Dr. Brian Davis
I am an Associate Professor in Computing, Funded Investigator and Research Challenge Leader with the RI funded ADAPT Centre. Prior to taking up my appointment in 2019, I was a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University. FromJune 2014- August 2017, I was a ResearchFellow,AdjunctLecturerandResearch Unit Leader attheINSIGHTCenter for Data Analytics, NUIGalway(NUIG), where I ledtheKnowledge Discovery Unit,focusingon the specificresearchareasof: Natural Language Processing, Data Visualization and Knowledge Discovery from heterogeneous data sources (text and graph). I was charged with managing the SW1 work package of the SFI Insight Grant. In addition, I was Principle Investigator of two SFI co-funded Targeted Projects (Elsevier and DataLive, respectively), Furthermore I was Coordinator of a 3 year Horizon 2020 Innovation Action – SSIX - Social Sentiment Financial Indexes (Grant No 645425).
Research Interests
My original expertise intersects with Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Ontology Development, however I have expanded and diversified my research capacity over the years to opinion mining, and multilingual opinion mining of social media (application in finance, politics and online safety). Philosophically, I am orientated to bridging the gap between computational linguistics/language processing research and the implementation of practical applications with potential real-world use. Hence in the context of modern neural NLP, I often focus on the construction of practical/real world language processing systems whose costs and outputs are not only measurable and predictable but reusable, controllable and explainable. Since arriving in DCU, I have grown my own NLP research team, which focuses on the following language processing applications i) pipelined neural architectures for building Data2Text Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems ii) bias detection and removal with the context of resume text analysis in the hiring and recruitment domains iii) applications of NLP to cyberbullying detection in short noisy texts domains in collaboration with the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC) located in DCU’s Institute of Education.
Teaching Interests
I have over eight years of formal lecturing experience. My current role involves module design, planning, delivery and assessment as well as feedback and course evaluation. I engage in large and small group teaching at undergraduate level, delivering two modules: i) CA167 to 1st year data science and mathematics students and ii) CA341 to 3rd year computer science students. I also teach introductory programming to non-computing postgraduate students; modules CA598 and CA5980 respectively. Student groups range from full-time, part-time to adult learners. Delivery modes for these modules have ranged from campus-based, to online delivery and most recently a blended learning approach. I have also co-developed an asynchronous online learning module on machine translation, CA681I, which is offered by Skillnet Ireland via FutureLearn. Furthermore, I regularly engage in taught undergraduate and postgraduate student supervision and examination. I currently supervise one full time PhD student, funded by the Irish Research Council and Google and one part-time final year doctoral student, funded by the ADAPT Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre. I have graduated four PhD students (two as primary supervisor and 2 as co-supervisor) as well as one research masters (primary supervisor). Furthermore, I have supervised up to 14 master dissertations and 5 final year undergraduate projects to completion. I am highly engaged in continuous professional development, having recently completed a professional teaching and learning qualification to the Masters level (90 ECTs) at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning(CELT), National University of Ireland, Galway. My final MA dissertation specialised in remote research supervision.
I am highly engaged in continuous professional development, having recently completed a professional teaching and learning qualification to the Masters level (90 ECTs) at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning(CELT), National University of Ireland, Galway. My final MA dissertation specialised in remote research supervision.