You are here

  1. Home
  2. Professor Advaith Siddharthan

Professor Advaith Siddharthan

Photo of Advaith Siddharthan

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Professor of Computer Science and Society
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • Knowledge Media Institute
  • advaith.siddharthan

Web links

Professional biography

I read Physics at the University of Delhi, and Computer Science at the University of Cambridge before gained my PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (2003). After Postdoctoral research at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge, I took up my first faculty position at the University of Aberdeen in 2009 before joining the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in 2017 as a Reader. I have over 80 peer-reviewed publications and have been PI on grants from the EPSRC, NERC and ESRC and Co-I on grants from EPSRC, H2020, National Geographic and NERC. I currently work on several research projects developing technologies for biodiversity citizen science, while continuing to dabble in disparate topics in Computational Linguistics. 

Research interests

My research intersects Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, facilitating societal access to information by mining, simplifying and summarising complex texts and by communicating data through language. I develop socially responsible AI technologies that bridge the divide between professional scientists and lay public, facilitate meaningful public engagement with science and foster attitudinal and behavioural change, particularly around biodiversity issues. I am the academic lead for three citizen science projects at the OU:

My current research investigates science learning within such citizen science projects, especially how citizens can learn alongside artificial intelligence from data. More details of my projects can be found at the Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence group pages or on my Personal Webpages.

Impact and engagement

Current projects integrate citizen science learning around pollinators into school curricula in the UK and Italy, collecting and analysing data while encouraging schools and students to create habitats and act as pollinator advocates in society. This research is referenced in the UKRI public engagement strategy document and was showcased during Bees’ Needs Week 2020, a public engagement event coordinated by DEFRA.

I previously led the development of novel technologies aimed at public engagement with nature conservation schemes, co-created in partnership with leading UK charities, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, Bumblebee Conservation Trust and Royal Horticultural Society. Two projects, Blogging Birds (redkite.abdn.ac.uk) and BeeWatch (beewatch.abdn.ac.uk) were among the 8 selected to feature in the RCUK impact summary report for its Digital Economy theme “Celebrating Success in the Digital Economy". Blogging Birds demonstrated the ability to generate complex automated data-driven texts, received an EPSRC prize (Telling Tales of Engagement Competition), and resulted in a publication in the prestigious Communications of the ACM (Siddharthan et al., 2019). BeeWatch was an online citizen science initiative that generated valuable bumblebee records across the UK by integrating artificial intelligence and data science into citizen science.  Following publication of our results on bumblebee feeding patterns in Nature Scientific Reports in 2020, we are working with the RHS to use citizen science data to improve pollinator-friendly planting lists.

External collaborations

Key research collaborators on our citizen science projects include University of Aberdeen, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London. I work with a much larger set of partners, within and outside of academia, including on European projects such as https://cos4cloud-eosc.eu/.

Publications

The Human Affectome (2024-03)
Schiller, Daniela; Yu, Alessandra N.C.; Alia-Klein, Nelly; Becker, Susanne; Cromwell, Howard C.; Dolcos, Florin; Eslinger, Paul J.; Frewen, Paul; Kemp, Andrew H.; Pace-Schott, Edward F.; Raber, Jacob; Silton, Rebecca L.; Stefanova, Elka; Williams, Justin H.G.; Abe, Nobuhito; Aghajani, Moji; Albrecht, Franziska; Alexander, Rebecca; Anders, Silke; Aragón, Oriana R.; Arias, Juan A.; Arzy, Shahar; Aue, Tatjana; Baez, Sandra; Balconi, Michela; Ballarini, Tommaso; Bannister, Scott; Banta, Marlissa C.; Barrett, Karen Caplovitz; Belzung, Catherine; Bensafi, Moustafa; Booij, Linda; Bookwala, Jamila; Boulanger-Bertolus, Julie; Boutros, Sydney Weber; Bräscher, Anne-Kathrin; Bruno, Antonio; Busatto, Geraldo; Bylsma, Lauren M.; Caldwell-Harris, Catherine; Chan, Raymond C.K.; Cherbuin, Nicolas; Chiarella, Julian; Cipresso, Pietro; Critchley, Hugo; Croote, Denise E.; Demaree, Heath A.; Denson, Thomas F.; Depue, Brendan; Derntl, Birgit; Dickson, Joanne M.; Dolcos, Sanda; Drach-Zahavy, Anat; Dubljević, Olga; Eerola, Tuomas; Ellingsen, Dan-Mikael; Fairfield, Beth; Ferdenzi, Camille; Friedman, Bruce H.; Fu, Cynthia H.Y.; Gatt, Justine M.; deGelder, Beatrice; Gendolla, Guido H.E.; Gilam, Gadi; Goldblatt, Hadass; Gooding, Anne Elizabeth Kotynski; Gosseries, Olivia; Hamm, Alfons O.; Hanson, Jamie L.; Hendler, Talma; Herbert, Cornelia; Hofmann, Stefan G.; Ibanez, Agustin; Joffily, Mateus; Jovanovic, Tanja; Kahrilas, Ian J.; Kangas, Maria; Katsumi, Yuta; Kensinger, Elizabeth; Kirby, Lauren A.J.; Koncz, Rebecca; Koster, Ernst H.W.; Kozlowska, Kasia; Krach, Sören; Kret, Mariska E.; Krippl, Martin; Kusi-Mensah, Kwabena; Ladouceur, Cecile D.; Laureys, Steven; Lawrence, Alistair; Li, Chiang-shan R.; Liddell, Belinda J.; Lidhar, Navdeep K.; Lowry, Christopher A.; Magee, Kelsey; Marin, Marie-France; Mariotti, Veronica; Martin, Loren J.; Marusak, Hilary A.; Mayer, Annalina V.; Merner, Amanda R.; Minnier, Jessica; Moll, Jorge; Morrison, Robert G.; Moore, Matthew; Mouly, Anne-Marie; Mueller, Sven C.; Mühlberger, Andreas; Murphy, Nora A.; Muscatello, Maria Rosaria Anna; Musser, Erica D.; Newton, Tamara L.; Noll-Hussong, Michael; Norrholm, Seth Davin; Northoff, Georg; Nusslock, Robin; Okon-Singer, Hadas; Olino, Thomas M.; Ortner, Catherine; Owolabi, Mayowa; Padulo, Caterina; Palermo, Romina; Palumbo, Rocco; Palumbo, Sara; Papadelis, Christos; Pegna, Alan J.; Pellegrini, Silvia; Peltonen, Kirsi; Penninx, Brenda W.J.H.; Pietrini, Pietro; Pinna, Graziano; Lobo, Rosario Pintos; Polnaszek, Kelly L.; Polyakova, Maryna; Rabinak, Christine; HeleneRichter, S.; Richter, Thalia; Riva, Giuseppe; Rizzo, Amelia; Robinson, Jennifer L.; Rosa, Pedro; Sachdev, Perminder S.; Sato, Wataru; Schroeter, Matthias L.; Schweizer, Susanne; Shiban, Youssef; Siddharthan, Advaith; Siedlecka, Ewa; Smith, Robert C.; Soreq, Hermona; Spangler, Derek P.; Stern, Emily R.; Styliadis, Charis; Sullivan, Gavin B.; Swain, James E.; Urben, Sébastien; Van den Stock, Jan; vander Kooij, Michael A.; van Overveld, Mark; Van Rheenen, Tamsyn E.; VanElzakker, Michael B.; Ventura-Bort, Carlos; Verona, Edelyn; Volk, Tyler; Wang, Yi; Weingast, Leah T.; Weymar, Mathias; Williams, Claire; Willis, Megan L.; Yamashita, Paula; Zahn, Roland; Zupan, Barbra; Lowe, Leroy; Gabriela, Gan; Charlotte F, Huggins and Leonie, Loeffler
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 158, Article 105450

Image Recognition as a ‘Dialogic AI Partner’ within Biodiversity Citizen Science - an empirical investigation (2024)
Sharma, Nirwan; Colucci-Gray, Laura; Lakeman-Fraser, Poppy; Robinson, Annie; Newman, Julie; Van der Wal, Rene; Rüger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
Citizen Science: Theory and Practice ((In press))

Updating Species Dictionaries in the Citizen Science Platform iSpotnature.org with the Help of Its User Community and ChecklistBank (2024)
Dodd, Michael; Döring, Markus; Valentine, Chris; Siddharthan, Advaith and Ansine, Janice
Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 8, Article e135236.

X-Polli:Nation: Contributing towards sustainable development goals through school-based pollinator citizen science (2023)
Lakeman Fraser, Poppy; Colluci-Gray, Laura; Robinson, Annie; Sforzi, Andrea; Staples-Rolf, Ruth; Newman, Julie; Gill, Richard; Sharma, Nirwan; Rüger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 8, Article 48(1)

Citizen science data reveals the need for keeping garden plant recommendations up-to-date to help pollinators (2020)
Anderson, Helen B.; Robinson, Annie; Siddharthan, Advaith; Sharma, Nirwan; Bostock, Helen; Salisbury, Andrew; Roberts, Stuart and van der Wal, René
Scientific Reports, 10, Article 20483(1)

Blogging Birds: Telling informative stories about the lives of birds from telemetric data (2019-03-31)
Siddharthan, Advaith; Ponnamperuma, Kapila; Mellish, Chris; Zeng, Chen; Heptinstall, Danny; Robinson, Annie; Benn, Stuart and van der Wal, René
Communications of the ACM, 62(3) (pp. 68-77)

Designing online species identification tools for biological recording: the impact on data quality and citizen science learning (2019-01-28)
Sharma, Nirwan; Colucci-Gray, Laura; Siddharthan, Advaith; Comont, Richard and Van der Wal, René
PeerJ, 6, Article e5965

Extractive and Abstractive Sentence Labelling of Sentiment-bearing Topics (2019)
Barawi, Mohamad Hardyman; Lin, Chenghua; Siddharthan, Advaith and Liu, Yinbing
Frontiers of Computer Science

From citizen science to citizen action: analysing the potential for a digital platform to cultivate attachments to nature (2018-12-05)
Sharma, Nirwan; Greaves, Sam; Colucci-Gray, Laura; Siddharthan, Advaith; Anderson, Helen; Robinson, Annie; Wibowo, Agung; Bostock, Helen; Salisbury, Andrew; Roberts, Stuart; Slawson, David and van der Wal, René
Journal of Science Communication, 18(1) (pp. 1-35)

SaferDrive: an NLG-based Behaviour Change Support System for Drivers (2018-07-31)
Braun, Daniel; Reiter, Ehud and Siddharthan, Advaith
Natural Language Engineering, 24(4) (pp. 551-588)

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements (2017-03)
Shulayeva, Olga; Siddharthan, Advaith and Wyner, Adam
Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25(1) (pp. 107-126)

Crowdsourcing Without a Crowd: Reliable Online Species Identification Using Bayesian Models to Minimize Crowd Size (2016-07-14)
Siddharthan, Advaith; Lambin, Christopher; Robinson, Anne-Marie; Sharma, Nirwan; Comont, Richard; O’Mahony, Elaine; Mellish, Chris and Van Der Wal, René
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 7, Article 45(4)

The role of automated feedback in training and retaining biological recorders for citizen science (2016-06-01)
van der Wal, René; Sharma, Nirwan; Mellish, Chris; Robinson, Annie and Siddharthan, Advaith
Conservation Biology, 30(3) (pp. 550-561)

Mapping species distributions: A comparison of skilled naturalist and lay citizen science recording (2015-11-01)
van der Wal, René; Anderson, Helen; Robinson, Annie; Sharma, Nirwan; Mellish, Chris; Roberts, Stuart; Darvill, Ben and Siddharthan, Advaith
Ambio, 44(Suppl 4) (pp. 584-600)

Automated data analysis to rapidly derive and communicate ecological insights from satellite-tag data: A case study of reintroduced red kites (2015-11)
van der Wal, René; Zeng, Cheng; Heptinstall, Danny; Ponnamperuma, Kapila; Mellish, Chris; Ben, Stuart and Siddharthan, Advaith
Ambio, 44(Suppl 4) (pp. 612-623)

A survey of research on text simplification (2014-01)
Siddharthan, Advaith
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 165(2) (pp. 259-298)

Information status distinctions and referring expressions: An empirical study of references to people in news summaries (2011-12)
Siddharthan, Advaith; Nenkova, Ani and McKeown, Kathleen
Computational Linguistics, 37(4) (pp. 811-842)

Interlingual annotation of parallel text corpora: a new framework for annotation and evaluation (2010-07)
Dorr, Bonnie J.; Passonneau, Rebecca J.; Farwell, David; Green, Rebecca; Habash, Nizar; Helmreich, Stephen; Hovy, Eduard; Levin, Lori; Miller, Keith J.; Mitamura, Teruko; Rambow, Owen and Siddharthan, Advaith
Natural Language Engineering, 16(3) (pp. 197-243)

Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion (2006-06)
Siddharthan, Advaith
Research on Language and Computation, 4(1) (pp. 77-109)

CSS: Contrastive Semantic Similarities for Uncertainty Quantification of LLMs (2024-07-15)
Ao, Shuang; Rüger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2024) (15-19 Jul 2024, Barcelona, Spain) (pp. 77-87)

Seeing with hands and touching with eyes: recovering sensorial attention to nature in primary schools (2024-05)
Colucci-Gray, Laura; Hancock, Jonathan; Islam, Riasat; Sharma, Nirwan; Manches, Andrew; Bowers, Lisa; Lakeman-Fraser, Poppy; Mozier, Stephen; Newman, Julie; Reuger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : First International Conference on Embodied Education (15-17 May 2024, Danish School of Education (DPU), Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark)

“We felt the textures from nature and it gave us new ideas”: Investigating sustainability education through primary school children’s natural and digital haptic touch explorations (2023-11-22)
Hancock, Jonathan; Colucci-Gray, Laura; Siddharthan, Advaith; Manches, Andrew; Sharma, Nirwan; Islam, Riasat; Bowers, Lisa; Reuger, Stefan; Lakeman-Fraser, Poppy; Newman, Julie; Mozier, Stephen and Barry, Richard
In : SERA Conference 2023 (Wednesday 22 - Friday 24 Nov 2023, Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, United Kingdom) (p 108)

Two Sides of Miscalibration: Identifying Over and Under-Confidence Prediction for Network Calibration (2023-07-31)
Ao, Shuang; Rueger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (31 Jul - 4 Aug 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) (pp. 77-87)

iSpot & AI: Integrating FASTCAT-Cloud and PI@ntNET-API in the Cos4Cloud framework (2023-06-30)
Ansine, Janice; Dodd, Michael; Valentine, Chris; Rüger, Stefan; Siddharthan, Advaith and Dadswell, Damian
In : Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) Conference 2023 (27-30 Jun 2023, Online)

Empirical Optimal Risk to Quantify Model Trustworthiness for Failure Detection (2023)
Ao, Shuang; Rüger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 2023 IJCAI Joint Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety and Safe Reinforcement Learning, AISafety-SafeRL (21-22 Aug 2023, Macau, China)

Consensus building in on-line citizen science (2022-11-11)
Sharma, Nirwan; Colucci-Gray, Laura; van der Wal, Rene and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 25th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW 2022) (08-22 Nov 2022, Online)

Confidence-Aware Calibration and Scoring Functions for Curriculum Learning (2022-11)
Ao, Shuang; Rüger, Stefan and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 2022 15th International Conference on Machine Vision. (18-20 Nov 2022, Rome, Italy)

Gender equality work in a distance learning institution (2022)
Lotz, Nicole; Siddharthan, Advaith; Priola, Cinzia and Wallace, Janette
In : Diversity Interventions 2022 (7-8 Apr 2022, Oxford)

Summarising Historical Text in Modern Languages (2021)
Peng, Xutan; Zheng, Yi; Lin, Chenghua and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (19-23 Apr 2021) (pp. 3123-3142)

Incorporating Constraints into Matrix Factorization for Clothes Package Recommendation (2018-07-11)
Wibowa, Agung; Siddharthan, Advaith; Masthoff, Judith and Lin, Chenghua
In : User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (8-11 Jun 2018, Singapore) (pp. 111-119)

Generating Summaries of Sets of Consumer Products: Learning from Experiments (2018)
Kuptavanich, Kittipitch; Reiter, Ehud; van Deemter, Kees and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (5-8 Nov 2018) (pp. 403-407)

Understanding how to Explain Package Recommendations in the Clothes Domain (2018)
Wibowo, Agung Toto; Siddharthan, Advaith; Masthoff, Judith Francoise Maria and Lin, Chenghua
In : Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS) in the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) (2018)

Matrix Factorization for Package Recommendations (2017-08-18)
Wibowo, Agung Toto; Siddharthan, Advaith; Lin, Chenghua and Masthoff, Judith
In : Proceedings of the RecSys 2017 Workshop on Recommendation in Complex Scenarios (ComplexRec 2017) (31 Aug 2017, Como, Italy) (pp. 23-28)

Should Learning Material's Selection be Adapted to Learning Style and Personality? (2017-07-09)
Alhathli, Manal; Mastho, Judith and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : UMAP 2017 - Adjunct Publication of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (9-12 Jul 2017, Bratislava, Slovakia) (pp. 275-280)

Automatically Labelling Sentiment-Bearing Topics with Descriptive Sentence Labels (2017-06-21)
Barawi, Mohamad Hardyman; Lin, Chenghua and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (21-23 Jun 2017, Liège, Belgium) (pp. 299-312)

Bumblebee friendly planting recommendations with citizen science data (2017)
Wibowo, Agung Toto; Siddharthan, Advaith; Anderson, Helen; Robinson, Annie; Sharma, Nirwan; Bostock, Helen; Salisbury, Andrew; Comont, Richard and van der Wal, René
In : Proceedings of the International Workshop on Recommender Systems for Citizens (31 Aug 2017, Como, Italy)

Summarising News Stories for Children (2016-09-05)
Macdonald, Iain and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : The 9th International Natural Language Generation Conference (5-8 Sep 2016, Edinburgh) (pp. 1-10)

Summarising the points made in online political debates (2016-08-12)
Egan, Charlie; Siddharthan, Advaith and Wyner, Adam
In : Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016) (7-12 Aug 2016, Berlin, Germnay) (pp. 134-143)

Exploring the impact of extroversion on the selection of learning materials (2016-07-04)
Alhathli, Manal; Masthoff, Judith and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 24th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalisation, UMAP 2016 (13-16 Jul 2016, Halifax, Canada)

Scrutable Feature Sets for Stance Classification (2016)
Mandya, Angrosh; Siddharthan, Advaith and Wyner, Adam
In : ArgMining2016: the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (7-12 Aug 2016, Berlin, Germany) (pp. 60-69)

Hybrid text simplification using synchronous dependency grammars with hand-written and automatically harvested rules (2014)
Siddharthan, Advaith and Angrosh, M.A.
In : Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (26-30 Apr 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden) (pp. 722-731)

Text simplification using synchronous dependency grammars: Generalising automatically harvested rules (2014)
Angrosh, M.A. and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 8th International Natural Language Generation Conference (19-21 Jun 2014, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) (pp. 16-25)

Lexico-syntactic Text Simplification And Compression With Typed Dependencies (2014)
Mandya, Angrosh Annayappan; Nomoto, Tadashi and Siddharthan, Advaith
In : 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (23-29 Aug 2014, Dublin) (pp. 1996-2006)

Investigation into Human Preference between Common and Unambiguous Lexical Substitutions (2011)
Walker, Andrew; Siddharthan, Advaith and Starkey, Andrew
In : 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (28-30 Sep 2011, Nancy, France) (pp. 176-180)

Text Simplification using Typed Dependencies: A Comparison of the Robustness of Different Generation Strategies (2011)
Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG) (2011)

Corpora for the conceptualisation and zoning of scientific papers (2010)
Liakata, Maria; Teufel, Simone; Siddharthan, Advaith and Batchelor, Colin
In : LREC 2010, 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (2010, Valletta, Malta)

Reformulating discourse connectives for non-expert readers (2010)
Siddharthan, Advaith and Katsos, Napoleon
In : Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Jun 2010, Los Angeles, California) (pp. 1002-1010)

Complex lexico-syntactic reformulation of sentences using typed dependency representations (2010)
Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference (7-9 Jul 2010, Dublin, Ireland) (pp. 125-133)

Towards discipline-independent argumentative zoning: evidence from chemistry and computational linguistics (2009)
Teufel, Simone; Siddharthan, Advaith and Batchelor, Colin
In : Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (6-7 Aug 2009, Singapore) (pp. 1493-1502)

Whose idea was this, and why does it matter? Attributing scientific work to citations (2007)
Siddharthan, Advaith and Teufel, Simone
In : Human language technologies 2007: The conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; proceedings of the main conference (2007) (pp. 316-323)

Automatic Classification of Citation Function (2006)
Teufel, Simone; Siddharthan, Advaith and Tidhar, Dan
In : Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2006) (22-23 Jul 2006, Sydney) (pp. 103-110)

An annotation scheme for citation function (2006)
Teufel, Simone; Siddharthan, Advaith and Tidhar, Dan
In : Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (2006) (pp. 80-87)

Generating Referring Expressions in Open Domains (2004)
Siddharthan, Advaith and Copestake, Ann
In : 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (21-26 Jul 2004, Barcelona, Spain) (p 407)

Syntactic Simplification for Improving Content Selection in Multi-Document Summarization (2004)
Siddharthan, Advaith; Nenkova, Ani and McKeown, Kathleen
In : 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (23-27 Aug 2004, Geneva)

An architecture for a text simplification system (2002)
Siddharthan, Advaith
In : Proceedings of the Language Engineering Conference 2002 (LEC 2002) (2002)