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My name is Sarah Menezes and I am a first year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. My research is in the area of Data Science and my topic relates to the climate change debate on social media platforms. My supervisor is Dr. Hywel Williams.

Prior to joining the University of Exeter in 2018, I worked in Software Quality Assurance and Testing for 16 years. After completing my Bachelor’s in Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology in 2002, I worked at Texas Instruments for over 3 years and then at General Electric (GE Transportation in Melbourne, FL) for close to 13 years. As a Software QA Engineer and Software QA Manager, I lead the testing, releases and installations of train management systems for US railroads.

My expertise in the software lifecycle and in agile development took me to a different path for the first half of 2018. During that time I worked as an Agile Scrum Master for Satcom Direct. As part of a scrum team I worked closely with the members of the team (Developers, QA and Product Owner) to support and improve agile processes.

Iraklis and I recently attended the Lake Como School of Advanced Studies summer school on Complex Networks: Theory, Methods and Applications.

The school featured a number of talks from prominent scholars in the field of complex networks. These sessions included both theoretical backgrounds and methodologies, as well as a number of experimental examples and real world applications of network science. During the Wednesday afternoon session, many students, including myself, presented on their recent work. This provided a really valuable opportunity to share new insights into the cutting-edge research taking place in universities across the world.

Beyond the academic benefit of a week’s study, we got to spend the week enjoying the weather of a Mediterranean spring whilst exploring the beautiful town of Como, situated in the foothills of the Alps.

Thanks to the speakers to the speakers for their interesting sessions, the other students for their excellent company and our funders for covering the costs. I really enjoyed my time at the school and look forward to putting some of the ideas I picked up to good use in the future.

New paper out – well done Arwen!

Arwen E Nicholson, David M Wilkinson, Hywel T P Williams, Timothy M Lenton; Gaian bottlenecks and planetary habitability maintained by evolving model biospheres: The ExoGaia model, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, , sty658, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty658

The search for habitable exoplanets inspires the question – how do habitable planets form? Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The Gaia hypothesis postulates that life influences the Earth’s feedback mechanisms to form a self-regulating system, and hence that life can maintain habitable conditions on its host planet. If life has a strong influence, it will have a role in determining a planet’s habitability over time. We present the ExoGaia model – a model of simple ‘planets’ host to evolving microbial biospheres. Microbes interact with their host planet via consumption and excretion of atmospheric chemicals. Model planets orbit a ‘star’ which provides incoming radiation, and atmospheric chemicals have either an albedo, or a heat-trapping property. Planetary temperatures can therefore be altered by microbes via their metabolisms. We seed multiple model planets with life while their atmospheres are still forming and find that the microbial biospheres are, under suitable conditions, generally able to prevent the host planets from reaching inhospitable temperatures, as would happen on a lifeless planet. We find that the underlying geochemistry plays a strong role in determining long-term habitability prospects of a planet. We find five distinct classes of model planets, including clear examples of ‘Gaian bottlenecks’ – a phenomenon whereby life either rapidly goes extinct leaving an inhospitable planet, or survives indefinitely maintaining planetary habitability. These results suggest that life might play a crucial role in determining the long-term habitability of planets.

Good news – we have received new funding from the EPSRC-funded CRUISSE network to work with the National Flood Forum around social sensing of flooding! The project will investigate how social sensing outputs can be made available to flood-affected communities and action groups.

Fully funded PhD position to start in September 2018 – apply now!

Online (mis)information and climate change: Using network analysis and machine learning to understand environmental debate

Despite widespread scientific consensus, climate change remains a controversial and politicised topic. On one side, environmentalists push for greater action to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change. On the other, a well-funded climate denial lobby promote doubt and confuse public opinion. This debate is actively pursued in online news and social media, where denialist blogs and commentators attempt to discredit the scientific viewpoint with a steady stream of contrarian articles and social media posts.

This PhD project will apply advanced computational methods to understand the online media ecosystem around climate change. In particular, it will seek to characterise the role of misinformation in online climate debates, looking in particular at social media accounts, bots and fake news sites linked to the climate denial viewpoint. Within this topic area there is considerable scope for the student to shape the project towards their own interests. The methods utilised will depend on the exact research question chosen, but are likely to combine complex network analysis, machine learning and text mining.

Find out more and apply here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=3037

Deadline: 8th March 2018