Edward Abel



I am a Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Humanistic Data Science at SDU and am part of the (Information Communication and Ethics) ICE research group. I was previously at the University of Manchester School of Computer Science, as part of the Decision and Cognitive Sciences Research Group, Information Management Group and the Data Science Institute. As a Research Associate I worked upon the VADA (Value Added DAta systems) EPSRC funded project, prior to this I did my PhD in the School of Computer Science under the supervision of Prof John Keane and Dr Ludmil Mikhailov.

Additionally, I run the Data Analysis and Visualizations YouTube channel - Sultans of data.

Bio and Research Interests Overview

My areas of research interests include decision support, advanced information management and machine learning & optimisation.

After completing a BSc in Computer Science I worked as a software engineer in France and then in London, before attaining a PhD in computer science from Manchester’s school of computer science. My PhD investigated utilising elements from machine learning, such as evolutionary computing, within decision making areas such as inconsistency reduction and compromise analysis within group decision making.

Since completing my PhD I have worked as a Research Associate upon the EPSRC funded Value-Added Data Systems (VADA) project. The VADA project is investigating, data management principles, techniques, methodologies and tools to support, in the context of big data, the complete cycle (from extraction, through semantic integration, to querying) of data provision that is sensitive to the user context and aims to find best-fit solutions in the light of the data context (e.g., quality, provenance, etc.). During the project I have also been involved in Knowledge transfer activities, and worked on a 3 month data science internship at the BBC R&D, investigating personalisation and advanced information management.

Additionally, I am involved with various outreach and teaching activities. I have been involved in activates including being a coding tutor, teaching computer science within primary schools, with The Tutor Trust and running an afterschool Code Club, and recently wrote an article for the Hello World publication called - Recommender Systems - The Hidden AI Steering our Choices. Information about The Digital Mindsets.

Publications

2024

Edward Abel, Andrew Goddard "Association Rule Breaking Based Diversity for Recommender Systems". 15th International Conference on Smart Computing and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI 2024) [PDF] [Slides]

Edward Abel, Anne Dorthe Larsen "Exploring Perceptions & Reactions to Digital Humans". 7th International Conference on Interaction Design and Digital Creation/Computing (IDDC 2024) [PDF] [Slides]

2023

Edward Abel, Andrew Goddard "A Live Concert Performance Recommender System Utilizing User Ideal and Antithesis Ideal Setlist Preferences". SMAI 2023 [PDF] [Slides]

Edward Abel, Sajid Siraj "An approach to investigate fairness using Dominance-based Rough Sets Analysis - How fair were the COVID-19 restriction decisions in the UK?". Applied Soft computing 2023 [Open Access Link]

Edward Abel "Recommender Systems: The Hidden AI Steering our Choices". Hello World, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, 2023 [PDF]

Edward Abel, Sajid Siraj "Investigating decision accountability and trustworthiness with dominance-based rough sets analysis. How fair were COVID19 restrictions?". IC2S2 2023 [PDF] [Slides]

Andrea Valente, Emanuela Marchetti, Edward Abel "Scaffolding CT via Point-And-Click and P5.js". LTLE 2023 [PDF]

2022

Edward Abel, Ixent Galpin, Norman W. Paton, John A. Keane "Pairwise comparisons or constrained optimization? A usability evaluation of techniques for eliciting decision priorities". International Transactions in Operational Research. (2022) [PDF]

Edward Abel, Sajid Siraj: "How fair were COVID-19 restriction decisions? A data-driven investigation of England using the dominance-based rough sets approach". CoRR abs/2211.00056 (2022) [Link]

2021

Martin Koehler, Edward Abel, Alex Bogatu, Cristina Civili, Lacramioara Mazilu, Nikolaos Konstantinou, Alvaro A.A. Fernandes, John A. Keane, Leonid Libkin, Norman W. Paton: Incorporating Data Context to Cost-Effectively Automate End-to-End Data Wrangling. IEEE Transactions of Big Data 7(1) (2021) [Link]

2020

Edward Abel, Julio César Cortés Ríos, Norman W. Paton, John A. Keane, Alvaro A. A. Fernandes "Targeted evidence collection for uncertain supplier selection". Expert Systems and Applications. 159: 113583 (2020) [PDF]

2019

Nikolaos Konstantinou, Edward Abel, Luigi Bellomarini, Alex Bogatu, Cristina Civili, Endri Irfanie, Martin Koehler, Lacramioara Mazilu, Emanuel Sallinger, Alvaro AA Fernandes, Georg Gottlob, John A Keane, Norman W Paton: "VADA: an architecture for end user informed data preparation". Journal of Big Data (2019) [Link]

Julio César Cortés Ríos, Norman W Paton, Alvaro AA Fernandes, Edward Abel, John A Keane: Crowdsourced Targeted Feedback Collection for Multicriteria Data Source Selection. Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ) (2019) [PDF]

2018

Edward Abel, Ludmil Mikhailov, John A. Keane "Inconsistency reduction in decision making via multi-objective optimisation." European Journal of Operational Research 267(1): 212-226 (2018) [PDF]

Edward Abel, John A. Keane, Norman W. Paton, Alvaro A. A. Fernandes, Martin Koehler, Nikolaos Konstantinou, Nurzety A. Azuan, Suzanne M. Embury "SOURCERY: User Driven Multi-Criteria Source Selection." CIKM 2018: 1947-1950 [Link]

Edward Abel, John A. Keane, Norman W. Paton, Alvaro A. A. Fernandes, Martin Koehler, Nikolaos Konstantinou, Julio César Cortés Ríos, Nurzety A. Azuan, Suzanne M. Embury "User driven multi-criteria source selection." Inf. Sci. 430: 179-199 (2018) [Open Acess Link]

Ixent Galpin, Edward Abel, Norman W. Paton "Source Selection Languages: A Usability Evaluation." HILDA@SIGMOD 2018: 8:1-8:6 [PDF]

2017

Koehler M., Bogatu A., Civili C., Konstantinou N., Abel E., Fernandes A., Keane J., Libkin L., Paton N., "Data context informed data wrangling". Int. Conf. on Big Data (BigData'17), IEEE, Boston, MA, USA, 2017 pages 956-963 [PDF link]

Ríos J., Paton N., Fernandes A., Abel E., Keane J.. "Targeted Feedback Collection Applied to Multi-Criteria Source Selection" Advances in Databases and Information Systems 2017, pages 136-150. [PDF]

Konstantinou N., Koehler M., Abel E., Civili C., Neumayr B., Sallinger E., Fernandes A., Gottlob G., Keane J., Libkin L., Paton N., "The VADA Architecture for Cost-Effective Data Wrangling", Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data, 2017, pages 1599-1602 [Link]

2016

Abel E. "Preference Elicitation from Pairwise Comparisons for Traceable Multi-Criteria Decision Making" PhD Thesis [PDF]

2015

Abel E., Mikhailov L., Keane J. “Group Aggregation of Pairwise Comparisons Using Multi-Objective Optimization” Information Sciences journal. 2015, Volume 322, Pages 257–275 [PDF]

2014

Abel E., Mikhailov L., Keane J. “Clustering Decision Makers with respect to similarity of views” SSCI clustering paper. Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (IEEE SSCI) IEEE International Conference, 2014 [PDF]

2013

Abel E., Mikhailov L., Keane J., "Reducing Inconsistency in Pairwise Comparisons Using Multi-objective Evolutionary Computing," in Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2013 IEEE International Conference, 2013, pp. 80-8 [PDF]