David De Roure PhD FBCS FIMA FRSA CITP

David De Roure is Academic Director of the Digital Scholarship @ Oxford initiative, Academic Director of the Laboratory for AI Security Research, and Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre, a multidisciplinary institute in the Department of Engineering Science. He is an Honorary Research Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he is Technical Director of the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM). His research focuses on new methods of digital scholarship, innovation in knowledge infrastructure, cybersecurity, and music.

He has co-founded three interdisciplinary initiatives: the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, which is the world’s largest socio-technical research centre focused on the future implementation of the Internet of Things; the Software Sustainability Institute, cultivating better and more sustainable software to enable world-class research; and PRiSM, the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music at the Royal Northern College of Music. Additionally he has been involved in running the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School since 2011. He was Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre from 2012-17, and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute from 2018-2024.

David's past research projects include The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (SOCIAM), Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST), and Transforming Musicology. He was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme where he was the National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2009-2013, and subsequently Strategic Advisor for new and emerging forms of data and real time analytics.

David's research is distinctively interdisciplinary. From an early background in electronics, computer science and artificial intelligence, David became closely involved in the Hypertext, Web, and computational research communities, in pervasive computing, digital social research and digital scholarship. He has engaged closely and collaboratively with humanities (digital humanities, digital musicology, computational creativity), engineering (Internet of Things, cybersecurity, physical computing), social sciences (Social Machines, Web Science, citizen science), information science (knowledge infrastructure, computational archival science), and computer science (large scale distributed systems, AI). Since 2018 he has had roles assisting the development of the UKRI Research and Innovation Infrastructure, particularly in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. His personal research is at the intersection of music, maths, machines and AI, empowering the creative human in a complex digital world.

Prior to moving to Oxford in 2010, David was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Director of the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment. His earlier research activities included Amorphous Computing at MIT and the Semantic Grid, as well as myExperiment and Research Objects which exemplify his promotion of open scholarship and enhancement of scholarly communication. His PhD study was in Lisp and distributed systems, supervised by David W Barron and Peter Henderson and awarded in 1990.

He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and the Royal Society of Arts, and a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College where he chairs the Digital Research Cluster.

David's interests are in the affordances and dis-affordances of the digital, innovating in digital research methods and knowledge infrastructures, and critical understanding of digital and computational approaches.

With a team of Research Software Engineers, the Digital Scholarship (DiSc) at Oxford initiative is building capacity at all academic levels and pump-priming digital research in the Humanities and adjacent disciplines. David has been Academic Director of Digital Scholarship since 2023. They are excited to be advancing plans for Digital Scholarship in the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, opening in 2025.

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS) has been running annually since 2011, bringing participants from all over the world, now in-person and online. David is one of the organisers and has taught Introduction to DH, crowdsourcing, quantitative methods, computational thinking, AI and creativity, and contributed to Linked Data and Humanities Data.

The MSc in Digital Scholarship is an interdisciplinary Masters programme introducing the full range of issues arising when digital tools and methods are applied to humanistic scholarship. Distinctively the MSc students do a ‘practicum placement’ working within Digital Scholarship projects. David is pleased to have been involved in the design and delivery since the course was introduced in 2022.

The UK Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) was founded in 2010, the first organisation in the world dedicated to improving software in research and helping individuals and institutions understand the vital role that software plays in research. David was a co-funder and co-investigator until 2024, and continues to advise on engagement with the Arts & Humanities community.

Previously David was National Strategic Director of Digital Social Research for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and a Strategic Advisor in new and emerging forms of data and real time analytics. He also helped develop a Social Machines approach to studying large scale sociotechnical systems.

David's interests are AI/ML security research from foundational theory to real-world application, large scale distributed systems, emergent behaviours and socio-technical perspectives on the ecosystem.

The Laboratory for AI Security Research took its first intake of PhD students in 2024. As Academic Director he help co-ordinate the LASR research programme working with national partners, focused on strengthening cyber resilience.

The PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity was the research wing of UKRI‘s Security of Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) programme, ensuring that technological advances in the Internet of Things are developed and applied safely and securely in consumer and business contexts. One of the five founders, David's areas included risk assessment in complex systems, AI at the edge, and hardware-software codesign. The programme completed in July 2024 after 8 years.

Previously David worked in the Amorphous Computing project at MIT (1997), investigating distributed system design for emergent behaviours, at BT Labs, and in pan-European IPv6 deployment projects. He studied technological innovation in physical and digital life in the Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (2001-07) and mediated collaborative spaces in CoAKTing. During this time he was also Director of the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment (EnviSense) funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry. Later he was involved in establishing the company Ontology Systems.

David's interest is in computational approaches to assist human creativity, from algorithmic composition to AI and machine learning, and sonification.

The Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM) was founded at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2007, in collaboration with Oxford, and has led to an extensive programme of research and musical works. As Technical Director David brings digital scholarship and interdisciplinary skills to support the team of composers and artists. He was involved in the early design of the gesture recognition software which has been used in many performances, including 6 premieres in New York in 2024.

The performance aspect is now part of the TORCH Hub for Performance Research, and together they hosted the International Conference on AI Music Creativity in 2024. He has also worked on Public Engagement with Research including maths and music, and in Oxford’s Science Together project which ran an event at the Old Fire Station and released a Hip Hop album.

Prior to this he worked on the Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST) project, working with colleagues to re-imagine Ada Lovelace’s contributions to maths and music, under the banner of “Numbers into Notes. He also contributed to Transforming Musicology, and was a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (2018-2024) working on AI and music.

Previously David worked on Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) and has maintained an interest in structural analysis. Before this he worked on music and multimedia archives in the pre-Web Hypertext research community.

Selected Music

Through his work with the PRiSM team at RNCM, at Oxford and at The Turing, David has been involved in several music projects and performances which bring together maths, music, text and AI: 

• Alter (2019) - Robert Laidlow
• But then, what are these numbers? (2019) - Emily Howard.
• The Anvil (2019) - Emily Howard and Michael Symmons Roberts.
• Text Score Dataset 1.0 (2021) - Jennifer Walshe.
• Gravity (2022) - Robert Laidlow.
• Silicon (2022) - Robert Laidlow.
• Epoch (2023) - Rawz and the Inner Peace Records collective.
• ICE & PRiSM (2024) - International Contemporary Ensemble and PRiSM: Music, AI, and Co-creation

My ORCID publication list is available here (my ORCID is 0000-0001-9074-3016), and there is also a list of my Computer Science publications on DBLP. See also Google Scholar citations. 

Many of my papers are available in the Oxford University Research Archive.

Bofan Ma, Ellen Sargen, David De Roure, and Emily Howard. “Learning to Learn: A Reflexive Case Study of PRiSM SampleRNN”, International Conference on AI and Musical Creativity AIMC 2024 (09/09 - 11/09). https://aimc2024.pubpub.org/pub/fnpykfdv

Agnieszka Dutkowska-Zuk, Joe Bourne, Chengyuan An, Xuan Gao, Oktay Cetinkaya, Peter Novitzky, Gideon Ogunniye, Rachel Cooper, David De Roure, Julie McCann, et al. 2024. "How Do Public Perceptions Affect the Security of Connected Places? A Systematic Literature Review" Information 15, no. 2: 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/info15020080

David De Roure and Pip Willcox, "e-Science: The Long View," 2023 IEEE 19th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), Limassol, Cyprus, 2023, pp. 1-4, https://doi.org/10.1109/e-Science58273.2023.10254795 David De Roure, John Moore, Kevin Page, Toby Burrows, David Beavan, Timothy Hobson, Giles Bergel, et al. “Digispec: Scoping Future Born-digital Data Services for the Arts and Humanities: Case Reports” Zenodo, 31 August 2022. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4716148 

David De Roure, Pip Willcox. Scholarly Social Machines: A Web Science Perspective on our Knowledge Infrastructure. ACM WebSci 2020: 250-256. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3394231.3397915

Barbara McGillivray, Beatrice Alex, Sarah Ames, Guyda Armstrong, David Beavan, Arianna Ciula, Giovanni Colavizza, James Cummings, David De Roure et al. The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A White Paper from The Alan Turing Institute. 2020. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164.v3

Michelle Phillips, Andrew J. Stewart, J. Matthew Wilcoxson, Luke A. Jones, Emily Howard, Pip Willcox, Marcus du Sautoy and David De Roure. What Determines the Perception of Segmentation in Contemporary Music? Front. Psychol., 28 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01001

N. Shadbolt, K. O'Hara, D. De Roure, W. Hall. The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. Lecture Notes in Social Networks, Springer 2019, ISBN 978-3-030-10888-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10889-2

M. Sandler, D. De Roure, S. Benford and K. Page, Semantic Web Technology for New Experiences Throughout the Music Production-Consumption Chain, 2019 International Workshop on Multilayer Music Representation and Processing (MMRP), Milano, Italy, 2019, pp. 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1109/MMRP.2019.00017

Sabbir M. Rashid, David De Roure, and Deborah L. McGuinness. A Music Theory Ontology. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Applications for Audio and Music (SAAM '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6–14. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243907.3243913

David De Roure, Pip Willcox, and Alan Chamberlain. Lovelace's Legacy: Creative Algorithmic Interventions for Live Performance. In Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2018 on Sound in Immersion and Emotion (AM'18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 41, 1–5. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243274.3275380

David De Roure, Graham Klyne, John Pybus, David M. Weigl, and Kevin Page. Music SOFA: An architecture for semantically informed recomposition of Digital Music Objects. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Applications for Audio and Music (SAAM '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 33–41. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243907.3243912

D. De Roure and P. Willcox, Experimental Humanities: An Adventure with Lovelace and Babbage, 2017 IEEE 13th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), Auckland, 2017, pp. 194-201. https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2017.32

D. De Roure, G. Klyne, K.R. Page, J. Pybus, D.M. Weigl, M. Wilcoxson, P. Willcox, Plans and performances: Parallels in the production of science and music, 2016 IEEE 12th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), Baltimore, MD, 2016, pp. 185-192. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2016.7870899

K.R. Page, T. Nurmikko-Fuller, C. Rindfleisch, D. M. Weigl, R. Lewis, L. Dreyfus, and D. De Roure, A toolkit for live annotation of opera performance: Experiences capturing Wagner’s Ring Cycle, in Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2015, pp. 211–217, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1415582

David De Roure, Clare Hooper, Kevin Page, Ségolène Tarte, and Pip Willcox. Observing Social Machines Part 2: How to Observe? In Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 13, 1–5. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1145/2786451.2786475

D. De Roure, The emerging paradigm of social machines, Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2014: Social Networks and Social Machines, Surveillance and Empowerment, p. 227. 2014. http://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-450-3-227

Ilaria Liccardi, Joseph Pato, Daniel J. Weitzner, Hal Abelson, and David De Roure. No technical understanding required: helping users make informed choices about access to their personal data. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MOBIQUITOUS '14), 140–150. https://doi.org/10.4108/icst.mobiquitous.2014.258066

Robert Simpson, Kevin R. Page, and David De Roure. Zooniverse: observing the world's largest citizen science platform. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '14 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1049–1054. 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2579215

Page, K.R., Fields, B., De Roure, D. et al. Capturing the workflows of music information retrieval for repeatability and reuse. J Intell Inf Syst 41, 435–459. 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-013-0260-9

Sean Bechhofer, Iain Buchan, David De Roure, et al. Why linked data is not enough for scientists, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 29, Issue 2, Pages 599-611. 2013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2011.08.004

B. Fields, K. Page, D. De Roure and T. Crawford, The segment ontology: Bridging music-generic and domain-specific, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Barcelona, 2011, pp. 1-6. 201. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME.2011.6012204

De Roure David, Page Kevin R., Fields Benjamin, Crawford Tim, Downie J. Stephen and Fujinaga Ichiro. An e-Research approach to Web-scale music analysis. An e-Research approach to Web-scale music analysis. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.3693300–3317. 2011. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2011.0171

Carole A. Goble, Jiten Bhagat, Sergejs Aleksejevs, Don Cruickshank, Danius Michaelides, David Newman, Mark Borkum, Sean Bechhofer, Marco Roos, Peter Li, David De Roure, myExperiment: a repository and social network for the sharing of bioinformatics workflows, Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 38, Issue suppl_2, 1 July 2010, Pages W677–W682. 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkq429

Birkin Mark, Procter Rob, Allan Rob, Bechhofer Sean, Buchan Iain, Goble Carole, Hudson-Smith Andy, Lambert Paul, De Roure David and Sinnott Richard. Elements of a computational infrastructure for social simulation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.3683797–3812. 2010. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0145

De Roure, David, Goble, Carole and Stevens, Robert. The Design and Realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for Social Sharing of Workflows. Future Generation Computer Systems, 25, 561-567. 2009.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2008.06.010

Hall, Wendy, De Roure, David and Shadbolt, Nigel. The evolution of the Web and implications for eResearch. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.367991–1001. 2008. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2008.0252