John was in the second Horizon CDT cohort and received his PhD in 2015. After graduation, he became a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University for 3 years, before returning to University of Nottingham to join N/LAB – a research centre focused on doing machine learning research for social good. He is currently an Associate Professor based in Nottingham University Business School where he is the research director for the marketing department. He also had the joy of returning to help supervise some PhD students from later Horizon cohorts.
His research focuses on consumer behaviour, particularly through the study of ‘digital footprint data’, the information trails that people leave behind when they use the Internet or smart devices. This has meant always doing engaged research in partnership with organisations, persuading them of the merits of opening their data for scientific research. In short, questioning why we give so much of our private digital footprint data to companies and expect that they do nothing prosocial with it in return.
John’s recent work has used a wide range of aggregated behavioural data to address social issues. This includes examples such as using food-sharing network data to model national food insecurity, studying mobile money data to predict when people might be exploited, and using supermarket loyalty card data to estimate social deprivation and childhood obesity. He founded the Future Food Symposium (an international research forum for multidisciplinary food-related research) and helped to organise the world’s first ‘Digital Footprints Conference’.
