News

Recently, Michelle and Tristan had the opportunity to present our work tying together social media, the weather and climate change to the XCS group here in the University. It was a great chance to connect with other researchers and share their work with new audiences.

Michelle presented her work looking at the use of Twitter data to ‘nowcast’, that is looking at how tweets can be used to augment traditional sensors to measure the impacts of storms, floods and other weather events.

Tristan shared his work studying how people share information about climate change on Twitter, in particular how polarisation in interactions extends to media choices.

Shortly before Christmas, I attended Complex Networks 2018 in Cambridge. It was a great opportunity to meet other scholars in the field of network science and hear about the latest research from around the world.

This conference published our recent paper studying projections of bipartite networks, which I presented to the other attendees. Many valuable questions and discussions followed the presentation and I’m grateful to all those that were interested for their insightful comments.

Many thanks to the organisers for an excellent conference.

I started this year as a research fellow supervised by Hywel Williams. I am working on the development of the Institute of Coding Career Coach. I am investigating how we can manage social data in order to leverage them efficiently. My topics of interest are machine learning and natural language processing (NLP).

Previously, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Aix-Marseille. Throughout this, I focused on information retrieval and NLP, in the context of a digital scientific library. I designed algorithms in order to exploit the possibilities of digital access to scientific information.

For our Christmas celebration, we attended an escape room. Split into two teams, we were tasked with saving the human race by recovering a sample of a non-aging serum and discovering the formula for the most dangerous toxin ever created. Fortunately, we all managed to save the world and escape in time for our dinner reservation.

We wish everyone all the best for a happy and successful 2019.

I’m a first year PhD student supervised by Tim Lenton, Hywel Williams and Chris Boulton. I will be working to quantify the impact of changing climate variance on ecosystem resilience. Initially I will be focusing on changes in vegetation patterns using remote sensed data in Google Earth Engine, with the aim of expanding this study by using ecological models.

Previously I studied BSc Mathematics at the University of Bristol, which I graduated from in 2017. Throughout this, I focused on applied mathematics, while also developing an understanding of wider environmental issues and sustainable development.

Following this, I undertook the MSc Climate Change Science and Policy course at the University of Bristol. For my research project I studied the marine carbon cycle with the model cGENIE, with a focus on the impact of rain ratio sensitivity and variation on the wider carbon cycle.