Dr Stuart Cunningham
Programme Leader for MSc Advanced Computer Science
Stuart is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in User Experience (UX), and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University. Stuart is programme leader for the MSc Advanced Computer Science, REF Unit of Assessment 11 co-ordinator, and Senior Postgraduate Research Tutor.
He has been working in higher education for 20 years in a variety of academic, research, and leadership roles. Through his career, Stuart has taught a variety of subjects in computer science and related creative technology domains. In addition to working with undergraduate and postgraduate students, he has been involved in the design and delivery of degree apprenticeships.
He is author of research articles, book chapters, and several music and artistic pieces, reflecting his broad range of interdisciplinary interests when it comes to research and external collaboration.
Stuart’s teaching focus is primarily on topics relating to user experience, interface design, software development, and web systems across undergraduate and postgraduate courses. In addition, he supervises final year and dissertation project students in these areas. Stuart is a proponent of interactive and collaborative learning approaches and portfolio-based assessment.
Dr Cunningham’s interests cover a range of computing and creative hybrids, including audio compression; affective technologies; human-computer interaction, sonic interaction; and user experience. He has interests in person-centred approaches to sound design and ways in which biofeedback sensors from humans can be analysed to determine their emotional states.
To date, his work has been predominantly technical and scientifically driven, but he has also produced creative works such as music, sound, and images, in relation to these fascinations.
He is Chair of the Audio Mostly steering committee and is a regular review for many international journals. Stuart was a member of the MPEG Music Notation Standards (MPEG-SMR) working group, which developed ISO/IEC 14496-23:2008.
McIntosh, T. H., Weinel, J., & Cunningham, S. (2022). Lundheim: exploring affective audio techniques in an action-adventure video game. In Proceedings of the 17th International Audio Mostly Conference (pp. 155-158).
Pike, J., Picking, R., Cunningham, S. (2021). “Robot companion cats for people at home with dementia: a qualitative case study on companotics”, Dementia, 20(4) pp. 1300-1318.
Cunningham, S., McGregor, I. (2021). “Evaluating use of the Doppler Effect to Enhance Auditory Alerts”, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 37(11) pp. 1074-1087.
Griffiths, D., Cunningham, S., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2021). “A multi-genre model for music emotion recognition using linear regressors”, Journal of New Music Research, 50(4) pp. 355-372.
Cunningham, S., Ridley, H., Weinel, J., Picking, R. (2021). “Supervised machine learning for audio emotion recognition”, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 25(4) pp. 637-650.
Cunningham, S., Brill, M., Whalley, J.H., Read, R., Anderson, G., Edwards, S., Picking, R. (2019). “Assessing Wellbeing in People Living with Dementia Using Reminiscence Music with a Mobile App (Memory Tracks): A Mixed Methods Cohort Study”, Journal of Healthcare Engineering, pp. 1-10.
Cunningham, S., McGregor, I. (2019). “Subjective Evaluation of Music Compressed with the ACER Codec Compared to AAC, MP3, and Uncompressed PCM”, International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, pp. 1-16.
- JOURNAL REVIEWING / REFEREEING
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
11 Mar 2024
- COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP