Professor of e-Research in the Engineering Science Department at the University of Oxford; Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.
Throughout his career David has investigated emerging technologies in large scale distributed and sociotechnical systems, with a broad interest in society, technology and creativity, while also focusing on innovation in the process of scholarship. He has co-founded three interdisciplinary initiatives: the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, which is the world’s largest socio-technical research centre focused on the future implementation of the Internet of Things; the Software Sustainability Institute, cultivating better and more sustainable software to enable world-class research; and PRiSM, The Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music at the Royal Northern College of Music.
From an early background in electronics and computer science, David became closely involved in the Hypertext, Web, and linked data communities, in pervasive computing, and in digital social research. Today he focuses on living in the Internet of Things, on new methods of digital scholarship, and innovation in knowledge infrastructure. David's personal research is at the intersection of music, maths, machines and AI, empowering the creative human in music composition and performance.
David's work is distinctively interdisciplinary. He engages closely with multiple disciplines including humanities (digital humanities, digital musicology), engineering (Internet of Things, cybersecurity), social sciences (Social Machines, Web Science), information science (knowledge infrastructure, computational archival science), and computer science (large scale distributed systems, AI). In addition to his longstanding engagement in PETRAS and the Software Sustainability Institute, David's recent research projects include The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (SOCIAM), Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST), and Transforming Musicology.
David is responsible in Oxford for the Digital Humanities programme in TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and the annual Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. He is also a member of Cyber Security Oxford and the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories, with the Oxford Internet Institute. As a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute he is engaged in music and AI, Humanities & Data Science, and AI for Arts. He is an honorary visiting professor at the Royal Northern College of Music, and acts as Technical Director of the RNCM Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music (PRiSM). Since 2018 he has assisted in developing the UKRI Research and Innovation Infrastructure for Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.
The Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network has been awarded for two years (Hilary Term 2022 - Hilary Term 2024).