RESEARCH INTERESTS

RESEARCH PROFILE

Social informatics is the study of factors that shape ICT adoption and use. A major part of my work in the past 15 years has focused on new computational research tools and methods, of which data science represents the current generation. A particular interest has been applying data science in the large-scale study of uses of social media, beginning when I led a multidisciplinary team working with the Guardian Newspaper on the Reading the Riots project, analysing tweets sent during the August 2011 riots. This work continued with funding from JISC, ESRC and EU Framework 7 and in my work as a Turing Fellow, where I co-lead the social data science interest group.

I collaborated Dr Alex Voss of St Andrews University and Wire Free Productions, an independent media company, on the BBC Radio 5 Live Hit List, a weekly show covering the top 40 stories in social media.

My current data science and AI related research includes: methodologies and practices for the development of trustworthy, safe and ethical AI systems, with applications of AI in public services, government and industry. These include decision-support tools in medical diagnostics, development of tools to assist in policy review and impact assessment, and in policy-making. I am a Co-I on two projects funded by UK RAI on AI ethics and safety, including AdSoLve. I am also a collaborator on Project Bluebird, which is developing agent-based tools for air traffic control. Current and recent policy-oriented projects include creating machine learning tools to assist in evidence-based policy review (in collaboration with Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government), systematic reviewing and in peace dialogue process management.

I was editor of the Health Informatics Journal from 2004-2020. I am a member of the advisory board of the Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT (ORBIT) and the Algorithms, Data and Democracy (ADD) project.

RESEARCH GROUPS

Human-Centred Computing Division

Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities

Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Bibizadeh, R., Procter, R., Girvan, C., Webb, H., & Jirotka, M. (2023). Digitally Un/Free: The everyday impact of social media on the lives of young people. Learning Media and Technology, 48.
• Procter, R., Catania, M. A., He, Y., Liakata, M., Zubiaga, A., Kochkina, E., & Zhao, R. (2023). Some Observations on Fact-Checking Work with Implications for Computational Support. Mediate workshop, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, June.
• Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., & Tolmie, P. (2023). Holding AI to Account: Challenges for the Delivery of Explainable AI in Healthcare. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, special issue on AI and healthcare.
• Arana Catania, M., van Lier, F., & Procter, R. (2022). Supporting peace negotiations in the Yemen war through machine learning. Data & Policy, 4.
• Tolmie, P., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Liakata, M., & Zubiaga, A. (2017). Microblog Analysis as a Programme of Work. ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
• Webb, H., Housley, W., Procter, R., Edwards, A., & Jirotka, M. (2017). The ethical challenges of publishing Twitter data for research dissemination. ACM Web Science Conference. Best paper award.
• Zubiaga, A., Voss, A., Procter, R., Liakata, M., Wang, B., & Tsakalidis, A. (2017). Towards Real-Time, Country-Level Location Classification of Worldwide Tweets. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
• Tkachenko, N., Procter, R., & Jarvis, S. (2017). Predicting floods with Flickr tags. PLOS One.
• Tolmie, P., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Liakata, M., Zubiaga, A., Randall, D. (2017). Supporting the use of user generated content in journalistic practice. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI). Best paper award.
• Wang, B., Liakata, M., Zubiaga, A., & Procter, R. (2016). TDParse-multi-target-specific sentiment recognition on Twitter. 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
• Zubiaga, A., Kochkina, E., Liakata, M., Procter, R., & Lukasik, M. (2016). Stance classification in rumours as a sequential task exploiting the tree structure of social media conversations. Proceedings of 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), December, pp. 2438-2448.
• Tkachenko, N., Procter, R., & Jarvis, S. (2016). Predicting the impact of urban flooding using open data. Royal Society Open Science, 3(5), 160013.
• Zubiaga, A., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Hoi, G. W. S., & Tolmie, P. (2016). Analysing how people orient to and spread rumours in social media by looking at conversational threads. PloS one, 11(3), e0150989.
• Webb, H., Burnap, P., Procter, R., Rana, O., Stahl, B.C., Williams, M., Housley, W., Edwards, A. and Jirotka, M. (2016). Digital Wildfires: propagation, verification, regulation, and responsible innovation. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 34(3), p.15.
• Greenhalgh, T., Shaw, S., Wherton, J., Hughes, G., Lynch, J., Hinder, S., Fahy, N., Byrne, E., Finlayson, A., Sorell, T. and Procter, R. (2016). SCALS: a fourth-generation study of assisted living technologies in their organisational, social, political and policy context. BMJ open, 6(2), e010208.
• Procter, R., Wherton, J., Greenhalgh, T., Sugarhood, P., Rouncefield, M. and Hinder, S. (2016). Telecare call centre work and ageing in place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 25(1), pp. 79-105.
• Bazerli, G., Bean, T., Crandall, A., Coutin, M., Kasindi, L., Procter, R. N., ... & Trewinnard, T. (2015). Humanitarianism 2.0. Global Policy Journal.
• Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Procter, R., & Greenhalgh, T. (2015). Designing Technologies for Social Connection with Older People. Aging and the Digital Life Course, 3, 107.
• Halfpenny, P., & Procter, R. (Eds.) (2015). Innovations in digital research methods. Sage.
• Wherton, Joseph, et al. Co-production in practice: how people with assisted living needs can help design and evolve technologies and services. Implementation Science 10.1 (2015): 75.
• Zubiaga, A., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Bontcheva, K., & Tolmie, P. (2015). Crowdsourcing the annotation of rumourous conversations in social media. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, pp. 347-353.
• Procter, R., Voss, A., & Lvov, I. (2015). Audience research and social media data: Opportunities and challenges. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12 (1).
• Maniatopoulos, G., Procter, R., Llewellyn, S., Harvey, G., & Boyd, A. (2015). Moving beyond local practice: Reconfiguring the adoption of a breast cancer diagnostic technology. Social Science & Medicine, 131, 98-106.
• Housley, W., Procter, R., Edwards, A., Burnap, P., Williams, M., Sloan, L., ... & Greenhill, A. (2014). Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response. Big Data & Society, 1(2).
• Burnap, P., Williams, M. L., Sloan, L., Rana, O., Housley, W., Edwards, A., Procter, R., & Voss, A. (2014). Tweeting the terror: modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 4(1), 1-14.

• Procter, R., Greenhalgh, T., Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Rouncefield, M., & Hinder, S. (2014). The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1-23.

• Greenhalgh, T., Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Hinder, S., Procter, R., & Stones, R. (2013). What matters to older people with assisted living needs? A phenomenological analysis of the use and non-use of telehealth and telecare. Social Science & Medicine, 93, 86-94.
• Procter, R., Crump, J., Karstedt, S, Voss, A. and Cantijoch, M. (2013). Reading the riots: What were the Police doing on Twitter? Policing and Society, Special issue on policing and cybercrime.
• Procter, R., Vis, F. and Voss, A. (2013). Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Special Issue on Computational Social Science: Research Strategies, Design & Methods.