Dr Alistair Willis

Professional biography

Alistair Willis is a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the Open University. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, and a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of York. After his DPhil, Alistair worked in the software engineering group at Philips Research Laboratories on automatic software testing, before joining the Open University's Computing Department in 2003. 

Alistair leads the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing research group in the School of Computing and Communications, and leads the Data Science theme of the Institute of Coding.

Research interests

Alistair's research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in particular how people interpret ambiguous text. At the Open University, he has investigated how to build computational models that predict when different people will disagree on the interpretation of ambiguous text. His work has looked at both the theoretical foundations of the phenomenon, and its potential impact in the area of requirements engineering.

He is also interested in the problem of how to recognise semantic similarity between texts. His research in this area applies inductive logic programming to learn systems for automatically grading students' written work. This work is currently being extended to use deep learning models for grading, as well as traditional symbolic methods.

The methods underlying these tasks are generalisable beyond NLP. Alistair has collaborated with computational musicologists on machine learning techniques to support automatic music composition for games, and with social scientists on using social media to understand the audience for the Russian television network RT.

Teaching interests

Alistair currently chairs the final year module Data Management and Analysis. This gives students a holistic view of the data lifecycle, developing a range of technical and discursive skills to enable them to use data to tell a story. By using open datasets, the module also attempts to demonstrate to students the possibility of using open data to effect change in the world.