School of Geography - Faculty of Environment

PROJECTS & WORK IN PROGRESS

Current projects :

• I spend much of my time with my students working on agent-based social modelling. We're trying to model societies from the individual level up. You can find out more about the people involved at the bottom of this page or on our research group webpage.

• I'm a member of the TALISMAN: Geospatial Data Analysis and Simulation National Centre for Research Methods project, which links CASA at UCL and CSAP at the University of Leeds, and which will develop methods for geospatial data analysis and simulation.

• I'm also part of a project to build a "science-and-arts" development in a quarry in the southern Yorkshire Dales: part of our YQA initiative.

• I also spend some time developing new interfaces that allow people to interact with geographical and non-geographical data on computers/the web. These interfaces are some of the building blocks we use in our online democracy work. I'm currently working on a fuzzy Geographical Information System that you can use to record "vernacular" geographical terms like "The East End", or "Down by the Gasworks". You can find out more information here. I'm also planning an interface based on the work of Ramon Lull, a 13th Century theologian and poet.

• In addition I'm engaged in a project to aid wider public participation in decision making with Richard Kingston (now at Manchester), and Steve Carver.

  The widening public use of the www means that it could be used to bring a higher degree of democracy to government. The technology gives every person with access to a public or private internet connection the ability to provide information, and to access information themselves that may help them make informed decisions. The technology also allows those interested in the public's decisions the ability to collect this information from a wide spread population and provide feedback. Information collected this way has the advantage of being in an easily processed form. Three test projects are being developed: a large scale project to aid public contributions to the debate over nuclear waste disposal, a medium scale project looking at public participation in the development of a national park, and a project to allow the villagers of Slaithwaite to decide how they would like to see their area developed.

  There's a online paper explaining what we've been trying to do.

• On the glaciology side, I'm working on research into the way glaciers change pro-glacial sediments. This is important for all kinds of reasons, including how glacial streams are used for power and drinking-water.

Current grants held :

• The SECSE project is funded by the EPSRC.
• The YQA project is funded by Natural England.