QMUL Centre for Human-Centred Computing News

Have moral narratives in popular music become darker? New Scientific Reports paper by CMAI/C4DM ...

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:00:00 +0100

Popular music may be reflecting a growing culture of vices, according to new research from the Centre for Multimodal AI (CMAI) and the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London. The analysis of musical evolution has found that song lyrics have become increasingly negative over the past six decades, with declining references to moral virtues. This could provide an important indicator of a change of culture in society. The findings suggest that music may act as a powerful cultural barometer, offering insights into how societies express emotions, values and moral concerns across generations. After analysing more than 380,000 songs released between 1960 and 2023, researchers discovered a significant shift in the emotional and moral language used in popular music. Expressions associated with moral virtues such as care and decency became less common over time, while language linked to harm, cheating, subversion and degradation increased. Lead author Dr Vjosa Preniqi, from CMAI/C4DM, said: "Music is much more than entertainment. It is one of the ways societies tell stories about themselves. By analysing song lyrics across several decades, we can begin to see how emotional expression and moral narratives evolve over time. What we found was a gradual shift away from language associated with virtues such as care and decency, towards themes that reflect conflict, harm and other moral concerns. These patterns are dependent on various factors, such as genre and shock-factor, but they provide a fascinating window into changing cultural values and emotional expression." The study examined two large popular music datasets spanning more than 60 years, making it the first study to chart moral content in song lyrics at this scale: more than 377,000 English-lyrics songs covering 1960 to 2010 were filtered from the WASABI dataset and complemented with 5,500 songs that made Billboard's year-end charts between 1960 and 2023. Using advanced artificial intelligence and language analysis techniques, the researchers tracked how different moral themes appeared in music over time. Their analysis revealed a rise in expressions associated with moral vices such as harm, cheating, subversion and degradation, alongside increasing levels of negative sentiment, anger and disgust. At the same time, expressions linked to moral virtues such as care and decency became less prominent. Senior author Dr Charalampos Saitis, Assistant Professor of digital music processing at Queen Mary University of London and a member of CMAI/C4DM, said: "Popular music provides a unique lens through which to explore cultural change. Because music is such a widespread and influential form of expression, analysing lyrics at scale allows us to identify patterns that would otherwise remain invisible. Music both reflects and shapes the world around us. Understanding how moral narratives evolve in lyrics can help us better understand wider changes in culture, identity and collective values around important social issues." The research also uncovered differences between genres and artist groups, suggesting that moral expression is closely linked to musical style and storytelling traditions. While some genres were more strongly associated with themes of care and social connection, others more frequently expressed conflict, rebellion and darker emotional narratives. The findings also revealed observed associations between attributed artist gender categories and lyrical moral content, though these should be interpreted in light of the binary artist gender classification and the substantive artist gender imbalance in the datasets. The research found that women artists were more frequently associated with virtues like care and loyalty, while in contrast men and mixed-gender groups more frequently reflected negative themes such as harm, subversion and degradation. By combining computational methods with theories of morality and human behaviour, the researchers were able to uncover long-term cultural trends hidden within decades of popular music. As debates around mental wellbeing, social cohesion and cultural change continue, the team believes music offers a valuable record of how societies communicate their emotions, meaning and values. To read the full story, please head over to the following link https://shorturl.at/qsu2p To read more about MoralBERT, the AI language model the team developed to detect moral expression in song lyrics, please check the following papers: Preniqi, V., Ghinassi, I., Ive, J., Saitis, C., & Kalimeri, K. (2024). MoralBERT: a fine-tuned language model for capturing moral values in social discussions. In Proceedings of the ACM GoodIT Conference. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677525.3678694 Preniqi, V., Ghinassi, I., Ive, J., Kalimeri, K., & Saitis, C. (2024). Automatic detection of moral values in music lyrics. In Proceedings of the ISMIR Conference. https://ismir2024program.ismir.net/poster_326.html

Marcus Pearce delivers keynote address at two conferences

Sun, 03 May 2026 23:00:00 +0100

Marcus Pearce has delivered two keynote addresses at the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) 2026 conference at the University of Cambridge and at the International Conference on Music and Sleep at Aarhus University, Denmark. These presentations follow the publication of his book Learning to listen, listening to learn by Oxford University Press.

Queen Mary hosts inaugural event of new London Interdisciplinary Music Research Initiative

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0100

Yesterday (29th April 2026), the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), part of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, hosted the inaugural event of the London Interdisciplinary Music Research Initiative (LIMRI) - bringing together leading researchers and practitioners from across London to explore the science, scholarship, and art of expert musical performance. The afternoon workshop, titled Interdisciplinary Conversations on Expert Performance, took place at Queen Mary University of London's Mile End Campus and featured four invited speakers from King's College London, Imperial College London, City St George's University of London, and the Royal College of Music. LIMRI is a newly launched cross-London network designed to foster collaboration and dialogue between researchers working across music, technology, science and the arts. The initiative is co-led by Dr Charalampos Saitis, Lecturer in Digital Music Processing alongside colleagues from Goldsmiths, Kingston University London, and King's College London. LIMRI was formally launched in December 2025. Yesterday's workshop was the first in a series of themed research events that LIMRI plans to host at different institutions across London. Further details about the initiative can be found on the LIMRI website.

Dan Gill gives CS in Academia Industry Talk

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0100

Cognitive Science group PhD student Daniel Gill gave a CS in Academia Industry Talk to the Computer Science Society at the University of Lincoln. Dan's PhD concerns the Identification of Interactive Motion Patterns in Neurodivergent Children and Adults. He is using a robotic system to experimentally investigate how neurodivergent people interact with technology and other humans in order to create systems with neurodivergent interactions in mind. In this talk he discussed his route into research, through his BSc FYP, MSc project, and now his PhD, demonstrating that academia can be an avenue for solving real-world problems within a user-centred framework. He provided tips for the audience on careers in academia.

Flip the Script: supporting better university progression

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0100

Paul Curzon and Edmund Robinson were part of the expert panel at the Flip the Script participatory design workshop at the British Computer Society offices. The aim of the meeting was to co-develop a new practice model that can help Computing departments across the UK to support better progression and completion of their undergraduate students. The workshop with staff, led by Professor Louise Archer from University College London (UCL), is part of the development process which also involves workshops with students, aims to co-develop the model. The aim was to ensure the ultimate model is high quality, accessible, close to practice and grounded in the needs of participating departments and the communities they serve. From this workshop, the intention was to refine the draft model and produce a version that will be ready for application in the Autumn.

Humans vs Vision-Language Models

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Shalom Lappin is part of a team centred at the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP) at the University of Gothenburg that have published new work on a comparison of Humans vs Vision-Language Models It proposes a unified way to measure narrative coherence in writing about about sequences of visual scenes. The experimental results suggest that human descriptions have more coherence, across different dimensions, than Large Language Model (LLM) ones, despite the fluency of the latter. Human writing about visual narratives show significantly more elements of surprise. Abstract We study narrative coherence in visually grounded stories by comparing human-written narratives with those generated by vision-language models (VLMs) on the Visual Writing Prompts corpus. Using a set of metrics that capture different aspects of narrative coherence, including coreference, discourse relation types, topic continuity, character persistence, and multimodal character grounding, we compute a narrative coherence score. We find that VLMs show broadly similar coherence profiles that differ systematically from those of humans. In addition, differences for individual measures are often subtle, but they become clearer when considered jointly. Overall, our results indicate that, despite human-like surface fluency, model narratives exhibit systematic differences from those of humans in how they organise discourse across a visually grounded story. Our code is available at this https URL. Reference Nikolai Ilinykh, Hyewon Jang, Shalom Lappin, Asad Sayeed, Sharid Loáiciga (2026) Humans vs Vision-Language Models: A Unified Measure of Narrative Coherence, arXiv, March. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2603.25537

Ekaterina Ivanova: Using haptic coupling enhances children's handwriting

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A team including Ekaterina Ivanova from the Centre for Human-Centred Computing have a paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Haptics. It shows that physically linking a child with a more experienced writer through a haptic interface when practicing handwriting leads to improvement in their handwriting skill. Abstract: The acquisition of handwriting is a challenging task for children, requiring consistent exercise throughout primary school. Many children struggle to develop fluent handwriting, which in turn may impact their academic success and affect their self-esteem. The emergence of new technologies supporting handwriting exercise and allowing active interactions with educators, caregivers, and/or peers has led researchers to explore the potential use of these new tools. Studies show that haptic technology and exploiting experts' trajectory feedback may improve students' performance better than one-way instruction. In the present study, we explore the use of bidirectional haptic feedback to support handwriting exercises. Twelve child and caregiver dyads were asked to copy single letters or letter pairs in cursive handwriting while being physically coupled or not. Results show improvement for the less skilled participant in the dyad, especially in handwriting fluency, when physically coupled. Reference S. Buscaglione; C. Provenzale; C. Bonsignori; E. Ivanova; A. Noccaro; L. Sparaci et al (2026). Write together: using haptic coupling to enhance children's handwriting. IEEE Transactions on Haptics, pp1 - 12 IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/TOH.2026.3677687.

Ekaterina Ivanova: Haptic Coupling to Negotiate Motion Plans

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Ekaterina Ivanova is part of a team to have research published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. They investigated how two people, when mechanically connected and had to achieve some task together coordinated their plans of what to do. In this study they started with different plans. When the plans involved each doing a similar amount of work they both made small changes. When one had a simpler plan, they directed the work with the other adapting to them. They therefore worked together in a way that used the connection to make the joint task easier. Abstract: Haptic coupling is integral to everyday life, enabling humans to collaborate on tasks without the need for verbal agreement of every detail. However, collaborative partners often have differing plans and use haptic coupling to negotiate a common strategy. While previous studies have focused on tasks where partners share the same plan, little is known about haptic negotiation when plans diverge. This study investigates how the motion plans of two mechanically connected partners evolve during repeating a via-points arm-reaching task when they start from differing initial plans. In one group, partners had plans requiring similar effort, while in another group, plans were unbalanced, requiring different levels of effort. The analysis of shape and movement metrics shows that all dyads coordinated their plans through practice, influencing subsequent movements even when disconnected. For symmetric plans, partners exhibited slight mutual adaptation toward each other. In contrast, for asymmetric plans, the partner with the simpler plan tended to lead the movement, while the partner with the more complex plan complied and relaxed their plan. These findings suggest that, during collaboration, partners leverage mechanical interaction to simplify tasks and minimize effort. Reference: C. De Vicariis, E. Ivanova, V. Sanguineti and E. Burdet, "Haptic Coupling to Negotiate Motion Plans," in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, vol. 34, pp. 1448-1456, 2026, DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2026.3670954.

Queen Mary Spinout Dragonfly AI Secures £5m to Accelerate Global Growth

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Queen Mary University of London is celebrating the success of its spinout company Dragonfly AI, which has secured £5 million in new investment to fuel its next phase of international expansion and product innovation. Dragonfly AI, co-founded by Dr Hamit Soyel, Chief Scientist and inventor of the underlying technology, has rapidly become a market leader in predictive visual analytics. The technology is rooted in neuroscience research carried out at Queen Mary, where Dr Soyel and colleagues developed a biological algorithm that predicts human attention in real time. Today, the platform is used by major global brands including Nestlé, Coca-Cola and L'Oréal to optimise the performance of their creative content across digital, in‑store, and omnichannel environments. Speaking about the company's continued success, Dr Soyel said: "Marketing teams compete for three things: attention, emotion and memory. Dragonfly AI is built on a biological algorithm we developed at Queen Mary University of London which allows global brands like Nestlé, Coca‑Cola and L'Oréal to optimise their creative performance across digital, in‑store, and omnichannel environments." He added: "Our science‑led approach can predict how people will see, feel, and remember creative content before it goes live. Crucially, because we rely on neuroscience and not training data, we can avoid the biases which plague many generative AI models. It's why we're trusted by some of the most valuable brands." The new £5m investment—led by 24Haymarket with participation from Guinness Ventures, Foresight for Growing Companies, and others—will enable Dragonfly AI to expand globally and further strengthen its product suite.

Ekaterina Ivanova has been appointed an Associate Editor for EuroHaptics 2026 and the IEEE/RSJ ...

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Ekaterina Ivanova has recently been made an Associate Editor for two different conferences. The first EuroHaptics 2026 takes place in Siena, Italy in July. It is a world renowned event that brings together the brightest and most innovative minds in the field of haptic perception and technology. Those attending will experience cutting-edge research, engaging discussions, and innovative demonstrations that showcase the diverse applications of haptics. See https://eurohaptics.org/ehc2026/ The second is the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems which takes place in Pittsburgh, USA. It is one of the largest and most impactful robotics research conferences worldwide and will bring together researchers, engineers, and industry leaders to Pittsburgh, a city at the forefront of robotics innovation, and home to world-renowned institutions and cutting-edge autonomous vehicle companies. See https://2026.ieee-iros.org/

Grant on Identification of Sensory-Motor Patterns of Autism

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Ekaterina Ivanova and Rachael Bedford have been awarded a grant from the QMUL CIRCLE Fund to run a pilot study to identify the Sensory-Motor Patterns of Autism. It runs until the end of 2026, and is worth £7,873.16 The main objective of the project is to investigate differences in interaction motion patterns between neurotypical and autistic adults. Haptic communication (HC), the exchange of task-relevant information through touch and forces, is fundamental to human motor interaction and supports motor performance and learning, yet its characteristics in autistic adults remain unexplored. Autism affects social and motor coordination, potentially altering haptic communication patterns. This pilot study will systematically compare Haptic communication in autistic and neurotypical adults, generating proof-of-concept data on measurable visuomotor differences. Findings will establish the feasibility of this approach and provide preliminary evidence to inform larger-scale studies, ultimately aiming to develop objective, motion-based biomarkers for earlier, more efficient autism diagnosis. The project team includes Dr Ekaterina Ivanova (EECS, QMUL), with expertise in Haptic communication and human-robot interaction, physiological data analysis, and computational modelling, and Prof Rachael Bedford (SBBS, QMUL), whose research focuses on transdiagnostic mechanisms in developmental conditions and identifying modifiable factors for personalised interventions. Their combined expertise ensures rigorous pilot testing and assessment of feasibility.

Grant on the Impact of Semantic Waves

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Paul Curzon and Jo Brodie have been awarded a QMUL Impact grant of £8,712 to investigate the impact of Paul's research on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Paul Curzon's research with Jane Waite and Karl Maton of the University of Sydney has shown how the Semantics dimension of LCT provides a way to reflect on and improve lesson plans and explanations. They initially focussed on Semantic profile and the importanceof semantic wave structures when teaching using unplugged computing. The ideas and approach, as aresult, have been adopted as best practice by Ofsted, the National Centre for Computing Education, Barefoot Computing and the Raspberry Pi foundation amongst others. This grant will for example gather evidence for how the impact happened and the extent it is now being used in schools after an initial investigation suggested that primary schools were adopting it as good pedagogy.

Women in Higher Education Network plus grant

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Ekaterina Ivanova and Anna Xambo Sedo have been awarded a grant from the QMUL Erica fund worth £13,200 to support the Women in Higher Education Network plus (WHEN+), until July 2027. The Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN) was founded in 2023 at EECS with the aim of building a strong and sustainable community for individuals identifying as women, while contributing to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. Over the past two years, under the leadership of Ekaterina Ivanova and Anna Xambó Sedó, WHEN has established a solid foundation for community engagement through a dedicated website, mailing list, and LinkedIn group. The network has grown from 38 active participants in its first year to 88 in the second, and now exceeds 100 registered members with the inclusion of SBBS and collaboration with ITS Women in Tech. To date, WHEN has delivered 30 monthly events, including workshops, talks, and social gatherings. These activities have received consistently positive feedback (July 2024 survey) and have fostered strong peer support, with members actively proposing new initiatives. With this new extension funding from ERICA, they aim to increase the project's impact through widening inclusion by collaborating with other underrepresented groups, including LGBTQIA+ communities; expanding participation across the Faculty of Engineering; and extending the network geographically from QMUL to the wider London academic community, supporting interdisciplinary exchange. Following their already established series of regular but distinctive events, the monthly activities will include social events and skill development events. Social events include coffee mornings, cinema screenings with discussion, tea parties, social lunches, sports (e.g. yoga, zumba), and so on. Skill development events include group coaching, presentations, workshops, meetups, and any relevant activity/idea proposed by and/or powered by network members. See the WHEN website for past activities:

Zahraa Al-Sahili wins an "honourable mention" award at AACL/IJCNLP 2025

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Zahraa Al-Sahili won an "honourable mention" award at AACL/IJCNLP 2025 held in Mumbai, India. It is one of the top tier of NLP conferences. There were only 10 awards given out across over 200 papers at the conference (not to mention the other 1,000 or so papers submitted that didn't make it into the conference), so it's a great achievement - very well done Zahraa! The paper is about social biases in multimodal foundation models, and looks in particular at multilingual models - surprisingly, things like gender bias often get worse in multilingual models, and biases can spread into gender-neutral languages from others in the training data. Abstract Multilingual vision-language models (VLMs) promise universal image-text retrieval, yet their social biases remain underexplored. We perform the first systematic audit of four public multilingual CLIP variants: M-CLIP, NLLB-CLIP, CAPIVARA-CLIP, and the debiased SigLIP-2, covering ten languages that differ in resource availability and morphological gender marking. Using balanced subsets of FairFace and the PATA stereotype suite in a zero-shot setting, we quantify race and gender bias and measure stereotype amplification. Contrary to the intuition that multilinguality mitigates bias, every model exhibits stronger gender skew than its English-only baseline. CAPIVARA-CLIP shows its largest biases precisely in the low-resource languages it targets, while the shared encoder of NLLB-CLIP and SigLIP-2 transfers English gender stereotypes into gender-neutral languages; loosely coupled encoders largely avoid this leakage. Although SigLIP-2 reduces agency and communion skews, it inherits -- and in caption-sparse contexts (e.g., Xhosa) amplifies -- the English anchor's crime associations. Highly gendered languages consistently magnify all bias types, yet gender-neutral languages remain vulnerable whenever cross-lingual weight sharing imports foreign stereotypes. Aggregated metrics thus mask language-specific hot spots, underscoring the need for fine-grained, language-aware bias evaluation in future multilingual VLM research. Citation Zahraa Al Sahili, Ioannis Patras, and Matthew Purver. 2025. Breaking Language Barriers or Reinforcing Bias? A Study of Gender and Racial Disparities in Multilingual Contrastive Vision Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 331–352, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.ijcnlp-long.20 Also Available from https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14160

Riasat Islam: Apps Meeting the Spiritual Needs of Modern Muslims

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Riasat Islam of the Centre for Human Centred-Computing has published research in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction on "Islamic Lifestyle Applications: Meeting the Spiritual Needs of Modern Muslims." Based on reviews of popular apps and interviews, the team found that existing applications aiming to support the religious practices and motivation among Muslims currently falls short, and that there is scope for much more and better focused technological support. Abstract: We evaluated contemporary Islamic lifestyle applications supporting religious practices and motivation among Muslims. We reviewed 11 popular applications using self-determination theory and the technology-as-experience framework to assess their support for motivation and affective needs. Most applications lack features that foster autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We also interviewed ten devoted Muslim application users to gain insights into their experiences and unmet needs. Our findings indicate that existing applications fall short in providing comprehensive learning, social connections, and scholar consultations. We propose design implications based on our results, including spiritual empowerment through technology, designing for intrinsic motivation, culturally grounded design and community engagement. We aim to inform the design of Islamic lifestyle applications that better facilitate ritual practices, benefitting application designers and Muslim communities. Our research provides valuable insights into the untapped potential for lifestyle applications to act as religious companions supporting Muslims' spiritual journey. Reference: Kabir, M., Kabir, M. R., & Islam, R. (2025). Islamic Lifestyle Applications: Meeting the Spiritual Needs of Modern Muslims. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 1–29. DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2025.2595545

New Scientist video: "How Virtual Nightclubs Are Changing Modern Society".

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 23:00:00 +0100

A New Scientist video about the collaboration between the Human Interaction Lab and Target3D has just been released featuring resaerch by Karl Clarke, Ella Cullen and Pat Healey. "The movie Ready Player One introduced us to the futuristic idea of a fully immersive virtual world where meaningful human interactions transcend borders. Now, VR technology has moved beyond science fiction, becoming embedded into our daily lives. New Scientist reporter, Linda Rodriguez-Mcrobbie took a trip to a virtual nightclub and immersed herself in a subculture where social identity can be as expressive as your imagination. Guided by club organiser and VR researcher Karl Clarke, we explore the technology underpinning these virtual experiences. We see how applications in movie production, military training, rehabilitation, and health are driving innovation, we reveal its use for training AI models and how it is being used to better understand social interaction. And, in groundbreaking new VR research, our team joins an experiment in which every aspect of their social presence is manipulated, with dramatic and profound implications. Ready Player One, it would seem, is much closer than we think."