Our research

The creation, discovery and sharing of knowledge is undergoing a radical shift through the global-scale generation of information on the internet, the increasing prevalence of mobile, embedded and wearable technologies and the developments in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. At the Knowledge Lab, we pursue research into the ways in which digital technologies and digital information are transforming how people learn, work and communicate.

Research at the Knowledge Lab draws on multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies from across the sciences, social sciences and arts. We collaborate with researchers, educationalists, schools, museums, businesses, and other public and private organisations nationally and internationally.

Our research focus aligns with Birkbeck’s unique and longstanding mission to empower learners from diverse backgrounds to participate fully in higher education and in work by promoting equality of opportunity, social inclusion and a lively environment of enquiry and scientific discourse.

Our research is centred on three key questions:

What is the potential for intelligent technologies and personalisation to enhance and transform learning and work, and empower individuals and communities?
How can systems be designed in order to promote diversity and inclusion, foster equality of opportunity, fairness and wellbeing?
How can innovative computational models and artificial intelligence methods be leveraged to support people and organisations in data and text analysis, information searching and understanding, and knowledge creation?

Learning and work

Learning takes place in formal and informal contexts, in the workplace, in transitions between education and work, and throughout life. Informed by pedagogic theory and practice, we investigate critically the roles and influences of digital technologies in individual, group, community and organisational learning.
Working in interdisciplinary teams comprising computer scientists, educationalists, psychologists, teachers and other practitioners, we employ artificial intelligence techniques - including learner modelling, adaptive systems, connectionist networks, machine learning, reasoning under uncertainty, natural language processing, affective computing, audio-visual processing and recommender systems - to design and evaluate tools that aim to provide personalised support and guidance to learners and learning communities in creating rich learning experiences.
We research into the use of learning analytics and information visualisation techniques to support teachers and tutors, particularly when introducing digital technologies into exploratory learning environments such as educational games, microworlds, simulators and virtual labs, where their role is that of 'facilitator' or 'coach'.
Projects
Completed projects

People and systems

We pursue participatory design methodologies to build innovative mobile and pervasive computing systems, working in collaboration with user stakeholders, educationalists, healthcare professionals, scientists, businesses and other public and private organisations. We work to understand how people and technology interact, and how digital technologies can enable members of society to participate fully in cultural activity, healthy living, business and e-government.
Pervasive computing embeds wireless communication and computation into material entities. Cyber-physical systems link these material entities with their information representations on the Internet. The Internet Of Things is changing personal experiences of the physical world, fundamentally transforming the way that individuals and organisations interact and blending physical and digital experiences into one. We research into systems architectures, data sensing, privacy protection and human dynamics to explore how users’ activities can be exploited as a core ingredient in building cyber-physical systems.
This research has resulted in techniques for efficient large-scale data processing in e-health applications, monitoring biodiversity across the globe, supporting Parkinson’s disease patients, and improving the well-being of office workers in London. We engage in public debates about the costs and benefits of pervasive computing, and our research informs legislatures in the UK and the US.
We seek to understand how individuals and communities are enabled through digital technologies, user-generated information and collaborative learning; including how individuals come together to form communities of practice; and how individuals, communities and organisations create and share information, represent and co-create knowledge, learn and enhance their practice. Along with this there is a need to understand the barriers to inclusion so that people of all backgrounds can participate more fully in society.
Projects
- cloudUPDRS: A smartphone-based Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale diagnostic
- iBats: Citizen science application for data harvesting for the Iindicator Bats Programme
- Universal RFID Resolver: Standardization of federated resolution service for the IoT
- Birkbeck Learning App
- London Ambulance App
Completed projects

Leveraging computational models and AI

The ubiquity of digital technologies is making available increasing volumes and varieties of data and information, presenting new opportunities for creating, assimilating, critiquing and sharing knowledge. Applying advanced computational techniques from big data, information integration, information management, information retrieval, knowledge representation and logical reasoning, we design and evaluate tools to support users in finding, combining and visualising information and in creating, assimilating, critiquing and sharing knowledge. We explore the use of social network analysis to understand how people collaborate with and influence each other and how knowledge diffuses through such networks.
We explore the use of semantic web technologies to design more effective ways of searching and integrating information, for example by accessing rich datasets through ontologies, which enable the retrieval of information according to conceptual relations established iteratively between domain experts and computer scientists. We work with experts from across the arts and humanities, sciences and social sciences on the digitisation and management of specialist datasets and the design of analyses and visualisations that can support knowledge creation and knowledge discovery, in domains such as cultural heritage preservation, historical text analysis, and health informatics.
Large volumes of information are being published on the Web in the form of Linked Open Data and are being increasingly used in areas such as formal and informal learning, careers guidance, entertainment, health and culture. Due to the volumes, complexity and heterogeneity of the data, users may not be familiar with its full structure, leading to the need for mechanisms to support users in finding and questioning useful information. We are researching techniques from heterogeneous data integration, ontology-based data access and flexible query processing to assist users in their exploration and querying of large complex knowledge graphs across a variety of application domains.
Projects
Completed projects