Dr Jamie A Ward

Jamie's research lies at the intersection of wearable computing, theatre, and psychology.

Staff details

Dr Jamie A Ward

Position

Interim Head of Department

Department

Computing

Email

j.ward (@gold.ac.uk)

Jamie is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths where (since May 2024) he is acting Head of Department for Computing. He sits as a staff representative on the college Academic Board, and as a board representative to the governing Council.

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

2020: SocSensors
Using wearable sensors to uncover social behaviour