Simon Jones Email & Phone Number

As a Senior Research Consultant at Prolific, I work with researchers and frontier AI model builders, designing and executing complex research studies that drive innovation across AI, academia, and market research. By delivering high-quality studies, human data and strategic insights, I empower clients to achieve their research goals and improve AI model alignment, safety, and human-AI interaction.

Lead User Researcher growing the research maturity of ParentPay Group and supporting all research across 15+ product teams.Supported the launch of SIMS Next Gen - a cloud-based re-design of the market leading SIMS Management Information System for schools.Represented the voice of our users in the product design process and at all levels of the business.Created and owned processes for conducting, documenting and analysing user experience research across 15+ product teams.Promoted qualitative and quantitative research, including a wide variety of methodologies including interviews, usability tests, card sorts, tree tests and surveys, to deeply understand users.Advised and mentored User Researchers, Product Designers, Product Managers and Product Owners to carry out effective user research and draw clear conclusions and actionable insightsEnsured metrics accurately measured the impact of new/modified designs.

Planning and conducting qualitative and quantitative research, using a variety of methodologies such as remote and in-person depth interviews, usability testing, and surveys, to deeply understand users. Working closely with cross-functional teams to identify and prioritise research questions to reinforce understanding of the problem space and user(s). Ensuring success metrics adequately measure the impact of any new/modified designs.Preparing research plans, recruiting participants, and facilitating varied user testing sessions.Drawing clear conclusions and actionable insights from analysing qualitative and quantitative research findings + managing the research repositories.Conducting desk-based assessments exploring existing resources such as literature, studies, and competitor products. Triangulating data from research and other sources to glean insights and actionable recommendations for our product teams. Advising and mentoring others to ensure appropriate research is conducted and the most suitable methods are applied. Representing the voice of our users in the product design process, including working closely with the product teams to take research into prototyping.

SlashData is the leading analyst firm in the developer economy, tracking global software developer trends via the largest, most comprehensive developer surveys worldwide. Our research helps the top technology firms understand who developers are, what tools are they using and where they‘re going next. Surveying 40,000 software developers annually in over 150 countries across all platforms, technologies and developer segments, from mobile, IoT, cloud, and desktop to games, AR/VR and machine learning.My role combined skills in data science with research design, consulting, and storytelling. I led projects for top technology firms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, performing data analysis and delivering insights in the context of market trends, behavioural analysis, population forecasting, segmentation and profiling. I helped clients to identify key business questions and translate them into research questions and projects. I delivered briefings and insights to senior decision makers at world-leading technology companies, as well as presenting at conferences, meetups and events. Working as part of a distributed team across four continents.

Bath, United Kingdom

Research lead for the Human-Computer Interaction group.Conducting research in the areas of Healthcare Technologies, Personal Informatics, Data Science, Social Networks, Data Visualisation, Collaborative Systems, Usable Privacy and Security, Natural Language Processing.Principal Investigator on an EPSRC Fast Healthcare NetworkPlus project developing a novel digital health app to support people with Osteoarthritis to engage in physical activity and maintain a healthy lifestyle.Principal Investigator on a Sir Halley Stewart Trust funded project looking at the impact of digital health interventions on outcomes for patients with axial spondyloarthritis.Co-Investigator on Language of Collaborative Manufacturing EP/K014196/1 £1.9M research project sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilCo-Investigator on Cyber Security across the Lifespan Project, an EPSRC funded collaboration between the University of Bath, Cranfield University, University of Northumbria and University of Portsmouth.Teaching: Applied Data Science, Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Research Project Preparation, Individual Dissertation Project, Collaborative Systems, Computing as a Science and Engineering Discipline.Line manager for 2 x Research Assistants and 1 × Research Software Engineer. Supervised 8 PhD students and over 100 MSc/BSc Computer Science students across a broad range of Human Computer Interaction related projects.Publications in CHI, IMWUT, UbiComp, SOUPS, Human-Computer Interaction, COLING (Computational Linguistics), MUM, DESIGN, ICED.

Bath, United Kingdom

Worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bath on a project entitled ‘The Language of Collaborative Manufacturing’, a £1.9M research project sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by the Universities of Bristol and Bath. The project will explore approaches for visualisation and analysis of communication in order to create a suite of methods and approaches that enable UK manufacturers to collaborate effortlessly on a global scale. The new methods and approaches will aim to provide collaborative cohesion, control and management based on an analysis of the output of the actual process (communications & sharing of digital objects) of spatially and temporally distributed project teams. The project is being undertaken in collaboration with a wide range of partners, including Airbus, Airbus CIMPA, Arup, Babcock, Delcam and Shapespace.

Bath, United Kingdom

Short-term contracts to conduct research on behalf of academic clients (e.g. literature reviews, user studies, evaluations) in the area of online data mining and behaviour analysis.

Bristol, United Kingdom

Co-author of a research grant examining online forum data to measure users’ changes in `linguistic style’ during computer-mediated communication on social media platforms. Involves developing software to mine and analyze datasets containing millions of interactions between users of online communities, selecting appropriate linguistic analysis techniques, developing new metrics for measuring changes in users’ behaviours, interpreting the results by drawing on theories from social sciences, mathematical and computer sciences, and disseminating the findings to project sponsors.

Bath

Research activities involved social network analysis on large scale networks, visualization of patterns and trends within large social media data sets, user modeling, data clustering, machine learning and predictive classification. Gained experience using statistical analysis tools (e.g. SPSS, Matlab, NumPY) and machine learning software (e.g WEKA) for building predictive models and recommendation engines. Included close collaboration with government research organizations, presenting to project teams verbally and visually to communicate complex problems and solutions, and writing reports for internal use, as well as for publication in academic journals.

Thesis Title: Automating Group-Based Privacy Control in Social Networks.Thesis Committee: Eamonn O’Neill (Supervisor), Stephen Payne (University of Bath), Cecilia Mascolo (University of Cambridge) Result: Passed with no thesis correctionsPhD Thesis Nominated for British Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation AwardFormulated research questions to address the usability problems of existing privacy controls in social media and social networks. Designed and conducted numerous lab and field studies involving interviews, surveys, ethnographic approaches, and usability/user experience evaluations. Performed extensive quantitative and qualitative data analysis to inform the design of automated algorithms and protocols for assisting users in controlling their content disclosures on social networks. Implemented and tested such algorithms to assess their accuracy and effect on users’ experiences with social media privacy controls. Published and presented research at international conferences. Networked and collaborated with various international research teams working on social media. My PhD work has had a significant impact on the study of automated privacy control mechanisms in both academia and industry.

Research assistant on the inTouch Project, a video link system to improve social inclusion for people with dementia. My work includes; selecting a flexible video conferencing platform as a basis for the inTouch system; gathering views from people with dementia, carers and family members to understand how they hope to use inTouch; carrying out iterative user evaluations in a specialist day centre to try out different aspects of the system and develop the user interfaces; testing a complete system across a remote link between the day centre and a relative's home; installing inTouch in the community and carrying out user evaluations, with technical support; compiling and disseminating the findings, including developing electronic teaching material using video footage to portray the findings in a powerful and informative way.

Worked at the University of Madeira, under the Carnegie Mellon / Portugal partnership, collaborating with members of the Web Security and Privacy (WeSP) project during my PhD. Conducted research into social network data mining and text analysis for the purpose of developing automated and assistive contact and content management tools.

University Of California, San Diego

Industrial Placement Year as part of my BSc (Hons) in Computer Science at the University of Bath

Doctor Of Philosophy (Phd), Computer Science, Passed Without Corrections

Nominated for the British Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award

Bsc (Hons) 1St Class, Computer Science