KMi secured a new research project “Tracking Stars and Unicorns” funded by the UKRI Metascience unit, with an award of £310,646, to look at successful and unsuccessful proposals within all UKRI councils to track research trends, assess UK competitiveness against global competitors, and understand appropriate funding mechanisms to better support the development of Early Career…
KMi researchers have secured £106,078 from UKRI’s Metascience Unit to explore how large language models can streamline grant peer review without diluting fairness. The 12-month project, led by Prof Petr Knoth and Dr Francesco Osborne in partnership with Sheffield and Salford universities, will test four AI roles: triaging low-quality proposals, acting as a third reviewer,…
Vaclav Bayer, who joined KMi as a part-time doctoral student in 2020, successfully defended his thesis on 9 September 2025. His work asks a single, urgent question: can the data we already collect about students be used to tackle the issue of awarding gaps that negatively impact our marginalised students? Awarding gaps – the unexplained…
KMi is delighted to announce that the paper “Literary Hypertext, AI and Google’s New Web: an Aesthetic Discussion”, by Alessio Antonini, Lucia Lupi, Mariusz Pisarski and Sam Brooker, received the Best Paper Award at this year’s ACM Hypertext conference in Chicago. The study asks what happens to the web when AI becomes both author and…
KMi has won a 2025 OU Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET) Award for its work on the Student Facing Dashboard (SFD), demonstrating the valuable support that technology can provide for teaching and learning. Over the past two years, the OU Analyse team at KMi, alongside colleagues in FBL and IET, has developed a student-facing…
Dr Alexander Mikroyannidis, Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, UK, has been appointed International Expert in Distance Learning by the Agency for the Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES), Portugal’s national authority for quality assurance in higher education. The mission of the A3ES is to improve the quality of…
We are delighted to announce that David Goddard, one of KMi’s dedicated PhD students, has successfully passed his viva. David’s PhD, titled “Designing a Personal Awareness Agent to Ameliorate Information Overload,” explores the pressing issue of information overload and proposes innovative solutions through the design of a personal software agent. His research, supervised by Dr….
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI published its 2025 AI Index report this week, providing a comprehensive look at the global state of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The report, now in its eighth edition, tracks and visualises data on technical performance, economic impact, education, policy, and responsible AI to offer an empirical foundation for understanding the…
We are thrilled to announce that the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard, an Open University project led by KMi’s Prof. Miriam Fernandez, driven by the AI expertise and dedication of the OU Analyse team, has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious MK STEM Awards 2025 in the AI Impact category. This recognition celebrates the…
KMi is delighted to announce a new project, “Immersive Online Reading for Mental Wellbeing,” funded in partnership with the OU in Northern Ireland, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Verbal Arts Centre, and Belfast Metropolitan College. Led by researchers Alessio Antonini and Imelda Haran, the project will run until October 2025. Building on a…
