CDT Supervisors
Our training programme has a hugely diverse community of over 90 supervisors from across 12 different Schools and Units at the University of Edinburgh. The intention is that all CDT students will be supervised by at least two supervisors – a primary supervisor, and a second supervisor from a different discipline or school who offers complementary expertise to the primary supervisor.
Below is a list of the academics who could supervise students on the CDT – this will be updated over the coming months to include more information on supervisors, including which CDT skills domains they have expertise in. We also recommend potential applicants take a look at some of the research institutes and groups that many of the supervisors are affiliated with. This includes:
Edinburgh NLP
Institute for Design Informatics
Centre for Speech Technology Research
Centre for Technomoral Futures
Regulation and Design Lab
Supervisors are listed here under the CDT Skills Domain that they primarily identify with; however, many are very happy to explore projects in other skills domain areas. Furthermore, you are not limited to proposing supervisors listed on this page – however, those listed here have engaged with the CDT and flagged their interest in supervising our PhD students.
Supervisors – by first skill domain
Co-creation and NLP futures
Human-AI co-creativity, Philosophy of technology, Creative agency, Computational creativity
Service design, Futures methods, Fintech, Licensing & rights management, Decentralised technologies
Education, Cultural heritage, Speculative methods, Futures
Human-AI interaction, Participatory design, Collaborative and co-operative technologies, Social experience of technology use
School, Education, GenAI, Children
Environmental sustainability, Community-focused research, Engaging non-experts with computing
Designing for Human-AI partnership
Bayesian reasoning, Scientific evidence evaluation in the law and policing, Graphical modelling, Decision-making under uncertainty
Humanities data, Glam, Information studies, Digital cultural heritage
Digital humanities, Computational literary analysis, Digital literary studies, Bias, Digital culture
Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Assistive Technology with AI support, Human–AI Interaction for Accessibility and Inclusion
Computational cognitive science, Cognitive modeling, Reasoning, World models, Communication
Pragmatics, Conversation, Inference, Communication, Quantification
Human-AI collaboration, Social learning, Causality, Active learning
Human-computer interaction, Ethics, Accountability, Literacies, Policy
Explainable AI/NLP, UX and NLP, Diversity and NLP, Assistive technologies
Theory of mind, Perspective taking, Social cognition, Conceptual development, Paediatric fmri
Dialogue, Human-computer interaction, Partner modelling, Bilingualism, Language development
Mental health, Parenting, Child development, Families, Genetics
Digital labour, Platform labour, Workers rights, Ethnography
Human-in-the-loop AI, AI for Social Good, AI and Education, Participatory democracy, Cognitive modeling
Interdisciplinary, Avatar, Virtual human, Digital anthropology, Business
Human speech, Disfluency, Pragmatics, Deception
Psychology, Language, Production, Comprehension, Dialogue
Cultural heritage, Information science, Machine learning, Digital scholarship, Digital humanities
Ethical AI, Privacy, Human-centered AI, Multiagent systems, Responsible AI
Applied AI, Human-AI Process Orchestration (meta-chatbot workflows), Interactive recommender systems, GenAI in Education
Criminology, Security, Policing, Surveillance, Privacy
Cognitive science, Explainable intelligent behaviour, Human-computer/robot interaction, Information processing and psycholinguistics
Education, Futures, Human-machine partnerships, Learning
Multimodality, Discourse analysis, Computer-mediated interaction, Social media discourses, Visual communication
Explainable NLP for users in-the-world
Ethics, Safety, Finance, Reasoning, Multilingual
Energy, Infrastructure, Government
Vision-language, Multi-modal models
Causal inference, Problem solving, Behavioural research, Program learning, Cognitive psychology
Human sentence processing, Psycholinguistics, Eye movements in reading
Large language models, Interpretability, Autoformalisation, Reasoning
Ml, Explainability, Generative modelling, NLP, Computer vision, Cogsci
Explanation, Causality, Counterfactuals, Responsibility, Computational modeling
Governance & accountability
Ethics, Law, Governance, Accountability, NLP, Human-AI partnership
Data protection, Legal, Regulation, Legal technology
AI, Politics, Data, Data structures, NLP
Law and regulation, AI, Sociotechnical approaches, Security, Infrastructure
Risk governance, Responsible Research and Innovation for AI and Robotics in the Health and Care Sectors, Science and technology studies
Critical, Translational, Epistemic cultures, Ethics education, Public understanding
Human-computer interaction, AI Regulation, Design methods, Usable privacy
Privacy and security, Online safety, Human-centred AI, AI Systems
History of science, Cultural studies, Expert institutions, Public understanding
Technology and power, Sociology of AI, History of computing, History of cybernetics, History of AI
Responsible AI, AI ethics, Trustworthy AI, Philosophy of AI
Dependability, Health, Governance, Evaluation
Responsible NLP data & models
Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, History, Climate
Multimodal Generative AI, Vision and language models, Embodied AI, Learning from interaction, Reinforcement learning
Gender, Social cognition, Cross-language, Sexism, NLP
Clinical NLP, NLP for low-resource languages, Text mining, Geo-parsing
Computational social science, Natural language processing, Social media, AI fairness, Ethics
Discourse, Corpora, Corpus-correction, Syntax-based-inference
Implied meaning, Commonsense, Natural language reasoning
Learning theory, Value alignment, Privacy, Game theory
Multimodal NLP, Language and vision, Computational narrative, Cognitive modeling, Explainability
Automatic speech recognition, Speech processing
Linguistics, Education, Teaching
Speech technology, Articulatory data and speech representations, Accent and pronunciation modelling, Speech therapy technology
Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Anthropology, Phonetics, Speech
Translational neuroscience, Research reproducibility, Rigour, Evidence synthesis
NLP, Multimodal learning, Generalization, Agent-based learning
Spoken language processing, Marginalised language communities, Dialogue and spoken language understanding
Model interpretability, Cognitive modelling, Low-resource speech and language processing
Speech synthesis, Speech deepfake detection, Voice conversion
Privacy-preserving AI, Surveillance, Censorship, Trustworthy systems
Biomedical speech signal processing, Time-series analysis, Statistical machine learning
Financial sentiment analysis, NLP for Fintech, Llm for investment analysis, Generative AI for Finance
Social media, Misinformation, Filter bubbles, Political manipulation, Bots
Reasoning and learning, Neuro-symbolic AI, Reasoning in large language models, Program learning
Computational social science, Natural language processing, Low-resource languages, Bias and culture in llms, Religious AI
AI for mathematics, Large language models, Mechanised theorem proving, Formal verification, Formal logic
Language modelling, Scottish gaelic language technology, Computational linguistics, Speech recognition, Crowdsourcing community involvement
Privacy preservation, Critical machine learning, Content moderation