Meet Our team
Otar Akanyeti
Otar Akanyeti is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University. His research focuses on developing artificial intelligence, data science and robotics solutions to aid knowledge discovery in life sciences, and has expertise in multi-modal data analysis, pattern recognition and modelling. He is the Principal Investigator in “Automatic Assessment of Gait Impairment and Recovery of Stroke using Smartwatch” study funded by the NHS Wales (portfolio ID: 43991). He is a Co-Investigator in UK Miscanthus AI (EP/Y005430/1) and EU iNavigate (873178, H2020-MSCA-RISE-2019) projects. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in leading multidisciplinary journals, including Nature Communications, PNAS, Cell reports and Royal Society of Proceedings B.
Sophie Bennett-Gillison
Sophie is a lecturer in Management and Business, her research is primarily focused within the Creative Industries; specifically, it considers the way in which this sector can inform current organisational practice and policy. Sophie’s recent project considers the use of VR in Craft and how this can be used in art-inspired physiotherapy. Previous work involves a study of Craftspeople and Artists based in Mid and West Wales, examining how creative people balance the need to both earn an income and gain self-fulfilment from work to maintain successful creative enterprises, and the wider implications of this within both an organisational and regional economic context.
Sophie is part of the organising team for the annual AI Symposium and, also, the Data Science Seminars. The aim of both activities is to highlight the multidisciplinary nature of artificial intelligence and data science research in areas such as exploration/discovery, predictive modelling, creation, behaviour analysis, theory development, ethics, interventions, and enabling technology.
John Doonan
John Doonan is Director of the National Plant Phenomics Centre, hosted within IBERS, Aberystwyth University. He has had a long term interest in utilising state of the art quantitative imaging approaches to dissect the basic biological mechanisms underpinning growth and development (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=6KcPHw8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate). Non-destructive non-contact methodologies provide repeated measurements of the same individual subject, allowing us to ask questions about the effect of environment or of management on outcomes. Scale ranges from sub-cellular to whole organism, and for crops, to the landscape scale. He is the Principal Investigator on UK Miscanthus AI (EP/Y005430/1) and involved in a number of other plant phenotyping related projects (https://www.plant-phenomics.ac.uk/).
Anne Harris
Anne’s background is as a Project Manager and administrator in the Public Sector. She has worked in Aberystwyth University since 2019 and has extensive experience in providing support to multi-discipline projects. More recently she has been involved in aspects of the Aberystwyth University AI Research Hub.
Aloysius Igboekwu
Aloysius Igboekwu is a Senior Lecturer in Finance and the Director of Postgraduate Studies at Aberystwyth Business School. His research focuses on investor and market behaviour, primarily through the ‘fast and frugal’ reasoning framework. His recent projects investigate market sentiments and how this influences asset pricing, performance, and investment in general.
In recent years, Aloysius’ research interest included using artificial intelligence (AI) in aggregating and constructing sentiment indices based on investors’ behaviour on various online discussion forums, AI in wealth management advisory and AI ethics research. He is the Alan Turing Institute’s Theme Champion for the Economy, Finance and Autonomous Systems group. Aloysius had years of experience in the banking sector before coming to academia.
Helen’s research is in the field of computer graphics and data visualisation, with a focus on HCI and helping people to get more from their data. She has worked with collaborators in many areas to explore interdisciplinary connections, including psychology, archaeology, sports science, geography, the creative industries, criminology, and international politics. Since 2016, Helen has been working as part of Aberystwyth University’s ExoMars team, developing image processing and visualisation techniques for this ESA mission to Mars, including exploring how AI could streamline data processing. Most recently, Helen has been working with an interdisciplinary group exploring multispecies politics and interactions, with a focus on how AI is being woven into our lives, particularly in knowledge generation and creative practice
Professor Huw Morgan leads the Solar System Physics research group, and his research interests are focused on developing new data analysis tools for interpreting solar atmospheric observations and for forecasting space weather, including government funding to develop new forecast systems for the UK Met Office. The future of space weather forecasting is in AI, and our team at Aberystwyth are involved in preparing benchmark datasets, and developing frameworks for automated detection and characterisation of solar storms, and their predicted time of arrival at Earth using machine learning methods.
Faisal Rezwan
Faisal is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science. His research interest mainly involves in artificial intelligence, machine learning and pattern recognition for analysing, understanding and improving computational prediction of disease, phenotypes and functions relating to human health. He is leading a number of AI/ML projects. Among them “Utilisation of recorded voice samples for developing a machine learning framework to predict pulmonary functions” and “A 3D electrocardiogram (ECG) analyser model for predicting cardiovascular diseases” are the two most notable projects. He is also collaborating several ML projects in plant and animal sciences. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in leading multidisciplinary journals, including Nature Communications, Clinical Epigenetics, Nucleic Acids Research and Genomic Research. I was also awarded the prestigious Turing fellowship and his research at Turing included a pilot project applying deep learning approach on patient data from Electronic Health Record Systems (EHRS).
Yasir Saleem Shaikh
Yasir is currently a Lecturer in Computer Science at Aberystwyth University, United Kingdom. His research interests include artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, vehicular networks and wireless networks. He was part of EU H2020 WISE-IoT project from 2018 to 2020. He is recently working on applying AI to vehicular networks and smart cities. More specifically, AI in vehicular networks for data offloading and trust management, and AI in smart cities for developing a data pre-processing tool. He is currently investigating the application of AI to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and autonomous vehicles. Besides, he is in the TPC of various international conferences (e.g., Globecom, ICC) and is a reviewer of various international journals and conferences.
Martin Swain
Martin Swain is a Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, based in the Department of Life Sciences (DLS) and the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS). He has a background in Physics and Computing Science, and his research interests are primarily in genomics and the analysis of large datasets of biological sequences, with applications to food systems, crops, and parasites and vectors. He has been involved in several high-profile genome assembly projects, including that of the Tsetse Fly and the snail vector of Schistosomiasis, as well as a numerous genomes and transcriptomes from plants and microbes. He is also interested in mathematical modelling and the simulation of biological systems – including ecological interactions, metabolic flux balance analysis, and the physics of swarming bacteria. He currently coordinates the high-performance computing infrastructure in DLS and IBERS; and is a member of the Infrastructure Committee for Supercomputing Wales.
Myra Wilson
Myra Wilson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, specialising in AI and Robotics. Her research interests are evolutionary algorithms and biologically inspired robotics. In collaboration with Airbus, she has used evolutionary algorithms to position Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) to improve network communication between ground based units. She is currently the president for the International Society for Adaptive Behavior (ISAB) which runs the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior conference and the Adaptive Behavior Journal,
Christine Zarges
Christine is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on heuristic search and optimisation. She is particularly interested in the theoretical analysis of randomised search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms and artificial immune systems with the aim to understand their working principles and guide their design and application. She is also interested in applications in combinatorial optimisation as well as computational and theoretical aspects of natural processes and systems. She is an editorial board member of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), Associate Editor of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier), and has been involved in the organisation of various conferences in the field, most importantly GECCO, PPSN, FOGA and EvoStar. Christine is a member of the Executive Board of SPECIES, the Society for the Promotion of Evolutionary Computation In Europe and Surroundings, and a Management Committee member for the UK in European research networks concerned with Randomised Optimisation Algorithms, currently COST action CA22137.
Reyer has 20+ years collaborative research experience with clinical/biology experts covering the development of machine learning and medical/biological image/data analysis techniques. More recently, he has also been working at the interface with digital repositories and represents Aberystwyth University at Supercomputing Wales. Current funding includes UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Advanced Computing (EP/S023992/1), Miscanthus AI- Plant Selection and Breeding for Net Zero (EP/Y005430/1), and Artificial Intelligence in the Biosciences (BB/Y006933/1).