Dr Richard Cox

Honorary Fellow, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Adjunct Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia.
Visiting Senior Research Fellow, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex.

I lead the PATSy project. PATSy makes 'virtual patients' available to trainees, educators, clinicians and researchers in various clinical professions and cognate academic disciplines. It is used by around 25 university departments in the UK and overseas. The system contains cases of developmental reading disorders, neuropsychology, medical rehabilitation and speech and language pathology.

A project based on PATSy began in June 2004: Vicarious Learning and Case-Based Teaching of Clinical Reasoning Skills, funded under Phase III of the ESRC's TLRP programme. Here is a press release.
I am currently a member of the Advisory Group of the ESRC TLRP-Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme. I also direct a Thematic Strand on Technology-Enhanced Research.

I am an international affiliate of the Openproof logic education software project at Stanford. I am collaborating with Dr Dave Barker-Plummer (Stanford) and Prof Robert Dale (Macquarie) on a data mining project utilising a very large dataset of students' logic exercise submissions to an online grading system. We have published at CogSci 2008,2010,2011; Diagrams 2008,2010 and Educational Data Mining 2009, 2011 - see publications. I was awarded a joint US Social Science Research Council/UK ESRC Visiting Americas Fellowship in connection with this work.

Some of my research has looked at assessing "graphical literacy" and how diagrams can help students with learning logic (see publications). I have also studied how people use diagrams and intelligent diagram-support systems like switchERII to solve constraint satisfaction puzzles.

An EPSRC-funded project studied how external representations are used by students learning to program in Java CRUSADE - Coordination of multiple external Representations in program UnderStAnding and DEbugging (with Benedict du Boulay, Rudi Lutz and Pablo Romero)

I was Program Chair for Diagrams 2006 and I currently serve on the steering committee of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams.

Psychological methods for system evaluation (Human-Centred Computer Systems MSc)
Solving Real-World Problems (Cognitive Science Interdisciplinary Program)
Knowledge Engineering (CSAI)
Research Methods in CSAI (DPhil, MRes)
Interactive Learning Environments (u/g, MSc, DPhil)
Multimedia Systems (MSc)

Dec 1999 - Sep 2010 Reader in Computer Science and A.I., School of Informatics, University of Sussex
From 1991 to 1998 I was a member of the Graphics and Language Working Group at HCRC, University of Edinburgh.

E-mail: rcox(AT)staffmail.ed.ac.uk