Alan Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University. He is well known for his textbook and research in HCI including CSCW, mobile interfaces, technical creativity, and some of the earliest work on privacy and ethical implications of intelligent data processing. More recent work includes community engagement especially in rural areas and his one thousand mile research walk around Wales, which generated substantial quantitative and qualitative open research data from blogs to biodata.

However, before he was in HCI, Alan was a mathematician, including representing the UK in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He has practiced as a professional statistician and applied mathematician including work on modelling agricultural crop sprays, medical statistics and undersea cable detection. Within HCI these skills have been applied in his foundational work on formal methods for interactive systems, the use of Bayesian techniques in education, random sampling for visualisation of big data and uncertainty, and analysis of potential bias against human/applied areas in REF, the UK research assessment exercise.

This unusual combination of skills and experience gives Alan a unique insight into the issues and problems when applying statistics to human data.