scratch to build even something simple; employing the theory that they have learned. So to learn programming, you just must build something. Whatever it is, just build it. That is how many begin to understand the core concepts.

I think what's really important is to be motivated to build the thing. If you're building some calculator app, which is the first thing that a lot of people learn, it's not going to be very interesting. Instead, think of some really silly idea, something really goofy.

Some of the first things I built were just silly sound boards. I wanted to learn touch interactions on iOS devices, and so I decided to make a sound board where you throw faces around and whenever they hit the side of the screen, they'll make a sound. This was a tangible project that I set myself up to do, and I was motivated to finish the project well and therefore learn the programming concepts simply because it was something I wanted to build. By building this silly interactive prototype, I improved my understanding of complex programming concepts, but also how to build simple physics simulations in code.

When you're transitioning from A levels to degree level, it's useful if you can reflect and think about what you are really interested in, so you have this intrinsic motivation when you advance. Many people, understandably, have outside pressures to do something that is going to offer a stable career. However, I think it is important you can find some way to find joy in the thing you end up studying.