Dave Murray-Rust is a Lecturer in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has a MEng in Information Systems (Cambridge), MSc in Informatics (Edinburgh) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Music (Edinburgh). His work is concerned with ways that people, data and things interact. Current research questions include: How can we understand the "social machines" – large-scale human-computer collective systems – that are a manifestation of the algorithmically mediated society that we are heading towards? How can we ensure that there is space for people within computational systems, preserving privacy, choice, identity and humanity while making use of possibilities of computational coordination and personal data? How can we work with things that have an increasing sense of agency, from sensing to responding to shaping the world around them? In practice, this relates to: IoT, personal data, human data interaction, physical computing and manifesting data.
His artwork relates to the research questions, and explores interactions between people, matter and computational systems. His work has been shown internationally, in particular Lichtsuchende, which has been exhibited at ZKM (Exo-evolution exhibition, 2016), the New Technology Art Awards (Ghent, 2015), Edinburgh Science Festival (2017).
Previously, Dave has worked on several large FP7 and EU projects on modelling and simulating human/environment interactions around land use and climate change (PLUREL, ECOCHANGE, VOLANTE), and produced several agent based modelling frameworks (Aporia, CRAFTY, ABMLand). He was a postdoc on the SociaM project, looking at the theory and practice of social machines, including using process calculus to model online interaction, developing ideas of pro-social deception and applying wayfaring to social machines.
