Creative Industries, Human Communication and Behavioural Science

At Queen Mary we connect computing researchers with partners from creative industries, the local community, NGOs, psychologists, and the cultural and heritage sectors, with our research delivering economic, policy, environmental and social impact across the world. We consider not just how technology affects individuals but also how it affects their communities and the environment they live in.  

Examples of QMUL staff working in these fields:  

• Prof Pat Healey applies models of human communication, drawn mainly from Psychology and Sociology, to capture, modify and project communicative actions (e.g., words, gestures and expressions). He uses technology both as an experimental tool for the study of interaction and as an application area for testing and developing theories of interaction. He is Theme Lead for the Wellcome Trust PhD programme on Health Data in Practice. 

• Prof Mark Sandler is Professor of Signal Processing and Director of the Centre for Digital Music and leads the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music. This is now one of the largest such AI research groupings in the world, with around 80 PhDs, PDRAs and academics. 

• Prof Simon Lucas is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, with the main focus of his research on AI and Games: both using games an ideal test-bed for AI research, and in using AI to make better game-playing agents, generating new games and optimising game content and game parameters. He is in the leadership team of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence. 

• Prof Rachael Bedford is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and investigates how use of technology affects children’s cognitive, social and brain development. She applies statistical modelling to characterise typical and atypical development.
• Dr Alex Mielke is a lecturer in Psychology and uses machine learning models for the study of animal communication systems.   

Research Centres:  
Centre for Multimodal AI; Centre for Human-Centred Computing; Centre for Brain and Behaviour