Personal statement

I have been a student at the University of Strathclyde's CIS department since 2011 as an Undergraduate and during my PhD. I am now working as a Teaching Associate with the CIS Department and I am the Programme Leader for the MSc in Software Development course.

My research interests lie in the areas of Video Games, AI, Gamification, Building Educational Tools, Ensemble Decision Systems, General Game Playing, and Deceptive Games. 

Video Games offer a fantastic research platform from which innovations in other fields can be implemented. The wide variety of environments and perspectives available provides AI researchers with a plethora of options for experimentation. It is my hope that the research that I conduct can be used to make the lives of people easier, freeing up their time to do more of what they want.

I am an advocate for improving education through the use of games, and game like mechanisms, through a process known as Gamification where education takes on many common aspects of games. The goal of this process is to make education less of a chore and more of a rewarding and enrichening experience that can be taken on by anyone. The guiding philosophy is to focus and reward the process of building up a person's knowledge, and building up more of a resistance to failure. Video Games offer the ability to restart any challenge, which may be helpful in teaching people to be more resilient in their day to day lives. Failure is often the first step to success.