Hot Takes | Cold Proofs

Two of the School's newest lecturers this week, and both were PhD students here not long ago. Dr Julia Tomaszewska is Lecturer in Audio Engineering and Dr Nicola Russo is Lecturer in Cyber Security. When they started, their lab had three people in it. Now it has around seven PhD students, and Nicola is already supervising one.

Nicola is from Molise, the region of Italy people call the unknown one. He first came to London in 2018 on an Erasmus+ traineeship to write his master's thesis, came back on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership, lost that job when the start-up ran out of cash, went home during COVID, and began his PhD at UWL in May 2021, months before he first set foot on campus. His project was a self-learning robotic goalkeeper: an arm that learns to block a ball using spiking neural networks and a dynamic vision sensor, a camera that only sends the pixels that change.

Julia worked in theatre from the age of six, studied studio production, did live sound in the West End and composed an EP based on David Hockney's paintings. Then the pandemic took all of it at once. She went back to her old biology and maths books, chose engineering over a more creative course, and took the MSc in Digital Audio Engineering here. A lecturer she'd just had a debate with in class called after her in the corridor to ask if she wanted to do a PhD. Her thesis used voice recordings, laryngeal bioimpedance and deep learning to flag disorders of the voice box early.

We talk about sitting on the other side of the same table, when you start calling your supervisor by their first name, why the first year of a PhD feels like being lost in a forest, and why a method that fails is still a result worth publishing.

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

#PhD #PhDLife #AcademicCareers #AudioEngineering #NeuromorphicComputing #SpikingNeuralNetworks #MachineLearning #Podcast #UWL

Two guests from the School's own audio team this week. Dr Gerard Roma, Lecturer in Audio Software Engineering, and his PhD student Jack Hoggard, who also happens to edit this podcast.

Jack started out playing a three-quarter-sized guitar, found the production side at college, mixed as a freelancer, then spent a few years as a technical author for a company making X-ray and metal detection systems before coming to UWL. Gerard studied philosophy in Spain, got hooked on the idea that music could be made from any sound at all, didn't find a job as a philosopher, and became a software developer. That led him to the Music Technology Group in Barcelona.

Jack's PhD is in spatial audio. In stereo you only have left and right. In object-based audio every sound is placed in three dimensions, and putting one sound source up and to the left, or further away, can take six to ten controls: front, back, sides, height, distance, width. That's for every sound in the mix. His tool uses machine learning and psychoacoustics to cut those parameters down for musicians who want their music out in 3D and have no interest in the middle step.

We talk about why 5.1 music never caught on, why soundbars and laptops with six speakers have changed things, and what you should even call a control: "spread" or "width"? Gerard explains why spatial mixing isn't about simulating a band in your living room. And on AI, both are clear about where the line sits. Jack loves editing, the part most people find tedious, and his tool will never generate anything.

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

Professor Mark Coulson is back. In Episode 7 he talked about gaming and virtual worlds. This time it is the conversation we first invited him for: Married at First Sight, the Channel 4 series where strangers met for the first time at the altar, matched by a panel of experts. Mark was the psychologist on that panel for the first two series.

He starts from a position some people find uncomfortable. Love can be measured. Most of what social scientists measure is invented, he says, and any measurement is imperfect, but that is equally true of depression. You define it, you ask a lot of people a lot of questions, and you see whether the answers hold up.

The panel worked with questionnaires, workshops and physical measures, from finger-length ratios to how people smell. Mark is blunt about which carried the weight: the quantitative data. He also takes apart one of the oldest beliefs about relationships. Opposites attract is one of the "sacred cows we love to slaughter". Similarity is what predicts a relationship lasting.

Then the story of the first recruitment evening, when the panel told a room of volunteers they would meet their partner on their wedding day, and about a third of them got up and walked out. Why he stopped after two series. Why social science is unlike physics: once people know how something works, it changes.

We ask about arranged marriage and what the show's individual-focused matching left out, and whether dating apps have the same problem. Mark points to their business model, which has no reason to want you to leave.

Looking back, there is one thing he would have measured harder: attachment style. Anxious and avoidant partners pull in opposite directions, and he thinks that, more than anything else, is where the couples came unstuck.

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

#Psychology #Relationships #MarriedAtFirstSight #DatingApps #SocialScience #Academia #Podcast #UWL #fyp

Professor Phil Cox, Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London, was our first guest in Episode 1. He has been through three REFs and helped write two of them, so we asked him to explain it.The Research Excellence Framework comes round roughly every seven years. Universities put forward their best papers, their impact case studies and an account of how they support research, a panel of assessors reads all of it, and a league table comes out at the end. UWL made the top 100 last time. The target this time is 70th.Phil walks through the mechanics: the three units of assessment the school is aiming for (computing, engineering and the built environment), who gets submitted with which case study, and what assessors who read a hundred papers a day are looking for. He is direct about the limits. It is a snapshot. It favours universities with deep resources, and the funding that follows the ranking makes that self-fulfilling. A post-92 has to go the extra mile because the main business is teaching.So where can a small university win? By doing a few things well and being noticed for it. Reflectors at Heathrow to measure how the ground moves, which he says no other hub airport in Europe has allowed. AI for acoustic imaging of the heart. And archaeoacoustics: rebuilding ancient monuments in a computer to hear how they sounded, including an unfinished Roman amphitheatre, with a grant in preparation alongside Sapienza University of Rome.His own view of impact is whether the work is on a global stage. His view of the REF's real value is staff: a good result brings research-active people in, their research reaches the teaching, and the people already here have a reason to stay.The second half is about the school itself. Around 40 per cent of colleagues are women, close to a hundred PhD students share a workspace, and Phil explains what a mixed staff room does for how people behave. He closes on the sector: too many degree providers, too many metrics, and a case for welcoming international students back.His last line gave us the title. Universities make two things, paper and people.Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

Season 2 opens with a returning guest. Professor Phil Cox, Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London, was our first guest in Episode 1. He has been through three REFs and helped write two of them, so we asked him to explain it.

The Research Excellence Framework comes round roughly every seven years. Universities put forward their best papers, their impact case studies and an account of how they support research, a panel of assessors reads all of it, and a league table comes out at the end. UWL made the top 100 last time. The target this time is 70th.

Phil walks through the mechanics: the three units of assessment the school is aiming for (computing, engineering and the built environment), who gets submitted with which case study, and what assessors who read a hundred papers a day are looking for. He is direct about the limits. It is a snapshot. It favours universities with deep resources, and the funding that follows the ranking makes that self-fulfilling. A post-92 has to go the extra mile because the main business is teaching.

So where can a small university win? By doing a few things well and being noticed for it. Reflectors at Heathrow to measure how the ground moves, which he says no other hub airport in Europe has allowed. AI for acoustic imaging of the heart. And archaeoacoustics: rebuilding ancient monuments in a computer to hear how they sounded, including an unfinished Roman amphitheatre, with a grant in preparation alongside Sapienza University of Rome.

His own view of impact is whether the work is on a global stage. His view of the REF's real value is staff: a good result brings research-active people in, their research reaches the teaching, and the people already here have a reason to stay.

The second half is about the school itself. Around 40 per cent of colleagues are women, close to a hundred PhD students share a workspace, and Phil explains what a mixed staff room does for how people behave. He closes on the sector: too many degree providers, too many metrics, and a case for welcoming international students back.

His last line gave us the title. Universities make two things, paper and people.

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

Five days, one brief, and a rule that nothing new goes into the game in the final 24 hours. This episode is about the UWL Game Jam, from two of the people who run it: Ryan Callard, Course Leader for BA (Hons) Esports at the London School of Film, Media and Design, and Dr Malte Ressin, Associate Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computing and Engineering.

Neither arrived by the direct route. In 2009 Malte was leading a software localisation team that had been hitting the same problem for years, until an email about Vice-Chancellor's scholarships at UWL turned it into his PhD. Ryan came at around the same time as a music technology undergraduate at the London College of Music (Nino was one of his lecturers), and found his way to games through voiceover work.

The jam started five or six years ago as a small event. The latest one, which finished three days before this recording, brought together students from around ten courses across four schools, with Sega Europe back as partner sponsor and a brief built around reefs. The longest they ever ran lasted ten days. The student feedback: please never do that again.

Malte's entry requirement is short. No fear of operating a computer, a willingness to put the work in, and the drive to create; if you know what a pixel is, you can contribute. Ryan points to two law students who joined a team this year. The payoff is practical. You can't walk into a games studio and say you studied X, Y and Z, give me a job, and for a computer science student the first side project that actually gets finished and shipped could just as easily be a game.

Then the harder parts. Five days drops a team straight into crunch, which is why Ryan compares a jam to making an album in five days: scope is everything. They also get into safeguarding in multiplayer games, why ethics boards get nervous about horror games, the years Doom spent restricted in Germany, and a Sega brief that let teams destroy the reef as long as the game showed the consequences.

It closes on what comes next: the first UWL Game Awards, and rumours that competitive game jams are being optioned for TV.

A few moments to jump to

00:00 Welcome, meet Ryan Callard and Dr Malte Ressin00:41 Malte: a localisation problem and a VC scholarship02:27 Ryan: music technology, voiceover, then games04:40 What a game jam is, and the ten-day one08:17 What you need to take part15:41 You need a portfolio25:50 Ethics, safeguarding and games made for cats35:02 Scope is everything

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

#GameJam #GameDev #GameDesign #Esports #ComputerScience #HigherEducation #Podcast #UWL #fyp

Before she was training the next generation of journalists at LSFMD, Alison Hawkings was choosing a call sign for her dog tags inside an American flight simulator at a 1990s defence-tech showcase. She called herself Lash. This episode traces thirty-plus years in journalism, from the dot-com boom's flown-in junkets and 1991 email addresses to a present she describes, bluntly, as a "techno-feudalistic period."

The two eras rhyme more than you'd expect. Alison remembers a Silicon Valley hedonistic enough that she once set it as a student essay topic; she sees the same money-first energy now in AI and the billionaires steering it. Where the 90s produced Steve Jobs and free, GNU-and-Linux-style software, she argues, today's version has the propensity to completely undermine democratic fundamentals in countries.

She's just as candid about the industry she came up in. Breaking into journalism in the early 90s meant a hard, male-dominated newsroom before the Equality Act or sexual harassment law existed - first in, last out, expected in the pub because that's where the stories were. That history sits behind her three-word test for the job, and for citizenship generally: be curious, investigate, serve the public.

Those values are her answer to a post-truth world. Her line for it: the pen is still mightier than the sword. Misinformation, algorithmic bias and a "push culture" that delivers content rather than letting people choose it all make media literacy - asking who wants me to know this, and why - more urgent, not less. She's blunt about the mechanics behind it too: say yes to any free site or app, she tells her media law students, and you are the product.

AI gets the same unsentimental treatment. Trust but verify, she says, applies to a chatbot exactly as it applied to a source - and she pushes back on the word we've settled on for when it gets things wrong: "I think hallucinate is the wrong word. I think it just lies," because it's built to give you an answer it thinks you want, consciousness or not.

The conversation closes on hope rather than alarm: a proposed university "switch off all technology" day, and her advice to any student weighing a career in journalism - stay curious, because every person, even the humble apple, is a story.

A few moments to jump to

00:00 Welcome, meet Alison Hawkings02:26 Silicon Valley in the 90s, and choosing the call sign "Lash"15:14 The pen is mightier than the sword17:00 We're in this kind of techno-feudalistic period27:20 We didn't have the Equality Act56:38 You are the product1:02:07 I think hallucinate is the wrong word, I think it just lies1:06:47 Advice for aspiring journalists: the humble apple

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

Before she was training the next generation of journalists at LSFMD, Alison Hawkings was choosing a call sign for her dog tags inside an American flight simulator at a 1990s defence-tech showcase. She called herself Lash. This episode traces thirty-plus years in journalism, from the dot-com boom's flown-in junkets and 1991 email addresses to a present she describes, bluntly, as a "techno-feudalistic period."

The two eras rhyme more than you'd expect. Alison remembers a Silicon Valley hedonistic enough that she once set it as a student essay topic; she sees the same money-first energy now in AI and the billionaires steering it. Where the 90s produced Steve Jobs and free, GNU-and-Linux-style software, she argues, today's version has the propensity to completely undermine democratic fundamentals in countries.

She's just as candid about the industry she came up in. Breaking into journalism in the early 90s meant a hard, male-dominated newsroom before the Equality Act or sexual harassment law existed - first in, last out, expected in the pub because that's where the stories were. That history sits behind her three-word test for the job, and for citizenship generally: be curious, investigate, serve the public.

Those values are her answer to a post-truth world. Her line for it: the pen is still mightier than the sword. Misinformation, algorithmic bias and a "push culture" that delivers content rather than letting people choose it all make media literacy - asking who wants me to know this, and why - more urgent, not less. She's blunt about the mechanics behind it too: say yes to any free site or app, she tells her media law students, and you are the product.

AI gets the same unsentimental treatment. Trust but verify, she says, applies to a chatbot exactly as it applied to a source - and she pushes back on the word we've settled on for when it gets things wrong: "I think hallucinate is the wrong word. I think it just lies," because it's built to give you an answer it thinks you want, consciousness or not.

The conversation closes on hope rather than alarm: a proposed university "switch off all technology" day, and her advice to any student weighing a career in journalism - stay curious, because every person, even the humble apple, is a story.

A few moments to jump to

00:00 Welcome, meet Alison Hawkings02:26 Silicon Valley in the 90s, and choosing the call sign "Lash"15:14 The pen is mightier than the sword17:00 We're in this kind of techno-feudalistic period27:20 We didn't have the Equality Act56:38 You are the product1:02:07 I think hallucinate is the wrong word, I think it just lies1:06:47 Advice for aspiring journalists: the humble apple

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

What's the thing that actually holds a university together — the part nobody can point to on an org chart? Professor Anthony Hilton, UWL's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), and Paula Bruton, Director of Human Resources & Organisational Development, spend an episode chasing exactly that.

Before either guest is properly introduced by title, Anthony explains how he ended up running a microbiology lab out of the back of an articulated lorry, parking it outside people's homes to show them the microbes living in, on and around them — a science-communication project born from a tension he still wrestles with: staying credible to fellow academics while staying accessible to everyone else.

Then the conversation turns to what actually shapes a university day to day. Asked what's invisible but foundational, Paula reaches for a comparison rather than a definition: a sense of community that feels, she says, "like the pre-COVID feeling" — not something any policy can manufacture. Anthony agrees, but frames it institutionally: a can-do culture willing to rally around people outside your own school or department, in a way he says he hasn't seen at larger, more siloed universities.

The sharpest stretch is about parenthood. Paula describes her own return to work after having her son — a senior HR role, six months off because six months was all they could afford, then a hunt for part-time senior work she calls "virtually impossible." Anthony connects it to the wider data: a "leaky pipeline" where the share of women thins at every career stage after the PhD, even though half of academia's workforce is female. Both are candid that legislation can make a pay gap measurable without making it close.

The back half turns to leadership. Anthony defines authentic leadership as knowing your own values first, then creating psychological safety so people can be themselves rather than copies of you — including, he argues, in the hardest conversations, when redundancy or closure is genuinely the only option on the table. Paula adds the HR half of that: a leader's job in those moments is to explain the why, not just deliver the decision.

They close on mythbusting — Anthony, ever the microbiologist, on why "a bit of dirt is good for you" doesn't mean poor hygiene builds character — and on what would help working parents more than any policy on paper: a manager who actually asks how you're doing, not just what you've delivered.

He opens by taking away the word the whole subject is built on. There is no such thing as a gamer, he says, because on personality, values and how they handle the hassles of ordinary life, gamers are indistinguishable from everybody else. They are just people who do this thing. We don't talk about badminton players or cyclists so much. And the industry is bigger than film and music combined.

So the question is not who plays. It is what happens to you while you do.

Professor Mark Coulson studies the traffic between a person and a virtual world. He borrows a line from a French travel writer: the problem with travel is that you always have to take yourself along with you. His better metaphor is a semi-permeable membrane. He can't carry an object into a game or take gold out of one, but he can take his experiences out. Some participants told him the question was beside the point — I'm only driving a character through a world, none of it touches me. That, he says, is simply denial.

The surprise is about love. His interest started with a game he played himself and finished thinking he had genuinely cared about those characters. Other players report attachments that measure comparably to enduring love.

Asked whether the appeal is a companion who never rejects you, he says the opposite. Game characters are far from sycophantic; some take an instant dislike to you. He thinks the interactions people have with them are less sycophantic than the ones they report having with AI chatbots, where the model shapes itself around your beliefs until you are both inside a bubble. He doesn't think that is psychologically healthy.

Is any of it rehearsal for real life? Absolutely, he says — a safe space to experiment with behaviour, choices and your own sexuality. The strongest evidence is not from his lab. The None in Three group builds simple games co-designed with the children who play them; the UK one is about coercive control, and it measurably increases what a player understands as domestic abuse.

The counterweight is the last honest thing he says. Two stories about acting out darker impulses somewhere consequence-free: you let it out and you're fine, or you desensitise yourself and grow more confident you could do it for real. The same behaviour, opposite consequences. He doesn't know which is right, and doesn't pretend to.

Also in this episode: why gaming disorder is in the WHO's ICD-11 but only a condition of interest in the DSM, and what games won't let you do.

Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio, from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Produced and edited by Jack Hoggard. Recorded at LSFMD, UWL, with Tim Bowerman and Arthur Page.

#Psychology #VideoGames #Gaming #OnlineBehaviour #GamingDisorder #AIChatbots #CoerciveControl #Research #Podcast #UWL #UniversityOfWestLondon