The Open University proudly announces its success in the highly competitive AI Fairness Innovation Challenge delivered by the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Innovate UK. Out of 75 submissions nationwide, only four were selected for funding, with The Open University emerging as one of the coveted winners. This achievement underscores our…
On Friday January 26th Dr. Martino Mensio successfully defended his PhD thesis, with the title “Persuasion across the Political Spectrum: Quantifying Differences in Parallel News Reports”. Dr. Mensio’s PhD thesis delves into computational studies on News Media, focusing on parallel news reports, persuasion techniques, political leaning, and topics. The research examines language and persuasion techniques…
Following the signing of a new contract, which extends the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature (SN) to December 2025, KMi researchers Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne and Angelo Salatino spent two days at the SN campus in London. The purpose of the workshop was to gather all the relevant stakeholders from the various SN scientific…
Professor Peter Scott has been appointed as the new President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), starting on January 8, 2024, following an extensive global search. With a distinguished 40-year career in open and distance learning, Professor Scott aims to continue COL’s mission of providing quality education globally. The announcement acknowledges the significant…
On December 4, Kitty Chisholm gave a 3-minute talk, titled "Can Belief in Brain Plasticity Really Enhance One’s Career?", which was based on her work towards a PhD. Her presentation was an introduction to her dissertation which looks at the power of growth mindset interventions over a longer period of time. The intervention is delivered…
Many congratulations to Dr. Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath for successfully defending her PhD thesis with the title: “Language Models for Citation Classification”. Her PhD topic focused on large language models for citation classification and how this can impact several areas including research evaluation, literature discovery and summary generation. Suchetha’s panel was chaired by Prof. Bart Rienties, while…
Many congratulations to Dr Lucas Anastasiou on the successful defence of his thesis entitled: “Computational Argumentation Approaches to Improve Sensemaking and Evidence-based Reasoning in Online Deliberation Systems. Under the supervision of Prof Anna De Liddo and Prof Petr Knoth, Lucas’s study explored how computational methods can advance the current state of online discussion. His investigation…
The OU Analyse team, which works to identify students at the university who may need extra support, has been awarded the prestigious Educational Dataset Prize by the Educational Data Mining Society for their remarkable work with the ‘OULAD’ dataset. OU Analyse is a system powered by machine learning methods for early identification of students at risk of failing….
The CORE team are proud and excited to announce that our paper entitled ‘CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers’, was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com. This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both…
Congratulations to Dr. Agnese Chiatti, who brilliantly defended her PhD Thesis, entitled "Visually Intelligent Agents – Improving Sensemaking in Service Robotics”. Agnese’s thesis, carried out under the supervision of Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Enrico Daga, tackled the problem of service robots operating in the real world, which need to interpret correctly the environment around…
