Welcome Neelima

We are delighted to welcome Neelima Sailaja to our team at Horizon. Neelima joins us as a Research Fellow and celebrates her Graduation from the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training this month.

Neelima’s PhD has involved working with the BBC to explore the challenges of using personal data in data driven media experiences. Here she worked on a number of research studies involving BBC technologies and teams including the multi-partner collaboration, the Living Room of the Future which brought together, the Universities of Nottingham, Lancaster and York along with the BBC, British Council and FACT. Here, she was involved in the research ( design, evaluation and dissemination ) which particularly focused on the use of  alternative privacy preserving techniques like edge-computing through the use of the DataBox, within a near-future media experience.

As a Research Fellow, she continues the partnership with the BBC, working on designing responses to the challenges of personal data leverage in future media experiences. As part of this agenda, her research has secured an EPSRC grant from the HDI network to work on the “Design of ‘Data Dialogues’ in Media Recommenders”. The project currently has completed a set of focus groups around a BBC designed innovative cross-media recommender system that utilises a Personal Data Store for it’s data processes. An online workshop was also conducted at ACM IMX 2020, in collaboration with Imagination Lancaster at the University of Lancaster, as part of this research. This initiative is now in the design phase, using the findings of the focus groups to feed into future iterations of the recommender.