Dave Murray-Rust is a Senior 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. He is researching questions such as: 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 understand the “social machines” – large-scale human-computer collective systems – that are a manifestation of the algorithmic society that we are heading towards? 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). He is also Director of Inspace, a public engagement space where data meets culture.
Current funded research includes: Chatty Factories (EPSRC - developing continuous digital ethnography), GeoPact (EPSRC/Interreg - location based smart contracts), VisHub (EPSRC - visualisation for early career researchers).
