People

Professor Matthew Williams has studied hate crime for 20 years and managed the largest dedicated study of hate victimisation in the UK.  He is Professor of Criminology at Cardiff University, and is widely considered one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary forms of hate and cybercrime. He manages all HateLab projects and leads on analysis of online and offline data.

Professor Pete Burnap is an applied computer scientist with a principal focus on data and computational methods such as machine learning to model Web-enabled human and software behaviour – contributing to the academic fields of Social Computing, Web Science and Cybersecurity. He manages the development of machine learning classifiers for online hate speech within HateLab.

Sefa Ozalp is the lead data science researcher within HateLab, contributing to all data management, transformation, analysis and visualisation tasks.  He is also studying for his PhD in patterns of online hate speech in the aftermath of terror attacks across the globe.

Dr. Mohamed Mostafa is the Lead Software Engineer and responsible for the development of the Online Hate Speech Dashboard.

Dr. Han Liu is a computer scientist with expertise in machine learning for text classification.  He leads on online hate speech classification tasks within HateLab.

Amir Javed is a computer scientist with expertise in information security, privacy and cybersecurity.  He leads on programming and data management and analysis within HateLab.  He is also studying for his PhD in cybersecurity.

Dr Alex Sutherland is Research Leader for Communities, Safety & Justice at RAND Europe.  He is a co-investigator on the new ESRC funded project Hate Crime After Brexit.  He is analysing online and offline hate to identify where crimes are most likely to occur and at whom they are most likely targeted. He previously worked in the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge and specialises in research on violence, disorder and community cohesion.

Paul Giannasi OBE is Head of the Cross-Government Hate Crime Programme aiming to improve the response to hate crime from across the criminal justice system. He is a member of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Hate Crime Group, coordinator for the updated NPCC Hate Crime Manual, United Kingdom National Point of Contact to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe for hate crime, and Director of the National Online Hate Crime Hub.