Robin Hill

Dr Robin Hill, Lecturer in Cognitive Science

Dr Robin Hill is Lecturer in Cognitive Science and Senior Laboratory Manager for the Cognitive Science Research Laboratories.  His academic work is primarily based around understanding the cognitive aspects of information processing with the aim of improving usability and accessibility. This encompasses investigating how people interact with audio-visual stimuli, whether through mainstream broadcasts, social media, or directly in face-to-face communication and dialogue, combined with their use of different technologies. He also strives to emphasise the importance of considering and accommodating the human user when designing technology.  In turn, he uses advanced technology in his experiments on human behaviour, language and perception to monitor psycho- and bio-physical reactions, such as eye-tracking, electroencephalography and heart rate. This multidisciplinary combination of social and computing science is reflected in his joint position at Edinburgh University, striding both the College of Humanities and Social Science and the College of Science and Engineering.  The words logic, philosophy, statistics, cognitive, science and psychology all appear in my degree titles. In the emerging field of Neuropolitics he analyses emotional engagement, visual attention and affective responses to contemporary news and political events. For Design Informatics, Robin teaches user-centric design and research methodology, enabling an optimal fusion of art and science in product development and data visualisation.

Previous multinational projects have covered human-robot interaction, AI mobile phone tour guides and facilitating the post-editing of machine translated text.  Currently Robin is working on ESRC “The UK in a Changing Europe” neuropolitics projects and has an EPSRC grant on human-like computing and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI).  Perhaps ironically, given everything you’ve just read, the title of the latter is “Start Making Sense”.