BRIEF PARTNER PROFILE
The University of Wolverhampton (UoW) is a post-1992 university that is investing heavily in research. It has a student population of 24,000 making it one of the largest in the UK. It has also achieved the European Commission HR Excellence in Research Award that incorporates the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers acknowledging alignment with the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for their Recruitment. The university has experience in dealing with all Framework Programme matters. In particular, in FP7, the University has been awarded in excess of £9 million, acting as a lead for many projects.
UoW is participating in this project with the Sustainable Transport Research Group (STRG) and the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG). The former has an excellent experience and international reputation in a number of fields, and with members coming from a wide range of backgrounds, providing a wealth of knowledge and expertise on fields such as intelligent transport systems, systems integration and design, multi-agent systems, artificial intelligent applications, knowledge-based engineering, computer engineering and management. The latter, is an information science research group developing software and methods to exploit Web-based sources for social sciences research. It researches alternative metrics, scientometrics, link analysis, cybermetrics, webometrics, social media images, and sentiment analysis. The SCRG’s REF2014 evaluation by the UK Communication, Cultural & Media Studies, Library and Information Management research assessment panel gave an average score of 3.37 out of 4, which was joint 5th in the UK in this subject area, with almost all of our research being rated “world leading” or “internationally excellent”. The group has participated in six EU-funded projects (CyberEmotions, RESCAR, CREEN, NetReAct, Rindicate and Wiser) which include FP5, FP6 and FP7 contracts, in addition to EC-funded special contracts.
The multidisciplinary teams from the UoW that are participating in the project have core competences in the following relevant areas:
- Development of mobility services.
- Systems integration.
- Natural language processing.
- Sentiment / stress analysis.
- Intelligent transportation systems.
PROJECT INVOLVEMENT
UoW leads WP2, the MaaS Ecosystem. It will have task leading roles in WP6, with the dynamic journey planner (T6.1) and the mobility services demand supply optimiser (T6.2). In WP9 it leads the data management plan an open science task (T9.2). Further, UoW is actively involved in WP5, WP7 and WP8.
KEY PERSONNEL
Dr. Panagiotis Georgakis (Male): B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., MBA, Ph.D, Reader in Transportation Systems, Sustainable Transport Research Group (STRG). Dr. Georgakis obtained his PhD from Wolverhampton University for the development of a platform for the integration of Intelligent Transport Systems. He has worked on a number of EPSRC (FRETSET, TARM) and FP (VRShips as research fellow at Strathclyde University) projects. Part of his postdoctoral worked examined systems design integration for marine applications as part of the EU-FP VRShips Project. He is currently the Technical and Scientific coordinator of the OPTIMUM H2020 project. He has numerous publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences, as well as chapter contributions in books. His areas of interest are ITS system design and development, in-vehicle networking and integration, AI techniques for urban planning, multi-criteria evaluation for logistical operations and others.
Prof. Christopher Nwagboso (Male): was the Chairman of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) – UK. He has worked on and led various futuristic transport systems related research and development projects funded through European Research Programmes, various UK government and industry research programmes. He was the leading investigator of FRETSET (EPSRC – Foresight Vehicle) and has published well over 140 research papers and four books on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Prof. Mike Thelwall (Male): B.Sc. (hons), Ph.D., Professor of Information Science and head of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG) within the Research Institute for Information and Language Processing at the University of Wolverhampton, which he joined in 1989. He is also Docent at the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, and a research associate at Oxford University. His research involves identifying and analysing social and general web phenomena using quantitative-led research methods, including text analysis, link analysis and sentiment analysis, and big data methods with social web data for the social sciences. Mike has developed a wide range of tools for gathering and analysing web data for Twitter, YouTube, blogs and the web in general. His 550+ publications include 278 refereed journal articles, 23 book chapters and three books. He has been cited over 17,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and sits on three other editorial boards. He led the Wolverhampton contribution to the EU funded projects Acumen, CyberEmotions RESCAR, CREEN, NetReAct, Rindicate and Wiser, and has been funded for research by JISC and non-profit organisations in the UK and Italy. He has also conducted evaluation contracts for the EC (several times), the UNDP (several times), and the UNFAO.