Rate My Professor Rob Procter

Professor Rob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics and Deputy Head (Research) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, where he has been employed since 2013. He holds a PhD in Electronics and previously held positions at the University of Manchester, including as Director of the eResearch Centre, and the University of Edinburgh. Procter's research specializes in social informatics, which examines the social factors shaping the adoption and use of information and communication technologies, with a focus on artificial intelligence over the past 15 years. This work is complemented by data science methodologies applied to social media analytics, health informatics, computer-supported cooperative work, participatory design, co-production, science and technology studies, and ethnography. His current efforts emphasize methodologies and practices for developing trustworthy, ethical, and safe AI systems in public services such as healthcare, government, and industry, including decision-support tools for medical diagnostics, policy review, impact assessment, and policy-making.

Procter led the multidisciplinary Reading the Riots project in 2011 with The Guardian Newspaper, analyzing Twitter activity during the UK riots, and collaborated with BBC Radio 5 Live on social media story analysis. As a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, he co-leads the social data science interest group. He served as Editor of the Health Informatics Journal from 2004 to 2020 and holds advisory roles including member of the OECD AI expert group on AI incidents, College of Optometrists Artificial Intelligence Expert Advisory Group, Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT advisory board, and Algorithms, Data and Democracy project. He is co-investigator on UKRI-funded projects AdSoLve and RAKE addressing AI ethics and safety, and participates in Project Bluebird for agent-based air traffic control tools. Procter received best paper awards for 'The ethical challenges of publishing Twitter data for research dissemination' at the ACM Web Science Conference (2017) and 'Supporting the use of user generated content in journalistic practice' at the ACM CHI Conference (2017). Key publications include 'Digital Wildfires: propagation, verification, regulation, and responsible innovation' (ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2016), 'Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data' (International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2013), 'Everyday Diagnostic Work in the Histopathology Lab: CSCW Perspectives on the Utilization of Data-Driven Clinical Decision Support Systems' (Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 2024), and 'Trustworthy AI: UK Air Traffic Control Revisited' (UK AI Research Symposium, 2025).