Professor Alan Dix

Professor Alan Dix

Director of Computational Foundry, Computer Science

Email address

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Office - 301
Third Floor
Computational Foundry
Bay Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Alan Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry, and the mission of the Foundry very much matches his own personal goals: to do world-class research that makes a difference to real people. In Alan's own career this has included seminal work in human–computer interaction (HCI), including one of the core textbooks in the area, foundational work on formal methods and the user interface, and the earliest academic papers on mobile interfaces, on privacy and on gender and ethnic bias in machine learning. In 2013 he was elected as a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, one of the highest accolades for research in HCI. However, he has also been involved in a wide variety of practical commercial and non-commercial applications including agricultural spayers, submarine design, educational technology, intelligent internet interfaces, and technology for rural communities. His techniques are often eclectic, not least his one thousand mile walk around the perimeter of Wales that combined a technical investigation of technology at the margins, with more philosophical and artistic exploration. Not surprisingly he has also written and taught academically and practically about technical creativity.

Photos: https://alandix.com/academic/images/photos/

 

Areas Of Expertise

  • • Human-computer interaction
  • Technical creativity and innovation
  • Digital Economy
  • Social Justice
  • Physicality and digital product design
  • Algorithmic bias
  • Statistics Artificial intelligence
  • Machine learning

Career Highlights

Teaching Interests

Alan's formal role does not include core teaching.  However, he contributes occasional guest lectures on a number of topics and also create online materials as part of wider mission to the academic and practitioner community.  This includes his well-known textbook on human–computer interaction, a recent book on statistics and books on physical product design and artificial intelligence under preparation.  He also creates video and other online material for other academics and online courses for practitioners through Interaction Design Foundation including  recently released course on technical creativity.

Research Award Highlights