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Dr Ian Kenny

Photograph of Dr Ian Kenny

Profile summary

Professional biography

Ian is a researcher within the School of Computing and Communications in the STEM Faculty, working in the field of applied machine learning.

Research interests

My research interests include:

  • Adaptive data driven models applied to real-world data to obtain useful predictions
  • Devoloping innovative techniques to use heuristics to work on smaller datasets e.g. small climate science datasets were historical data does not represent recent climate change.
  • Mobile and wearable devices to gather patient centric health data which can be used to better inform clinical decisions for the patient.
  • Exploring small world networks in data
  • Computational human behaviour models
  • Fairness in AI

I’m particularly interested in applying machine learning techniques to domains which are less accessible to brute force, large dataset, modelling, or where the dataset is niche. For example, where the there is a lack of data and the heuristic needs to become more adaptive to a changing or adaptive data environment. Examples of such an environment would be, climate change science where historical data does not necessarily represent current experience, making it difficult to make predictions from the historical data. Alternatively in the healthcare field where patient centric approaches to healthcare require a more adaptive heuristic approach to deliver more personalised health information back to the clinician.

I’m also interested in the theoretical underpinnings of computation, in particular the implications of the No Free Lunch theorem to NP versus P

This is my ResearchGate profile

Potential Research Collaborations

I'm currently looking to build relationships with NGOs or policy think tanks who are involved in influencing governmental decision-making on or public perceptions of climate change. Please get in touch with me if this is of interest: ian.kenny@open.ac.uk

With my colleague Dhouha Kbaier, I am currently looking for a  PhD student, either self funded or to apply for funds via the school, for the project below:

Publications

Creating ‘a simple conversation’: Designing a conversational user interface to improve the experience of accessing support for study (2023-03)
Iniesto, Francisco; Coughlan, Tim; Lister, Kate; Devine, Peter; Freear, Nicholas D.; Greenwood, Richard; Holmes, Wayne; Kenny, Ian; McLeod, Kevin and Tudor, Ruth
ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 16, Article 6(1)


Taylor, The Disability Disclosure Virtual Assistant: A Case Study of Participatory Research with Disabled Students (2021-10)
Lister, Kate; Coughlan, Tim; Kenny, Ian; Tudor, Ruth and Iniesto, Francisco
Education Sciences, 11, Article 587(10)


Hydrographical Flow Modelling of the River Severn Using Particle Swarm Optimization (2020)
Kenny, Ian
The Computer Journal, 63(11) (pp. 1713-1726)


Rapid Adaptive Climate Change Model: Application of a Probabilistic Centred Approach to the Minas Passage Bay of Fundy datasets (2022)
Kenny, Ian and Kbaier, Dhouha
In : OCEANS 2022 (17-20 Aug 2022, Hampton Roads)