John is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee, and manager of the centre's Infrastructure Working Group, responsible for the design and development of argument technology software with over 100,000 users in 80 different countries. Such software includes the most widely used online tools for argument analysis (OVA), storage (AIFdb), and visualisation (Argument Analytics), as well as two projects in collaboration with the BBC – Test Your Argument, and the Evidence Toolkit, deployed to over 3,000 secondary schools in the UK as part of BBC School Report 2018.
John combines 16 years of professional software development experience, working with companies such as Hewlett Packard, IBM and the BBC, alongside an academic track record of over 50 publications spanning the leading journals in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. He currently serves as area chair (Argument Mining and Sentiment Analysis) for the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference, and his paper “Argument mining: A survey” recently became the 2nd Most Read Paper in the journal Computational Linguistics with over 18,000 views in 2021-22.
He has won over £2.1m in grant funding, and currently leads on the Horizon (EU) project "TITAN: AI for Citizen Intelligent Coaching against Disinformation" as well as being involved in much of the Centre's work with Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).