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Dr Anton Dil

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Senior Lecturer in Computing
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • School of Computing & Communications
  • anton.dil

Professional biography

Anton completed a BSc in Mathematics graduating Summa Cum Laude, followed by a Masters in Computing at the University of Maryland (Eastern Shore) , USA.  This was followed by doctoral work at Loughborough University (UK) in the Department of Civil Engineering, where he worked on Markov modeling of heating and ventilation systems, culminating in the award of the CIBSE Dufton Silver Medal in 1997. In 1995 he did post-doctoral work developing concurrent mobile robot software with the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University using a novel model for training a neural net.

Following time at Coventry University, Anton joined the Open University in 2001, where he has contributed to teaching materials on modules in discrete mathematics, object-oriented programming, and concurrent and distributed systems, as well as chairing several modules in presentation and production. In addition Anton takes an interest in appropriate assessment, novel approaches to e-delivery of teaching materials and accessibility issues.

Anton is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

Anton's current research interest centres around automated assessment of Java code quality, and improving feedback to students on their Java code in online environments. The aim is to enable timeliness of specific and personalised feedback on students' code, as well as scalability of feedback to large cohorts of students.

Teaching interests

Anton's teaching interest is in making object-oriented programming accessible to more students through high quailty teaching materials and leveraging features of online teaching environments to provide better support to students learning to write code. He has chaired several programming modules at the Open University, and is chairing the production of the latest version of the Open University's key object-oriented Java programming module, M250.

Anton initially studied Natural Sciences at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, and maintains links with a Zambian NGO, Makeni Ecumenical Centre, providing occasional computer support to them and fundraising in the UK. 

Research groups

NameTypeParent Unit
CRC: Software Engineering and DesignGroupFaculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology

Publications

Towards the bibliography of life (2011-11-27)
King, David; Morse, David R.; Willis, Alistair and Dil, Anton
ZooKeys, 150 (pp. 151-166)

Teaching the Art of Computer Programming at a Distance by Generating Dialogues using Deep Neural Networks (2020)
Yu, Yijun; Wang, Xiaozhu; Dil, Anton and Rauf, Irum
In : 28th ICDE World Conference on Online Learning (3-7 Nov 2019, Dublin, Ireland) (pp. 1071-1081)

Evaluation of a tool for Java structural specification checking (2018-10-26)
Dil, Anton and Osunde, Joseph
In : 10th International Conference on Education Technology and Computers (26-28 Oct 2018, Tokyo, Japan) (pp. 99-104)

A secondary data analysis of SEAMs responses for programming and non-programming modules by gender (2018-04-26)
Osunde, Joseph and Dil, Anton
In : The 7th eSTEeM Annual Conference 2018 (25-26 Apr 2018, Milton Keynes)

Evaluation of a tool for Java specification testing (2018-04-25)
Dil, Anton and Osunde, Joseph
In : 7th Esteem Annual Conference (25-26 Apr 2018, The Open University)

From XML to XML: The why and how of making the biodiversity literature accessible to researchers (2010-05-19)
Willis, Alistair; King, David; Morse, David; Dil, Anton; Lyal, Chris and Roberts, David
In : Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) (19-21 May 2010, Malta) (pp. 1237-1244)

Improving search in scanned documents: Looking for OCR mismatches (2009-09)
Willis, Alistair; Morse, David; Dil, Anton; King, David; Roberts, Dave and Lyal, Chris
In : Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries 2009: ICSD - International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (8 Sep 2009, Trento, Italy)

ABLE Corpus (2010-02-22)
Willis, Alistair; King, David; Morse, David; Dil, Anton; Lyal, Chris and Roberts, Dave
The Open University

ABLE Software (2010-02-22)
King, David; Willis, Alistair; Dil, Anton and Morse, David
The Open University

Audio Navigation: Using Spatial Audio In Ubiquitous Interfaces (2004-05-10)
Day, Robert; Holland, Simon; Bowers, David and Dil, Anton
Department of Computing, The Open University

Using Spatial Audio in Minimal Attention Interfaces: Towards An Effective Audio GPS Navigation System (2004-03-11)
Day, Robert; Holland, Simon; Bowers, David and Dil, Anton
Department of Computing, The Open University