David De Roure PhD FBCS FIMA FRSA CITP

David De Roure is Academic Director of the Digital Scholarship @ Oxford initiative and Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre, an institute of the Department of Engineering Science. He is also an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he is Technical Director of the Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music (PRiSM), and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.

David's personal research is at the intersection of music, maths, machines and AI, empowering the creative human in music composition and performance. From an early background in electronics and computer science, David became closely involved in the Hypertext, Web, and computational research communities, in pervasive computing, and in digital social research. His broad range of interdisciplinary research has investigated emerging technologies in large scale distributed and sociotechnical systems, with an interest in society, technology and creativity, while also focusing on innovation in the process of scholarship. Today he focuses on new methods of digital scholarship, innovation in knowledge infrastructure, and living in the Internet of Things.

David was Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre from 2012-17. 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. He has also been involved in running the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School since 2011.

David's past research projects include The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (SOCIAM), Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST), and Transforming Musicology. His research is distinctively interdisciplinary and 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.

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. He was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme and was the National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2009-2013, then Strategic Advisor for new and emerging forms of data and real time analytics. 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.

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.

Through my work with the PRiSM team at RNCM, at Oxford and at The Turing, I have 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.

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.

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