Caroline Jay

The University of Manchester · School of Computer Science

The Community Land Model Urban (CLMU) is a process-based numerical urban climate model that simulates the interactions between the atmosphere and urban surfaces, serving as a powerful tool for the convergence of urban and climate science research. Despite its advanced capabilities, CLMU presents significant challenges for users unfamiliar with nume...

Objectives: To investigate clinicians' attitudes towards current automated interpretation of ECG and novel AI technologies and their perception of computer-assisted interpretation. Materials and Methods: We conducted a series of interviews with clinicians in the UK. Our study: (i) explores the potential for AI, specifically future 'human-like' comp...

Museum online collections now contain millions of objects, making developing tools for supporting users in navigating these a priority. We present a user-centric study of a recommendation system created to browse Art UK’s digital collection according to personal preference. Three forms of recommendations were explored: image-only, metadata-only, an...

When visualising data, chart designers have the freedom to choose the upper and lower limits of numerical axes. Axis limits can determine the physical characteristics of plotted values, such as the physical position of data points in dot plots. In two experiments (total N=300), we demonstrate that axis limits affect viewers' interpretations of the...

Variability in case severity and in the range of symptoms experienced has been apparent from the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a clinical perspective, symptom variability might indicate various routes/mechanisms by which infection leads to disease, with different routes requiring potentially different treatment approaches. For publ...

Vaccination is one of the most impactful healthcare interventions in terms of lives saved at a given cost, leading the anti-vaccination movement to be identified as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019 by the World Health Organization. This issue increased in importance during the COVID-19 pandemic where, despite good overall adherenc...

Biological science produces “big data” in varied formats, which necessitates using computational tools to process, integrate, and analyse data. Researchers using computational biology tools range from those using computers for communication, to those writing analysis code. We examine differences in how researchers conceptualise the same data, which...

Vaccination is one of the most impactful healthcare interventions in terms of lives saved at a given cost, leading the anti-vaccination movement to be identified as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019 by the World Health Organization. This issue increased in importance during the COVID-19 pandemic where, despite good overall adherenc...

Testing for infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an important intervention in reducing onwards transmission of COVID-19, particularly when combined with the isolation and contact-tracing of positive cases. Many countries with the capacity to do so have made use of lab-processed Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing targeted at individuals with symptoms a...

Within the last few years, wearable sensor technologies have allowed us to access novel biometrics that give us the ability to connect musical gesture to computing systems. Doing this affords us to study how we perform musically and understand the process at data level. However, biometric information is complex and cannot be directly mapped to digi...

Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report on an online observational study with ten undergraduate student programmers as they engaged in programming ta...

Network comparison is a widely used tool for analysing complex systems, with applications in varied domains including comparison of protein interactions or highlighting changes in structure of trade networks. In recent years, a number of network comparison methodologies based on the distribution of graphlets (small connected network subgraphs) have...

Hay fever affects people differently and can change over a lifetime, but data is lacking on how environmental factors may influence this. This study is the first to combine atmospheric sensor data with real-time, geo-positioned hay fever symptom reports to examine the relationship between symptom severity and air quality, weather and land use. We s...

Teaser: Concerned about the costs of implementing the FAIR data principles for existing datasets in pharmaceutical companies? Our framework and helper tool can guide decision-making on retrospective FAIRification by supporting you in analysing the expected costs and benefits. Research highlights:  Implementing FAIR in pharmaceutical R&D is a costl...

Many disciplines are facing a “reproducibility crisis”, which has precipitated much discussion about how to improve research integrity, reproducibility, and transparency. A unified effort across all sectors, levels, and stages of the research ecosystem is needed to coordinate goals and reforms that focus on open and transparent research practices....

Complex models, such as neural networks (NNs), are comprised of many interrelated components. In order to represent these models, eliciting and characterising the relations between components is essential. Perhaps because of this, diagrams, as “icons of relation”, are a prevalent medium for signifying complex models. Diagrams used to communicate NN...

Background The efforts to contain SARS-CoV-2 and reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have been supported by Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) systems in many settings, including the United Kingdom. Mathematical models of transmission and TTI interventions, used to inform design and policy choices, make assumptions about the public’s behaviour in...

Biological science produces large amounts of data in a variety of formats, which necessitates the use of computational tools to process, integrate, analyse, and glean insights from the data. Researchers who use computational biology tools range from those who use computers primarily for communication and data lookup, to those who write complex soft...

Network comparison is a widely-used tool for analyzing complex systems, with applications in varied domains including comparison of protein interactions or highlighting changes in structure of trade networks. In recent years, a number of network comparison methodologies based on the distribution of graphlets (small connected network subgraphs) have...

Testing for infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an important intervention in reducing onwards transmission of COVID-19, particularly when combined with the isolation and contact-tracing of positive cases. Many countries with the capacity to do so have made use of lab-processed Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing targeted at individuals with symptoms a...

Hay fever affects people differently and can change over a lifetime, but data is lacking on how environmental factors may influence this. This study is the first to combine atmospheric sensor data with real-time, geo-positioned hay fever symptom reports to examine the relationship between symptom severity and air quality, weather and land use. We s...

Objectives: A need for Open Research practices exists, yet there remains a lack of validated questionnaires to assess Open Research practices. The study aimed to develop a brief (<5 minutes), standardised questionnaire to measure Open Research awareness and engagement across UK institutions.Methods: The Brief Open Research Survey (BORS) was develop...

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid response from governments and researchers worldwide. As of May 2022, over 6 million people died as a result of COVID-19 and over 500 million confirmed cases, with many COVID-19 survivors going on to experience long-term effects weeks, months, or years after their illness. Despite this staggering to...

Despite the intuitive value of adopting the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles in both academic and industrial sectors, challenges exist in resourcing, balancing long- versus short-term priorities, and achieving technical implementation. This situation is exacerbated by the unclear mechanisms by which costs and bene...

Physical activity reconstruction is a process whereby self-trackers reflect on their physical activities and goals in an episodic fashion by recalling a series of past experiences and events. Tracking tools often include spatio-temporal cues (i.e. maps and timelines) to provide further context to these physical activity patterns, yet little is know...

In recent years, quantifying the impacts of detrimental air quality has become a global priority for researchers and policy makers. At present, the systems and methodologies supporting the collection and manipulation of this data are difficult to access. To support studies quantifying the interplay between common gaseous and particulate pollutants...

The efforts to contain SARS-CoV-2 and reduce the impact of COVID-19 have been supported by Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) systems in many settings, including the United Kingdom. The mathematical models underlying policy decisions about TTI make assumptions about behaviour in the context of a rapidly unfolding and changeable emergency. This study inv...

Software now lies at the heart of scholarly research. Here we argue that as well as being important from a methodological perspective, software should, in many instances, be recognised as an output of research, equivalent to an academic paper. The article discusses the different roles that software may play in research and highlights the relationsh...

The increasing amount of data collected about the environment brings tremendous potential to create digital systems that can predict the impact of intended and unintended changes. With growing interest in the construction of Digital Twins across multiple sectors, combined with rapid changes to where we spend our time and the nature of pollutants we...

Many disciplines are facing a “reproducibility crisis”, ushering in much discussion about how to improve research integrity, reproducibility, and transparency. A unified effort across all sectors, levels, and stages of the research ecosystem is needed to coordinate goals and reforms that focus on open and transparent research practices, while promo...

Understanding variability in clinical symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 community infections is key in management of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Here we bring together four large and diverse datasets deriving from routine testing, a population-representative household survey and participatory mobile surveillance in the United Kingdom and use cutting-edge u...

The first quarter of 2020 heralded the beginning of an uncertain future for museums and galleries as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the only means to stay ‘open’ was to turn towards the digital. In this paper, we investigate how the physical closure of museum buildings due to lockdown restrictions caused shockwaves within their digital strategies an...

The findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) principles for scientific data management and stewardship aim to facilitate data reuse at scale by both humans and machines. Research and development (R&D) in the pharmaceutical industry is becoming increasingly data driven, but managing its data assets according to FAIR principles remains co...

Diagrams are often used in scholarly communication. We analyse a corpus of diagrams found in scholarly computational linguistics conference proceedings (ACL 2017), and find inclusion of a system diagram to be correlated with higher numbers of citations after three years. Inclusion of more than three diagrams in this 8-page limit conference was foun...

We utilise VisDNA as a tool for understanding neural network system architecture diagrams. Through examples from scholarly proceedings, we find that the application of the framework to this ecological and complex domain is effective for reflecting on these diagrams. We argue for additional vocabulary to describe semiotic variability and internal in...

This paper examines diagrams describing neural network systems in academic conference proceedings. Many aspects of scholarly communication are controlled, particularly with relation to text and formatting, but often diagrams are not centrally curated beyond a peer review. Using a corpus-based approach, we argue that the heterogeneous diagrammatic n...

Media is evolving from traditional linear narratives to personalised experiences, where control over information (or how it is presented) is given to individual audience members. Measuring and understanding audience engagement with this media is important in at least two ways: (1) a post-hoc understanding of how engaged audiences are with the conte...

Museums contain vast amounts of information and knowledge, providing a vital source of engagement for diverse audiences. As society becomes ever more digital, museums are moving towards making their collections available online to the public. However, just providing a searchable interface to the entirety of the collection could be a barrier to succ...

Electrocardiograms (ECGs), which capture the electrical activity of the human heart, are widely used in clinical practice, and notoriously difficult to interpret. Whilst there have been attempts to automate their interpretation for several decades, human reading of the data presented visually remains the ‘gold standard’. We demonstrate how a visual...

Relapse prevention (RP) - helping people to develop relevant coping skills in high-risk situations that challenge abstinence - is an important part of alcohol use disorder treatment. Recreating personalised, high-risk situations can be challenging in clinical contexts. Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) has the potential to offer immersive exposure to r...

Research software – specialist software used to support or undertake research – is of huge importance to researchers. It contributes to significant advances in the wider world and requires collaboration between people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Analysis of recent survey data provides evidence for a lack of diversity in the Research Softwa...

Stereotypes are hugely influential in human-human interactions but have received little attention in human-computer interaction. The associations held for everyday technological devices and the ways these devices are stereotyped have the potential to influence interactions, and may be beneficial to designers in improving the congruency between a de...

Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) has been shown to be effective in treating anxiety disorders and phobias, but has not yet been widely tested for Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) and it is not known whether health care practitioners working with SUDs would use VRT if it were available. We report the results of an interview study exploring practitioners’...

In the first quarter of 2020, the doors of museums around the world shut and their operations at physical sites were reduced in line with necessary security measures. This heralded the beginning of an uncertain future for museums and galleries as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the only means to stay ‘open’ was to turn towards the digital. In this pa...

Diagrams are often used in scholarly communication. We analyse a corpus of diagrams found in scholarly computational linguistics conference proceedings (ACL 2017), and find inclusion of a system diagram to be correlated with higher numbers of citations after 3 years. Inclusion of over three diagrams in this 8-page limit conference was found to corr...

This short paper examines diagrams describing neural network systems in academic conference proceedings. Many aspects of scholarly communication are controlled, particularly with relation to text and formatting, but often diagrams are not centrally curated beyond a peer review. Using a corpus-based approach, we argue that the heterogeneous diagramm...

Complex systems, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems , are comprised of many interrelated components. In order to represent these systems, demonstrating the relations between components is essential. Perhaps because of this, diagrams, as "icons of relation", are a prevalent medium for signifying complex systems. Diagrams used to communicat...

Research software -- specialist software used to support or undertake research -- is of huge importance to researchers. It contributes to significant advances in the wider world and requires collaboration between people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Analysis of recent survey data provides evidence for a lack of diversity in the Research Soft...

Torsade de points (TdP), a life-threatening arrhythmia that can increase the risk of sudden cardiac death, is associated with drug-induced QT-interval prolongation on the electrocardiogram (ECG). While many modern ECG machines provide automated measurements of the QT-interval, these automated QT values are usually correct only for a noise-free norm...

Many self-trackers lose interest in, disengage from and ultimately withdraw from tracking. Reasons for this include poor motivation, unmet expectations and difficulty in attaining daily goals. To support users in reflecting on their goals more realistically, we developed FitReflect, an app that moderates physical activity goals by factoring in user...

Software now lies at the heart of scholarly research. Here we argue that as well as being important from a methodological perspective, software should, in many instances, be recognised as an output of research, equivalent to an academic paper. The article discusses the different roles that software may play in research and highlights the relationsh...

Background : Software is now ubiquitous within research. In addition to the general challenges common to all software development projects, research software must also represent, manipulate, and provide data for complex theoretical constructs. Ensuring this process of theory-software translation is robust is essential to maintaining the integrity o...

Time-series forecasting methods have often been used to mitigate some of the challenges associated with deploying chemical transport models at high resolution for use at local scales. In this study we deploy and evaluate Facebook’s Prophet model v0.6 in predicting hourly concentrations of Nitrogen Dioxide [NO2] over a 2 year period [2018–2019] acro...

Drug-induced long QT syndrome (diLQTS), characterized by a prolongation of the QT-interval on the electrocardiogram (ECG), is a serious adverse drug reaction that can cause the life-threatening arrhythmia Torsade de Points (TdP). Self-monitoring for diLQTS could therefore save lives, but detecting it on the ECG is difficult, particularly at high an...

Twelve artificial intelligence system experts are interviewed about their use of diagrams. 1. Differences in interpretation, preference and use of scholarly system diagrams are discovered. 2. Priorities and problems that scholarly system diagram users encounter are identified. 3. Guidelines for neural network system diagrams are proposed. Abstr...

Self-trackers reflect on their personal data to understand their behaviour and plan accordingly. Often, this reflection involves uncertainty, which can affect decision-making. To better understand the role of uncertainty, we conducted an interview study to comprehend how uncertainty influences reflection and the resulting actions. Our findings sugg...

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic, progressive condition of the lungs. With the rise of "big data" and data science, there are increasing opportunities for improving the management of such chronic conditions. This potential can only be exploited if we actively involve patients in research and development processes. On 21 st...