Academic background

David was Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre 2012-17. The Centre, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2016, conducts research in and across multiple disciplines and innovates in digital research methods.

Prior to moving to Oxford in 2010 he was Professor of Computer Science at University of Southampton, where he was Director of the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment, Head of the Grid and Pervasive Computing Research Group in Electronics and Computer Science, and a Co-Director of Southampton Regional e-Science Centre. David received his BSc in Mathematics and Physics from Southampton in 1984, and PhD in Computer Science in 1990.

David was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme and from 2009-13 was the UK National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research for the UK Economic and Social Research Council, a strategic leadership role that developed a coherent inter-agency approach to maximize the uptake, use and impact of digital and online technologies across the social science community. Subsequently he became a Strategic Adviser for Data Resources in New and Emerging Forms of Data and Realtime Analytics.

His contributions to reviews and foresight exercises include the UK Blackett Review of Internet of Things (“Internet of things: making the most of the second digital revolution”) and EC Foresight on Key long-term Transformations in Research, Innovation and Higher Education (“The Knowledge Future: Intelligent policy choices for Europe 2050”).

Past visiting positions include the MRC biostatistics unit (analysis of large and complex datasets), INRIA-Rocquencourt (distributed concurrent languages), MIT (amorphous computing), BT Labs (next generation networks), IBM Hursley laboratories (visualisation), the iSchool at University of Illinois (e-Science), and the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at ANU (experimental humanities).

David has been involved in running many community events. He has been chair or programme chair of the ACM World Wide Web Conference, ACM Hypertext and Hypermedia, e-Social Science, ACM Web Science, Digital Research, Future of Research Communication (FORCE11), and IET Living in the Internet of Things. He is currently executive chair of the annual Digital Humanities at Oxford summer school.

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