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.

Alex is Chief Scientist and Director of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). He leads on BIT’s involvement on the new ESRC funded project Hate Crime After Brexit. His recent published work has been on police body-worn cameras and he has led a number of large-scale randomised-controlled trials in education. Before joining BIT Alex was a at RAND Europe for 5 and a half years, and spent three years coordinating and teaching research design/quantitative methods at the University of Cambridge. Prior to Cambridge he worked at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford and has a D.Phil. in sociology, also from Oxford.

Arron is a Research Associate and leads on project and data management on the Hate Crime After Brexit and HateLab Dashboard grants.  He is completing a PhD on police use of social media.

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 lecturer in cybersecurity with expertise in information security, privacy and malware.  He leads on programming and statistical analysis within HateLab.

Paul Giannasi OBE is the National Policing Advisor for Hate Crime 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.

Luca is a senior lecturer in criminology in the school of social sciences.  He leads on network analysis within HateLab.