James is a PhD student undertaking an EPSRC funded PhD titled: “Social and Environmental Data Science”, supervised by Prof. Hywel Williams, and Dr. Rudy Arthur.
His research interests include investigating alternative unstructured data sources for improving our understanding of natural hazards and climate change, specifically social media data.
After completing a Mathematics BSc and Data Science MSc from the University of Exeter, he worked as a research associate (RA) between 2020 and 2021 where his research projects included:
• Social Sensing Kerala Floods. This project compared government flood impact data for the 2018 Kerala flood to three social media data sources. Results showed strong agreement between the government data and social media data, with the latter sources enabling real-time monitoring for free.
• Social Sensing for Resilient Cities. Facebook data regarding extreme heat was collected and analysed, with a dashboard produced to highlight the cabability of social media data for improving our understanding of heatwaves. This was presented to resilience representatives from the London, Athens, and Hague councils.
