Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming
James Ashford 
On Thursday, Meta (you know, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) launched a new social media platform. It’s called Threads and it can be described as “text-based” microblogging platform similar to that of Twitter and Mastodon with around 55 millions users. With the downfall of Twitter, Meta seeks to add its own competitor … Read more
In a separate blog post, I covered the basis for understanding how self-organising maps (SOM) work. This included what a SOM is, why SOM’s are useful and how they work – including the training algorithm. In this blog post, we’ll go through how we can build a simple SOM neural network of our own using … Read more
This is just a short blog post to update you on a major milestone in my career and, in my life. Last week, I successfully defend my PhD thesis. 🎉🥳 It’s a great achievement, and it’s something thing I never thought I would ever do. Having spend the past 4.5 years working on this (some … Read more
Artificial Neural Networks (simply known as neural networks) come in all different shapes and sizes and can be designed to solve different types of problems. Classification, regression, supervised and unsupervised. Neural networks are incredibly versatile. It’s fair to say that neural networks are the go-to solution for any predictive task imaginable. This is especially true … Read more
There is no doubt that the recent coronation of King Charles III was a massive event in the UK. Whether you’re in favour of the monarchy or not, there is no doubt that the coronation event is a big talking point. This was certainly the case on Mastodon – my preferred microblogging platform of choice. … Read more