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Matthew Williams

Yr Athro Matthew Williams

Senior Lecturer

Ysgol y Gwyddorau Cymdeithasol

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I am Director of the Social Data Science Lab at the Data Innovation Research Institute, Director of the Centre for Cyberhate Research and Policy and Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. My main areas of research activity are:

  • Hate Crime, Hate Speech and Extremism Online
  • Computational Social Science
  • Cybercrime / Human Factors in Cybersecurity

Hate Crime, Hate Speech and Extremism Online

I have a long-standing interest in hate crime and the migration of all forms of hate to the Internet.  In 2010 I captured a Big Lottery grant (3 years, £570k) for the 'All Wales Hate Crime Project', on which I was sole PI. This remains the largest and most comprehensive dedicated academic study of hate crime conducted within the UK, surveying over 1800 respondents, interviewing over 60 victims across all recognised strands (race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and gender identity) and reaching out to over 5000 community members via a dedicated project officer.  This project built upon my previous two studies into homophobic hate crimes in Wales (Stonewall Cymru Counted Out! Survey 2003 & Counted In! Survey 2007). The Big Lottery project achieved outstanding impact.  The findings were received by the Wales Minister for Communities at the project launch in the National Assembly for Wales and formed the key source of evidence for the Welsh Government's Framework for Action on Tackling Hate Crime. The key findings from the project were recently published in the British Journal of Criminology.  More recently I have studied the migration of hate crime and speech to the Internet.  As part of my PhD thesis I examined how forms of illocutionary speech in online communities could constitute hate crime.  I continued this research by capturing the ESRC/Google Data Analytics grant 'Hate Speech and Social Media: Understanding Users, Networks and Information Flows'. Major outputs from this project include 'Tweeting the Terror: Modelling the Social Media Reaction to the Woolwich Terrorist Attack' Social Network Analysis and Mining and ‘Cyberhate on Social Media in the Aftermath of Woolwich: A Case Study in Computational Criminology and Big Data’, British Journal of Criminology.  Both were picked up in the national and international press including the BBC, Times of India, Zee News, India, and Sun News, Canada . Following on from this study, in partnership with Rand Corporation and Rand Europe, I successfully led a team at Cardiff in a bid to the National Institute for Justice, US Department of Justice 3-year project 'Understanding Online Hate Speech as a Motivator for Hate Crime'.  This project was covered in the Financial Times, LA Times, New York Post and Sky News.  In 2017 I was successful in a bid to the ESRC to fund the Centre for Cyberhate Research and Policy, tasked with examining the production and spread of hate speech on social media related to Brexit.  This project is covered in the Independent, Telegraph, Politico , BBC News, MSN News, The Register, ComputerWeekly , Verdict, and Police Professional.  My research into hate crime and speech also appeared on an episode of Panorama on BBC One in September 2017.

Computational Social Science

I am Director of the Social Data Science Lab that forms part of the £64M ESRC Big Data Network for the Social Sciences.  The Lab core team and Research Fellow are supported by a grant from the ESRC (2017-2020).  I was also a lead on Cardiff Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS) programme of work (2011-2015).  Both the Lab and COSMOS represent the largest investment in social media research in the UK (funded by ESRC, EPSRC, JISC, DoH, HPC Wales, Welsh Government, Metropolitan Police Service, Department for International Development, Airbus and Admiral Insurance (£4M)).  This programme of work directly relates to my career-long interest in computational social science that dates back to my PhD on virtual communities and cybercrime (supervised by Prof. Paul Atkinson). I was Principal Investigator on the founding COSMOS grant 'Digital Social Research Tools, Tension Indicators and Safer Communities: A demonstration of COSMOS' (ESRC Digital Social Research Programme) and the follow on grant 'Social Media and Prediction: Crime Sensing, Data Integration and Statistical Modeling' (ESRC/National Centre for Research Methods Methodological Innovation Project).  I also played a major role as a Co-Investigator on the following complete computational social science grants: 'Understanding the Role of Social Media in the Aftermath of Youth Suicides' (Department of Health for England); 'Public Perceptions of the UK Food System: Public Understanding and Engagement, and the Impact of Crises and Scares' (ESRC & Food Standards Agency); 'Digital Wildfires: (Mis)information Flows, Propagation & Responsible Governance' (ESRC Global Uncertainties Ethics and Rights in Security); 'Detecting Tension and Cohesion in Local Communities with Social Media' (Airbus Group); High Performance Computing, Scalability and Big 'Social' Data (HPC Wales/Fujitsu); 'Hate Speech and Social Media: Understanding Users, Networks and Information Flows' (ESRC/Google Data Analytics);  'Supporting Empirical Social Science Research with a Virtual Research Environment' (JISC); and 'Requirements Analysis for Social Media Analysis Research Tool’ (ESRC/DSR).

I am currently working on five projects that continue my work in this area: 'Social Data Science Lab: Methods and Infrastructure Development for Open Data Analytics in Social Research' (ESRC, with Burnap, Rana & Sloan); 'Event Detection using Open Source Communications' (Airbus Group, with Burnap); 'Investigating the link between social media activity and reporting crime' (Metropolitan Police Service Centre for Scientific and Engineering Excellence); 'Impact Acceleration Award – Embedding Open Source Intelligence Analytics within the Metropolitan Police Service' (ESRC); and 'The 2016 Welsh Election Study: A Study of the 2016 Election to the National Assembly for Wales' (ESRC).  In 2014 I was appointed by the ESRC to their Social Media/Phase 3 Big Data Network Working Group.

Before my computational social science work I was involved in the Cardiff Digital Ethnography and Hypermedia research programme (with Atkinson, Coffey & Dicks) as Co-Investigator on 'Ethnography for the Digital Age' (ESRC) and 'Methods and Issues in Qualitative Online Data Sharing and Archiving' (ESRC Qualitative Archiving & Data Sharing).  On the topic of computational social science I have published in the major social science methodology journals (Sociology, Qualitative Research, International Journal of Social Research Methodology (IJSRM), Sociological Research Online, Methodological Innovations and Building Research Capacity) and have edited a special issue of IJSRM on Computational Social Science: Theory, Method and Data.  I have also written the Digital Social Research chapters in the leading methodology textbooks in criminology including 'Doing Criminological Research' (Jupp: Sage); 'Doing Research on Crime and Justice' (King & Wincup: Oxford) and 'Online Social Research: Methods, Issues & Ethics' (Chen & Hall: Peter Lang).  In 2013 I was awarded a 12 month Cardiff University Research Leave Fellowship to further develop my work in this area and to establish international links with Rutgers University, Duke University and Twitter US.

Cybercrime and Human Factors in Cybersecurity

I have applied my significant amount of digital methodology work to the study of cybercrime, that formed the focus of my PhD thesis. In 2010 I was successful in capturing a ground-breaking research grant 'e-Crime Reduction Partnership Mapping Study' (with Levi) from Nominet Trust. The project was championed by the Rt. Hon. Alun Michael MP and the findings were launched at Westminster to MPs and industry. Our recommendations highlighted the need for a UK cybercrime reduction partnership and in 2013 HMG's Cybercrime Reduction Partnership was formed and I was invited to join as one of only two academics. The research was presented at a keynote address, and at conferences in Europe and Australia and published as two journal papers and one book chapter.  In 2013 I was a key player in the successful capture of the RCUK Global Uncertainties Consortia for Exploratory Research into Cyber Security grant 'Identifying and Modelling Victim, Business, Regulatory and Malware Behaviours in a Changing Cyberthreat Landscape' (£1.2M) that continues my work in this area. I have published extensively in this area in high profile international journals including: British Journal of Criminology, Criminology & Criminal Justice, Policing & Society, Security Journal, Journal of Sexual Aggression, Information Management & Computer Security and International Review of Law, Computers & Technology. Recently I edited the special issue of Policing and Society entitled: Policing Cybercrime: Networked and Social Media Technologies and the Challenges for Policing.  I have written chapters in several key criminology textbooks and edited collections on the topic, including 'Criminology' (Hayle et al.: Oxford); 'Handbook of Crime' (Brookman et al.: Willan); 'Handbook of Internet Crime' (Jewkes & Yar: Willan); and 'Crime & the Internet' (Wall: Routledge). My book, Virtually Criminal published by Routledge was short listed for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize in 2007.  In 2013 I was invited by James Brokenshire, then Minister for Security, and David Willets, Minister for Universities and Science to join, as one of only two academics, HMG's Cyber Crime Reduction Partnership. In 2014 I was invited by Professor Sir Alan Wilson, Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Committee, to join HMG's Costs of Cybercrime International Expert Advisory Group. I am currently conducting an analysis of fear of cybercrime for the Home Office.  I also currently act as an expert reviewer for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Board of Physical Sciences Cyber Security Programme.  I have been an academic reviewer on HMG's Office for Science Foresight project 'Future of Identity', an academic advisor to the ACPO/College of Policing project 'National Assessment on threats and opportunities posed by the use of Global Digital Communication Technologies', and an academic advisor to the DTI foresight programme and the eCrime Wales Project.

Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of my research and I have worked with members of staff in the schools of Computer Science, Psychology, Law, Business, Mathematics and Dentistry. I have been successful in gaining grants from the ESRC, EPSRC, AHRC, JISC, Big Lottery Fund, Welsh Government, Nominet Trust, Stonewall Cymru, TUC Wales, Safer Wales, Department of Health, Food Standards Agency, Google, US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, High Performance Computing Wales/Fujitsu and the Airbus Group. My research income to date is in excess of £6M.

I am member of the ESRC's Peer Review College and I sit on the Editorial Boards for British Journal of Criminology, EPJ: Data Science and Journal of Computational Social Science.

Cyhoeddiad

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Book sections

Books

Conferences

Monographs

Websites

Ymchwil

As Principal Investigator

  1. Centre for Cyberhate Research & Policy: Real-Time Scalable Methods & Infrastructure for Modelling the Spread of Cyberhate on Social Media, ESRC, £256,155
  2. Understanding Online Hate Speech as a Motivator for Hate Crime, National Institute for Justice, US Department of Justice, $885,820
  3. Cardiff University Research Leave Fellowship in Social Data Science, Cardiff University, £13,000
  4. Social Media and Prediction: Crime Sensing, Data Integration & Statistical Modelling, ESRC under the NCRM Methodological Innovation Call, £194,138
  5. Digital Social Research, Tension Indicators and Safer Communities: Introducing COSMOS, ESRC's Digital Social Research Programme, £97,506
  6. All Wales Hate Crime Project, Big Lottery Fund, £569,194
  7. Cybercrime Reduction Partnership Mapping Study, Nominet Trust, £74,199
  8. All Wales Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual Survey, Welsh Government, £17,984
  9. Cybercrime Rapid Evidence Assessment, Welsh Government, £4,500
  10. Analysis of the Stonewall Cymru Survey of the LGB Community in Wales, Stonewall Cymru, £5,568

As Co-Investigator

  1. Social Data Science Lab: Methods and Infrastructure Development for Open Data Analytics in Social Research, ESRC, £448,879
  2. Event Detection using Open Source Communications, Airbus Group, £936,000
  3. The 2016 Welsh Election Study: A Study of the 2016 Election to the National Assembly for Wales, ESRC, £257,148
  4. Criminal Event Detection with Social Media, Centre for Scientific and Engineering Excellence, Metropolitan Police Service, £50,000
  5. Impact Acceleration Grant, ESRC, £25,000
  6. Impact Acceleration Grant, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, £5,000
  7. Cyber-related economic crime and implications for policing approaches, City of London Corporation, £25,000
  8. Public perceptions of the UK food system, ESRC/FSA, £291,200
  9. Digital Wildfire: (Mis)information flows, propagation and responsible governance, ESRC Global Uncertainties, £248,413
  10. Detecting Tension and Cohesion in Local Communities with Social Media, Airbus Group, £51,040
  11. High Performance Computing, Scalability and Big 'Social' Data, HPC Wales / Fujitsu, £45,000
  12. Understanding the Role of Social Media in the Aftermath of Youth Suicides, Department of Health, £200k
  13. Identifying and Modelling Victim, Business, Regulatory and Malware Behaviours in a Changing Cyberthreat Landscape, EPSRC/ESRC under the Global Uncertainties CEReS call, £1.2M
  14. Hate Speech and Social Media: Understanding Users, Networks and Information Flows, ESRC/Google, £124,986
  15. Supporting Digital Social Research for the Social Sciences with a VRE, JISC, £55,519
  16. Requirements Analysis for Social Media Analysis Research Tools, ESRC, £5,000
  17. Perpetrators of Hate Crime, Welsh Government, £22,000
  18. Translating Tales of the Trickster, AHRC, £23,901
  19. Methodological Issues in Qualitative Data Sharing and Archiving, ESRC, £84,645
  20. Ethnography for the Digital Age, ESRC, £174,529

Addysgu

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Foundations of Contemporary Criminology (Yr 1)
  • Offending and Victimisation (Yr 2)
  • Responses to Crime (Yr 2)
  • Policing: Theory, Evidence and Policy (Yr 3)
  • Criminolgical Practice (Yr 3)
  • Diversity, Crime and Criminal Justice (Yr 3)
  • Digital Society: Theory, Method and Data (Yr 3)

Postgraduate Teaching

  • Researching Crime, Safety and Justice
  • Responses to Crime, Safety and Justice
  • Open Data Analytics with COSMOS (SSRM Workshop)

PhD Supervision

  • Supervision Louise Madden - Women's use of the Internet (Complete)
  • Penny Miles - Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Citizenship in Latin America (Complete)
  • Mike Thomas - Civil Partnership Unions in Canada, US and UK (Complete)
  • Matt Jones - Occupational Experiences of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Police Officers (Complete)
  • Will Chivers - Online Counter Surveillance (Complete)
  • Liam Rowley - Virtual Worlds and Art Education (Complete)
  • Ian Thomas - Men Who Have Sex with Men and Mobile Technologies (Complete)
  • Heather Panter - Heteronormativity and Homophobia in US and UK Policing (Complete)
  • Daniel Gray - Misogyny on Social Media (Year 2)
  • Lisa Calloway - Surveillance and Social Media (Year 2)
  • Luke Roach - Governance of Cyberhate on Social Media (Year 1)
  • Scott Kerpen - Social Construction of Sexual Orientation on Social Media (Year 1)
  • Arron Cullen - Social Media and Perceptions of Policing (Year 1)
  • Sefa Ozlap - Reactions on Social Media to Terrorist Attacks (Year 1)
  • Wafa Sloaiman M Alorainy - Classification of Cyberhate on Social Media (Year 1)

Bywgraffiad

Employment:

  • 2015 - present: Professor (full), Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
  • 2013-2015: Reader, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
  • 2007-2013: Senior Lecturer, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
  • 2004-2007: Lecturer, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Over the last decade I have formed an international reputation for my interdisciplinary research in the fields of Cybercrime, Cyberhate & Computational Social Science.

Summary of Key Achievements:

  • Grant capture totalling ~£6M over 36 projects, 16 of which are from RCUK amounting to ~£4M. I was/am currently PI on 14
  • Invited speaker at 50 US, Australian, Asian & European conferences and a delegate at 23 others
  • PI on the Online Hate Speech Project ($886K) funded by the National Institute for Justice, US Department of Justice
  • PI on the All Wales Hate Crime Project (£570K) that was used as key evidence in the Welsh Government’s Hate Crime Framework 2014 and continues to shape national policy
  • Solely represented the Social Data Science Lab in visits to Rutgers, Duke & Twitter US
  • Invited to speak at Cambridge Institute of Criminology Public Seminar Series in 2015
  • ESRC sponsored delegate at the EU Trans-Atlantic Workshop on Big Data in DC, US
  • Appointed to ESRC’s Peer Review College and Social Media Research Working Group
  • Appointed by Sir Alan Wilson to Home Office Cybercrime International Advisory Group
  • Invited by James Brokenshire, Minister for Security, and David Willets, Minister for Universities to join HMG’s Cybercrime Reduction Partnership in 2013
  • Editor of British Society of Criminology house journal and guest editor of 2 special issues

Contributions to the Field: I sit on the Editorial Boards for British Journal of Criminology, EPJ: Data Science and Journal of Computational Social Science.  I was co-editor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the international peer-reviewed journal of the British Society of Criminology.  I am a reviewer for many international journals including Criminology (US). I have reviewed grant applications for the ESRC, EPSRC and the Nuffield Foundation and in was invited to act as an expert reviewer for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. I was also invited to participate as an Expert Evaluator on the Horizon 2020 Digital Security Call and was recently made a member of the ESRC’s Peer Review College and their Social Media Working Group. I have launched findings in the National Assembly for Wales, and in Westminster to MPs, Google, Facebook & Twitter. I was invited by the Ministers for Security and Universities & Science to join HMG’s Cybercrime Reduction Partnership, was appointed by Professor Sir Alan Wilson, Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Committee to HMG’s Costs of Cybercrime International Expert Advisory Group, and was adviser to HMG’s Office for Science ‘Future of Identity’ project, to ACPO’s ‘National Cybercrime Assessment’, to DTI’s ‘Foresight e-Crime Project’ and to WG’s ‘eCrime Project’. I provided evidence at a WG disability hate crime inquiry, at the EHRC Disability Inquiry, and at HMG’s Parliamentary IT Committee. I have provided interviews to the media (ITV & BBC), to the US public journal Scientific American and my work on big data has appeared in the ESRC magazines Britain in 2015 & 2016.

Anrhydeddau a dyfarniadau

  • Cafodd fy llyfr, Virtually Criminal a gyhoeddwyd gan Routledge, ei restru'n fyr ar gyfer Gwobr Llyfr Coffa Philip Abrams Cymdeithas Gymdeithasegol Prydain yn 2007.

Aelodaethau proffesiynol

  • Aelod o Gymdeithas Droseddeg Prydain
  • Aelod o'r Gymdeithas Ewropeaidd Troseddeg
  • Aelod o Gymdeithas Troseddeg America

Ymgysylltu Allanol

Penodwyd i Goleg Adolygu Cymheiriaid ESRC a Gweithgor Cyfryngau Cymdeithasol i lunio strategaeth
Noddodd ESRC gynrychiolydd yng Ngweithdy Traws-Iwerydd yr UE ar Ddata Mawr yn DC, UDA
Golygydd cylchgrawn British Society of Criminology House a golygydd gwadd 2 rhifyn arbennig
Gwahoddiad i gymryd rhan fel Gwerthuswr Arbenigol ar Alwad Diogelwch Digidol Horizon 2020
Penodwyd gan yr Athro Syr Alan Wilson i'r Swyddfa Gartref Costau Grŵp Cynghori Rhyngwladol Cybercrime
Penodwyd i bwyllgor trefnu ar gyfer Ysgol Haf Singapore yr Ymddiriedolaeth Gwyddor y We (WST) a gofynnwyd iddo gyflwyno a chynrychioli COSMOS gan yr Athro Dame Wendy Hall
Adolygydd Rhaglen Seiberddiogelwch Sefydliad Ymchwil Gwyddonol yr Iseldiroedd (NWO)
Gwahoddiad gan James Brokenshire (y Gweinidog Diogelwch) a David Willets (Gweinidog Prifysgolion) i ymuno fel un o ddim ond dau academydd Partneriaeth Lleihau Troseddau Seiber HMG yn 2013
Cynghorydd i brosiect 'Dyfodol Hunaniaeth' Swyddfa Wyddoniaeth EMG
Cynghorydd i 'Asesiad Cenedlaethol o Seiberdroseddu' ACPO
Cynghorydd i 'Foresight e-Crime Project' DTI
Cynghorydd i 'brosiect eDrosedd' LlC
Cynghorydd i ymchwiliad i drosedd casineb anabledd Llywodraeth Cymru
Cynghorydd i Ymchwiliad Anabledd y Pwyllgor Cydraddoldeb a Hawliau Dynol
Cynghorydd i'r Pwyllgor Cydraddoldeb a Hawliau Dynol Rhaglen Adrodd Troseddau Casineb Homoffobig
Cynghorydd i Bwyllgor TG Seneddol EMG

Meysydd goruchwyliaeth

I am interested in supervising postgraduate degrees in the following areas: Cybercrime, Hate Crime, Policing, Social Media

Current and past PhD Supervision:

  • Supervision Louise Madden - Women's use of the Internet (Complete)
  • Penny Miles - Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Citizenship in Latin America (Complete)
  • Mike Thomas - Civil Partnership Unions in Canada, US and UK (Complete)
  • Matt Jones - Occupational Experiences of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Police Officers (Complete)
  • Will Chivers - Online Counter Surveillance (Complete)
  • Liam Rowley - Virtual Worlds and Art Education (Complete)
  • Ian Thomas - Men Who Have Sex with Men and Mobile Technologies (Complete)
  • Heather Panter - Heteronormativity and Homophobia in US and UK Policing (Complete)
  • Daniel Gray - Misogyny on Social Media (Year 3)
  • Lisa Calloway - Surveillance and Social Media (Year 3)
  • Luke Roach - Governance of Cyberhate on Social Media (Year 2)
  • Scott Kerpen - Social Construction of Sexual Orientation on Social Media (Year 2)
  • Arron Cullen - Social Media and Perceptions of Policing (Year 2)
  • Sefa Ozlap - Reactions on Social Media to Terrorist Attacks (Year 1)
  • Wafa Sloaiman M Alorainy - Classification of Cyberhate on Social Media (Year 1)
  • Simon White - Estimating Crime Patterns using Open Source Communications (Year 1)

Contact Details

Email WilliamsM7@caerdydd.ac.uk
Telephone +44 29208 74853
Campuses sbarc|spark, Ystafell 1.27, Heol Maendy, Cathays, Caerdydd, CF24 4HQ
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04 October 2022

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24 August 2022

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