Overview

Hywel is a computational scientist focused on challenges around sustainability and environmental change. He is a faculty member in Computer Science, and affiliated to the Institute for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence and the Global Systems Institute, at University of Exeter. He is a Visiting Fellow at Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

Hywel leads an active research group of postdoctoral fellows and PhD students, with diverse interests in environmental data science. He is Co-Director of the Joint Centre of Excellence in Environmental Intelligence, a collaborative research centre operated by University of Exeter and the UK Met Office. He is also Director of the UKRI CDT in Environmental Intelligence and leads the Environmental Intelligence Research Network at Exeter. He teaches courses and supervises student projects in data science applied to the environment, and has been programme lead for a number of postgraduate programmes in data science. He has published >80 research papers in leading outlets (see Google Scholar here). His research has received substantial funding from UKRI (EPSRC, ESRC, NERC), HEFCE, Leverhulme Trust, Children's Investment Facilitation Fund, as well as several commercial and philanthropic sponsors.

Hywel's research career has applied complex systems thinking and computational methods to problems in social sciences, environmental science, evolutionary ecology and artificial intelligence. His work has applied a range of methods including modelling, network analysis, natural language processing and machine learning. Hywel received his PhD in Complex Systems from University of Leeds in 2006. Since then he has worked in the departments of Environmental Science and Computer Science at University of East Anglia, before moving to University of Exeter in 2011 to work first in Biosciences (2011-2017) and then Computer Science (2017 - present). In 2019 he was promoted to Associate Professor in Data Science. In 2022, he was promoted to Professor in Environmental Data Science. Hywel was formerly a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and he has also launched a successful spinout company.

Current research interests focus primarily on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to environmental problems. Hywel is especially interested in applied research with real-world impact, engaging with a variety of industry and public sector partners in collaborative projects. If you are interested in working with Hywel on a research project, please get in touch.

Back to top

Publications

_{Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.}

| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |

2024

• Mander L, Williams HTP. (2024) The robustness of some Carboniferous fossil leaf venation networks to simulated damage, Royal Society Open Science, volume 11, no. 5, DOI:10.1098/rsos.240086. [PDF]
• Young JC, Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2024) CIDER: Context-sensitive polarity measurement for short-form text, PLoS One, volume 19, no. 4, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0299490. [PDF]
• Hickey J, Young J, Spruce M, Pandit R, Williams H, Arthur R, Stovall W, Head M. (2024) Social sensing a volcanic eruption: application to Kīlauea 2018, DOI:10.5194/nhess-2024-3. [PDF]
• Joyce J, Arthur R, Fu G, Bialkowski A, Williams H. (2024) Using Social Sensing to Validate Flood Risk Modelling in England, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), volume 14472 LNAI, pages 95-106, DOI:10.1007/978-981-99-8391-9_8.

2023

• Young JC, Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2023) CIDER: Context sensitive sentiment analysis for short-form text, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2307.07864.
• Jaramillo AM, Williams HTP, Perra N, Menezes R. (2023) The structure of segregation in co-authorship networks and its impact on scientific production, EPJ Data Science, volume 12, no. 1, DOI:10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00411-8.
• Göber M, Christel I, Hoffmann D, Mooney CJ, Rodriguez L, Becker N, Ebert EE, Fearnley C, Fundel VJ, Geiger T. (2023) Enhancing the Value of Weather and Climate Services in Society: Identified Gaps and Needs as Outcomes of the First WMO WWRP/SERA Weather and Society Conference, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, volume 104, no. 3, pages E645-E651, DOI:10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0199.1.
• Cann TJB, Dennes B, Coan T, O'Neill S, Williams HTP. (2023) Using Semantic Similarity and Text Embedding to Measure the Social Media Echo of Strategic Communications. [PDF]

2022

• Weaver I, Westwood N, Coan T, O'Neill S, Williams HTP. (2022) Sponsored messaging about climate change on Facebook: Actors, content, frames, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2211.13965.
• Treen K, Williams H, O’Neill S, Coan TG. (2022) Discussion of Climate Change on Reddit: Polarized Discourse or Deliberative Debate?, Environmental Communication, volume 16, no. 5, pages 680-698, DOI:10.1080/17524032.2022.2050776. [PDF]
• Young JC, Arthur R, Spruce M, Williams HTP. (2022) Social sensing of flood impacts in India: A case study of Kerala 2018, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, volume 74, pages 102908-102908, article no. 102908, DOI:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102908. [PDF]

2021

• Williams M, Cioroianu I, Williams H. (2021) Different News for Different Views: Political News-Sharing Communities on Social Media Through the UK General Election in 2015, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, volume 10, no. 2, pages 118-125, DOI:10.1609/icwsm.v10i2.14843.
• Buxton J, Powell T, Ambler J, Boulton C, Nicholson A, Arthur R, Lees K, Williams H, Lenton T. (2021) Community-driven tree planting greens the neighbouring landscape, DOI:10.21203/rs.3.rs-334324/v2.
• Nie W, Medina-Lara A, Williams H, Smith R. (2021) Do Health, Environmental and Ethical Concerns Affect Purchasing Behavior? A Meta-Analysis and Narrative Review, Social Sciences, volume 10, no. 11, pages 413-413, DOI:10.3390/socsci10110413. [PDF]
• Buxton J, Powell T, Ambler J, Boulton C, Nicholson A, Arthur R, Lees K, Williams H, Lenton TM. (2021) Community-driven tree planting greens the neighbouring landscape, Sci Rep, volume 11, no. 1, DOI:10.1038/s41598-021-96973-6. [PDF]
• Spruce MD, Arthur R, Robbins J, Williams HTP. (2021) Social sensing of high-impact rainfall events worldwide: a benchmark comparison against manually curated impact observations, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, volume 21, no. 8, pages 2407-2425, DOI:10.5194/nhess-21-2407-2021. [PDF]
• Moutidis I, Williams HTP. (2021) Community evolution on Stack Overflow, PLoS One, volume 16, no. 6, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0253010. [PDF]
• Young JC, Arthur R, Spruce M, Williams HTP. (2021) Social sensing of heatwaves, Sensors, volume 21, no. 11, DOI:10.3390/s21113717.
• Cann TJB, Weaver IS, Williams HTP. (2021) Ideological biases in social sharing of online information about climate change, PLoS One, volume 16, no. 4, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0250656. [PDF]
• Buxton J, Powell T, Ambler J, Boulton C, Nicholson A, Arthur R, Lees K, Williams H, Lenton T. (2021) Community-driven tree planting greens the neighbouring landscape, DOI:10.21203/rs.3.rs-334324/v1. [PDF]
• Leonelli S, Lovell R, Wheeler B, Fleming L, Williams H. (2021) From FAIR Data to Fair Data Use: Methodological Data Fairness in Health-Related Social Media Research, Big Data and Society.
• Spruce MD, Arthur R, Robbins J, Williams HTP. (2021) Social sensing of high-impact rainfall events worldwide: A benchmark comparison against manually curated impact observations, DOI:10.5194/nhess-2020-413. [PDF]
• Hintz KS, McNicholas C, Randriamampianina R, Williams HTP, Macpherson B, Mittermaier M, Onvlee‐Hooimeijer J, Szintai B. (2021) Crowd‐sourced observations for short‐range numerical weather prediction: Report from EWGLAM/SRNWP Meeting 2019, Atmospheric Science Letters, volume 22, no. 6, DOI:10.1002/asl.1031. [PDF]
• Weaver IS, Williams HTP, Arthur R. (2021) A social Beaufort scale to detect high winds using language in social media posts, Sci Rep, volume 11, no. 1, DOI:10.1038/s41598-021-82808-x. [PDF]

2020

• Ollagnier A, Williams H. (2020) Text Augmentation Techniques for Clinical Case Classification, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, volume 2696.
• Moutidis I, Williams HTP. (2020) Complex networks for event detection in heterogeneous high volume news streams, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2005.13751.
• Ollagnier A, Williams H. (2020) Sequential Transfer Learning for Event Detection and Key Sentence Extraction, 2020 19th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 14th - 17th Dec 2020, 2020 19th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), DOI:10.1109/icmla51294.2020.00166. [PDF]
• Treen KMD, Williams HTP, O'Neill SJ. (2020) Online misinformation about climate change, WIREs Climate Change, volume 11, no. 5, DOI:10.1002/wcc.665. [PDF]
• Morgan KM, Perry CT, Arthur R, Williams HTP, Smithers SG. (2020) Projections of coral cover and habitat change on turbid reefs under future sea-level rise, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, volume 287, no. 1929, pages 20200541-20200541, DOI:10.1098/rspb.2020.0541. [PDF]
• Cann TJB, Weaver IS, Williams HTP. (2020) Is it correct to project and detect? How weighting unipartite projections influences community detection, Network Science, volume 8, no. S1, pages S145-S163, DOI:10.1017/nws.2020.11. [PDF]
• Spruce M, Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2020) Using social media to measure impacts of named storm events in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Meteorological Applications, volume 27, no. 1, DOI:10.1002/met.1887.
• Moutidis I, Williams HTP. (2020) Utilizing Complex Networks for Event Detection in Heterogeneous High-Volume News Streams, Studies in Computational Intelligence, volume 881 SCI, pages 659-672, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-36687-2_55.

2019

• Brelsford C, Thakur G, Arthur R, Williams H. (2019) Using digital trace data to identify regions and cities, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities, ARIC 2019, pages 5-8, DOI:10.1145/3356395.3365539.
• Boulton CA, Hughes E, Kent C, Smith JR, Williams HTP. (2019) Student engagement and wellbeing over time at a higher education institution, PLoS One, volume 14, no. 11, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0225770. [PDF]
• Ollagnier A, Williams H. (2019) Network-Based Pooling for Topic Modeling on Microblog Content, String Processing and Information Retrieval, Springer International Publishing, 80-87, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-32686-9_6. [PDF]
• Ollagnier A, Williams H. (2019) Classification and event identification using word embedding, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, volume 2380.
• Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2019) Scaling laws in geo-located Twitter data, PLoS One, volume 14, no. 7, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0218454. [PDF]
• Weaver IS, Williams H, Cioroianu I, Jasney L, Coan T, Banducci S. (2019) Communities of online news exposure during the UK General Election 2015, Online Social Networks and Media, volume 10-11, pages 18-30, DOI:10.1016/j.osnem.2019.05.001.
• Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2019) The human geography of Twitter: Quantifying regional identity and inter-region communication in England and Wales, PLoS One, volume 14, no. 4, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0214466. [PDF]
• Cann TJB, Weaver IS, Williams HTP. (2019) Is it Correct to Project and Detect? Assessing Performance of Community Detection on Unipartite Projections of Bipartite Networks, Studies in Computational Intelligence, volume 812, pages 267-279, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-05411-3_22.

2018

• Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2018) The Human Geography of Twitter, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1807.04107.
• Nicholson AE, Wilkinson DM, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2018) Gaian bottlenecks and planetary habitability maintained by evolving model biospheres: The ExoGaia model, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1803.08063.
• Cowie S, Arthur R, Williams HTP. (2018) @choo: Tracking pollen and hayfever in the UK using social media, Sensors (Switzerland), volume 18, no. 12, DOI:10.3390/s18124434.
• Banducci S, Jasny L, Cioroianu I, Coan TG, Stevens DP, Weaver IS, Williams H. (2018) To Polarize or Not: Comparing Networks of News Consumption, CeDEM Asia 2018: Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, Yokohama, Japan, 12th - 13th Jul 2018.
• Nicholson AE, Wilkinson DM, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2018) Alternative mechanisms for Gaia, J Theor Biol, volume 457, pages 249-257, DOI:10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.08.032. [PDF]
• Boulton CA, Kent C, Williams HTP. (2018) Virtual learning environment engagement and learning outcomes at a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ university, Computers and Education, volume 126, pages 129-142, DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2018.06.031.
• Lenton TM, Daines SJ, Dyke JG, Nicholson AE, Wilkinson DM, Williams HTP. (2018) Selection for Gaia across Multiple Scales, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, volume 33, no. 8, pages 633-645, DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2018.05.006.
• Nicholson AE, Wilkinson DM, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2018) Gaian bottlenecks and planetary habitability maintained by evolving model biospheres: The ExoGaia model. [PDF]
• Weaver IS, Williams HTP, Cioroianu I, Williams M, Coan TG, Banducci SA. (2018) Dynamic social media affiliations amongst UK politicians, Social Networks, volume 54, pages 132-144, DOI:10.1016/j.socnet.2018.01.008.
• Walding NG, Williams HTP, McGarvie S, Belcher CM. (2018) A comparison of the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) with recorded fire occurrence and final fire size, International Journal of Wildland Fire, volume 27, no. 2, pages 99-113, DOI:10.1071/WF17030.
• Arthur R, Boulton CA, Shotton H, Williams HTP. (2018) Social sensing of floods in the UK, PLoS ONE, volume 13, no. 1, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0189327.

2017

• Arthur R, Boulton CA, Shotton H, Williams HTP. (2017) Social Sensing of Floods in the UK, DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1711.04695.
• Kent C, Boulton CA, Williams H. (2017) Towards measurement of the relationship between student engagement and learning outcomes at a bricks-and-mortar university, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, volume 1828, pages 4-14.
• Nicholson AE, Wilkinson DM, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2017) Multiple states of environmental regulation in well-mixed model biospheres, J Theor Biol, volume 414, pages 17-34, DOI:10.1016/j.jtbi.2016.11.019. [PDF]

2016

• Williams MJ, Cioroianu I, Williams HTP. (2016) Different news for different views: Political news-sharing communities on social media through the UK General Election in 2015, 1st International Workshop on News and Public Opinion (NECO) at International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016), Cologne, Germany.
• Boulton CA, Shotton H, Williams HTP. (2016) Using social media to detect and locate wildfires, 1st International Workshop on Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM) at International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016), Cologne, Germany.

2015

• O'Neill S, Williams HP, Kurz T, Wiersma B, Boykoff M. (2015) Dominant frames in legacy and social media coverage of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Nature Climate Change, volume 5, pages 380-385, DOI:10.1038/nclimate2535.
• Williams HTP, McMurray JM, Kurz TR, Lambert FH. (2015) Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change, Global Environmental Change, volume 32, pages 126-138, DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.006.

2014

• Beckett SJ, Boulton CA, Williams HTP. (2014) FALCON: a software package for analysis of nestedness in bipartite networks, F1000Res, volume 3, DOI:10.12688/f1000research.4831.1. [PDF]

2013

• Beckett SJ, Williams HTP. (2013) Coevolutionary diversification creates nested-modular structure in phage–bacteria interaction networks, Interface Focus, volume 3, no. 6, DOI:10.1098/rsfs.2013.0033.
• Lenton TM, Williams HTP. (2013) On the origin of planetary-scale tipping points, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, volume 28, no. 7, pages 380-382, DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2013.06.001.
• Lenton TM, Williams HTP. (2013) On the origin of planetary-scale tipping points, Trends Ecol Evol, volume 28, no. 7, pages 380-382, DOI:10.1016/j.tree.2013.06.001. [PDF]
• Clark JR, Lenton TM, Williams HTP, Daines SJ. (2013) Environmental selection and resource allocation determine spatial patterns in picophytoplankton cell size, Limnology and Oceanography, volume 58, no. 3, pages 1008-1022, DOI:10.4319/lo.2013.58.3.1008.
• Williams HTP. (2013) Phage-induced diversification improves host evolvability, BMC Evol Biol, volume 13, DOI:10.1186/1471-2148-13-17. [PDF]

2012

• Williams HTP. (2012) Coevolving parasites improve host evolutionary search on structured landscapes, Artifical Life 13: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, pages 129-136.
• Boyle RA, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2012) Natural selection for costly nutrient recycling in simulated microbial metacommunities, J Theor Biol, volume 312, pages 1-12, DOI:10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.07.018. [PDF]

2011

• Williams HTP, Boyle RA, Lenton TM. (2011) Spatial structure creates community-­level selection for nutrient recycling, Eleventh European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ECAL2011), Paris, France, 8th - 12th Aug 2011, Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ECAL2011).

2010

• Williams HTP. (2010) Virus-host coevolution, killing the winner, and the Red Queen, Twelfth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE XII), Odense, Denmark, 19th - 23rd Aug 2010, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE XII).
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2010) Evolutionary regime shifts in simulated ecosystems, Oikos, volume 119, no. 12, pages 1887-1899, DOI:10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18127.x.

2009

• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2009) The problem of ephemeral identity in evolving metacommunities and using organisational character to define higher-level units of selection, 10th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL2009), Budapest, Hungary, 13th - 16th Sep 2009, Workshop on Levels of Selection and Individuality in Evolution: Conceptual Issues and the Role of Artificial Life Models.
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2009) Rebels with a cause, NERC Planet Earth, no. Winter 2009.
• Lenton TM, Williams HTP. (2009) Gaia and evolution, Gaia in turmoil, The MIT Press.
• Lenton TM, Williams HTP. (2009) Gaia and Evolution, Gaia in Turmoil, MIT Press, 61-84.
• Clark JR, Williams HTP, Lenton TM, Watson AJ. (2009) Agent-based modelling of Archean biogeochemistry and the Great Oxidation, GEOCHIMICA ET COSMOCHIMICA ACTA, volume 73, no. 13, pages A228-A228. [PDF]

2008

• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2008) Environmental regulation by higher level selection in a simulated network of microbial ecosystems, Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life XI), Winchester, Uk, 5th - 8th Aug 2008, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life XI).
• Clark JR, Williams HTP. (2008) An adaptive model of marine biogeochemistry in the Archean, Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life XI), Winchester, Uk, 5th - 8th Aug 2008, Proceedings of Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life XI).
• Wood AJ, Ackland GJ, Dyke JG, Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2008) Daisyworld: A review, Reviews of Geophysics, volume 46, no. 1, DOI:10.1029/2006RG000217.
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2008) Environmental regulation in a network of simulated microbial ecosystems, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, volume 105, no. 30, pages 10432-10437, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0800244105. [PDF]

2007

• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2007) Microbial Gaia: a new model for the evolution of environmental regulation, Gaia Circular.
• Williams H, Noble J. (2007) Homeostatic plasticity improves signal propagation in continuous-time recurrent neural networks, Biosystems, volume 87, no. 2-3, pages 252-259, DOI:10.1016/j.biosystems.2006.09.020. [PDF]
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2007) The Flask model: Emergence of nutrient-recycling microbial ecosystems and their disruption by environment-altering 'rebel' organisms, Oikos, volume 116, no. 7, pages 1087-1105, DOI:10.1111/j.0030-1299.2007.15721.x.
• Boyle RA, Lenton TM, Williams HTP. (2007) Neoproterozoic 'snowball Earth' glaciations and the evolution of altruism, Geobiology, volume 5, no. 4, pages 337-349, DOI:10.1111/j.1472-4669.2007.00115.x.
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2007) Artificial ecosystem selection for evolutionary optimisation, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), volume 4648 LNAI, pages 93-102, DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-74913-4_10.
• Williams HTP, Lenton TM. (2007) Artificial selection of simulated microbial ecosystems, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, volume 104, no. 21, pages 8918-8923, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0610038104. [PDF]

2006

• Williams HTP. (2006) Homeostatic Adaptive Networks.
• Williams HTP. (2006) Does global niche construction lead to environmental regulation?, Tenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE X), Bloomington, Indiana, Usa, Proceedings of Workshop on Modelling Environment Construction.

2005

• Williams HTP, Noble J. (2005) Homeostatic plasticity improves signal propagation in continuous-time recurrent neural networks, Sixth International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues (IPCAT2005), York, Uk, 30th Aug - 1st Sep 2005.
• Williams HTP. (2005) Homeostatic plasticity improves continuous-time recurrent neural networks as a behavioural substrate, 3rd International Symposium on Adaptive Motion in Animals and Machines (AMAM 2005), Ilmenau, Germany, 25th - 30th Sep 2005.
• Williams H, Noble J. (2005) Evolution and the regulation of environmental variables, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), volume 3630 LNAI, pages 332-341, DOI:10.1007/11553090_34.

2004

• Williams H. (2004) Homeostatic plasticity in recurrent neural networks, FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 8, pages 344-353. [PDF]

Back to top