Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design at Imagination, an open and exploratory research lab at Lancaster University where he is also Research Director for the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts. He is Associate Director of the Institute for Social Futures, leading research on the Future of Cities and Urbanism. His work responds to the contemporary city as a series of systems, flows and processes, and is explored through experimentation and discourse addressing the nature of urban space: its perception, demarcation and appropriation. His papers have been published and presented internationally and collaborative creative work exhibited across the UK, China and the Ukraine. His forthcoming book, Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City will be published by Zero Books in 2016.
Nello Cristianini is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol since March 2006, and a recipient of both a ERC Advanced Grant, and of a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award. He has wide research interests in the areas of data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and applications to computational social sciences, digital humanities, news content analysis. He has contributed extensively to the field of statistical AI. Before the appointment to Bristol he has held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, and visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and in many other institutions. Before that he was a research assistant at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has also covered industrial positions. He has a PhD from the University of Bristol, a MSc from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Degree in Physics from University of Trieste. Since 2001 has been Action Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), and since 2005 also Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). He is co-author of the books 'An Introduction to Support Vector Machines' and 'Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis' with John Shawe-Taylor, and "Introduction to Computational Genomics" with Matt Hahn (all published by Cambridge University Press).
I am one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture. Since 1995, I have published a dozen books which have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Italian and other languages. These include An Introduction to Visual Culture and (as editor) The Visual Culture Reader. In 2013, my book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke, 2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. My new How To See The World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies and More is just out from Basic Books.
Nathan Kerrigan is a Research Assistant at Coventry University. He uses ethnographic approaches to explore a number of issues around identity, community and exclusion. This research tends to examine the ways rural identities are maintained and protected from wider social pressures such as urbanisation, neoliberal expansion and population growth. In this, he has focussed on the ways in which prejudices, such as racism, against minority ethnic groups are worked up as unintended consequences.
Dr Porter's interests, qualifications and experience span a range of built environment disciplines including landscape architecture, urban design and architecture. Following training at the University of Melbourne (PhD, M.Arch, Grad Cert L.Arch, BPD) Nicole taught landscape theory within the landscape program at Melbourne. In 2008 Nicole was appointed as lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the University of Canberra, where she taught a number of design studios, with projects ranging from individual residential gardens through to urban interventions / installations, critical urban design scenarios and the design and management of National Park landscapes. Her current role at the University of Nottingham includes architecture studio teaching and research with a strong landscape and place making focus, as well as renewable energy and GI provision in heritage landscapes. Nicole has practiced as an urban designer with the Australian Capital Territory, Canberra, where she engaged in master planning work and strategic policy research. Nicole led the production of the PIA award winning Molonglo Valley Place making guide (2010). She is an academic member of the Landscape Institute.
