Digital, Data & Policy

Today, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) opened a...

Academic papers — especially ones that you’ve written — look different depending on...

On being appointed an RSS William Guy Lecturer for 2026/27. I am pleased to share that I have been appointed as one of the Royal Statistical Society’s William Guy Lecturers for 2026/27, delivering the 16+ lecture: Can You Trust the Numbers? Statistics, Misinformation and the Information Ecosystem. The Royal Statistical Society’s 2026/27 William Guy Lecturers. Image: RSS. The William Guy Lecturesh…

I’ve been elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a...

On 18 April 2026, I spoke at the Worshipful Livery Company of Wales Master’s Installation Banquet in Cardiff, responding to the toast to the guests and proposing the toast to the Company. The speech reflected on the new Master’s annual theme, “Respecting Tradition and Embracing New Technologies”, and on AI, education and skills, Welsh civic life, culture and language, trust, and the responsibilit…

As Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, I have written a short editorial commemorating...

When I started this blog in 2011, it was called Computing: The Science of Nearly Everything. As the blog approaches its fifteenth anniversary in April 2026, this feels like a natural moment to take stock of how the blog, and my own work, have evolved. That original title reflected my disciplinary roots in computer science, but also a wider sense that computing was becoming central to almost every…

At the start of February 2026, it was ten years since I was first appointed Professor, at the age of 35. It is also more than fifteen years since I submitted my PhD at the University of Bath in September 2009, before passing my viva with minor corrections later that autumn. I have written a few of these short “time passing” posts over the years — five years after the PhD, five years of blogging, …

I am delighted to have joined the University of Bristol as Professor of Digital Society and Policy, based in the School of Education and working across the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences. I will also be working with the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. This new role provides an exciting academic home for my work at the interface of computer science, education, digital policy, culture …

If 2024 was the year the day job started bleeding into the reading list, 2025 went the other way: deep into the comfort of a re-read, picking up a childhood favourite series mid-binge from the tail end of last year and mostly not coming up for air. There’s still a clear professional thread running through some of the non-fiction below — forecasting, statistics, diplomacy — but the dominant note t…

I have long loved this clip of BBC science broadcaster James Burke reporting live from NASA during the 1977 launch of Voyager 2 on a Titan IIIE/Centaur rocket. Every so often, it reappears on social media and reminds people just how extraordinary great science broadcasting can be. The clip originally appeared in Connections, Burke’s remarkable 1970s BBC series exploring the hidden relationships b…

I am delighted to have joined the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media...

Following on from my previous end of year reading/listening summaries, I have once...

The classic Nintendo quit screen: a warning message for the challenges of preserving...

Digitally Engaged, Data Savvy and Computationally Literate: Key Competencies for Future Citizens? Tom...

Yesterday we had a paper published in the British Journal of Sociology of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an unprecedented global shift within higher education in...

With colleagues from Swansea University and the University of South Wales, we are...

Today, we had a paper published in Irish Educational Studies, linking to our...

In this episode of Exploring Global Problems, Professor Tom Crick (Professor of Digital...