Annabel Latham
Title: Dr Annabel Latham
Qualifications: PhD, MSc, BSc(Hons)
Address:

Room E130
School of Computing, Mathematics & Digital Technology 
The Manchester Metropolitan University
John Dalton Building
Chester Street
Manchester
M1 5GD

Telephone: +44 (0)161 247 1495
Email: a.latham (at) mmu.ac.uk

I am a Lecturer in Computing in the School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology at MMU. I am a member of the Intelligent Systems Group.

I am a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Education Society, the IEEE Women in Engineering Group and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

I am a 2013 committee member of the IEEE Women in Computational Intelligence group.

Office hours

If you need to see me for more than 5 minutes it is best to email me for an appointment. My drop-in hours for the spring term are:

Teaching

Information Systems - 6G4Z1003:

Professional Development - 6G5Z1008:

Human Computer Interaction - 63IS6304:

Research Interests

Past Project: Adaptive Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems

My doctoral research investigated whether it is possible for computer agents to behave in a socially-aware manner. I have developed a Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System called Oscar, which uses a conversational agent to engage in a one-to-one tutorial discussion. Oscar aims to personalise the tutorial by dynamically estimating an individual's learning style during the tutoring conversation, and then adapting the style of tutoring to suit the individual's learning style.


Oscar Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System

Past project: A Conversational Expert System for Bullying and Harassment Policies

The project involved the development of a web-based expert system to support a Bullying and Harassment policy. A Bullying and Harassment policy was knowledge engineered into a knowledge tree representation, and a dynamic GUI developed to allow users to investigate their area of interest non-laterally.  A conversational agent was included to allow natural language questions to be asked.  The expert system was generalised so that other knowledge trees designed within specified restrictions could be 'plugged in' to the system.


Conversational Expert System

Publications
Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A. and Edmonds, B. (in press 2012) 'Adaptive Tutoring in an Intelligent Conversational Agent System', Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence vol. VIII, Springer-Verlag.

Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A. and Edmonds, B.(2012), 'A conversational intelligent tutoring system to automatically predict learning styles', Computers & Education Journal, vol. 59 (1), pp. 95-109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.11.001

Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A. and Edmonds, B. (2011) 'Oscar: An Intelligent Adaptive Conversational Agent Tutoring System' Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 6682. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 563-572

Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A. and Edmonds, B. (2011) 'Oscar: A Personalised Online Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System' In The CAL Conference 2011, Learning Futures: Education, Technology, Sustainability. Manchester, 13-15 April 2011. Elsevier.

Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A. and Edmonds, B. (2010) 'Predicting Learning Styles in a Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System' Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6483. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 131-140

Latham, A.M., Crockett, K.A., McLean, D.A., Edmonds, B. and O'Shea, K. (2010) 'Oscar: An Intelligent Conversational Agent Tutor to Estimate Learning Styles' In Proc. IEEE WCCI 2010. Barcelona, 18-23 July 2010. IEEE, pp. 2533-2540.

Latham, A, Crockett, K & Bandar, Z 2010, 'A Conversational Expert System Supporting Bullying and Harassment Policies', In: Joaquim Filipe; Ana Fred; Bernadette Sharp (Eds.). Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence. (ICAART-2010), January 22-24, Valencia, Spain, Pages 163-168, ISBN 978-989-674-021-4, INSTICC, 2010.

Latham, A, Crockett, K, McLean, D & Edmonds, B 2009, 'Using Learning Styles to Enhance Computerised Learning Systems', in Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Research Student Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University

Latham, A, Crockett, K & Bandar, Z 2008, 'An automated bullying and harassment support system with a conversational capability', in Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Research Student Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, ISBN: 978-1-905476-367

"Can Automated Tutors be Socially Intelligent?", Faculty Research and Enterprise Colloquium, September 2008, MMU Faculty of Science & Engineering

Hughes, N., Latham, A., Hearn, P.: Why do Foundation Year Students Fail to Attend their Classes? A Model of the Poor Attendee. Learning and Teaching In Action, Vol. 6 (3), MMU (2007).