Anna De Liddo (Research and UX Design Lead)

Anna De Liddo is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, working on the design, development and evaluation of argument mapping web platforms such as Cohere and the Evidence Hub. She is currently the OU lead on the EU-funded FP7 Catalyst Collective Awareness project. She gained her PhD at Polytechnic of Bari, Italy, investigating ICT for Participatory Planning and Deliberation, using OU argument mapping tools. In the course of her PhD she took individual responsibility in several international projects (Hypermedia Discourse, Palette and OpenParks) in the UK, Greece and Italy. She is member of the of the Hypermedia Discourse group, the Compendium Institute, and Global Sensemaking community.

Lucas Anastasious (PhD Student, Software Engineer)

Lucas is a PhD student on Computational argumentation methods to improve sensemaking and evidence-based reasoning in online deliberation systems, at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. He is working on creating automatic method of summarising online discussions, extracting arguments from scientific literature and developing recommendation systems for scientific arguments embedded in online debate platforms. Before his PhD was working on CORE project – the largest open access full text aggregator- as a senior developer and has participated in several EU or UKRI-funded projects (Stellar, cRunch, eCloud, openMinTeD, LTfLL and others). He is a strong advocate of Open Access and Open Science in general.

Alberto Ardito (Software Engineer)

Alberto Ardito is an MSc student of Computer Engineer at Politecnico of Bari. During his academic studies he has worked as freelance ICT consultant on web technologies. After completing a Bachelor Degree at Politecnico of Bari, with the thesis “Computer vision system for date recognition on LPG cylinders in critical conditions”, he collaborated with Politecnico of Bari as a computer engineer, implementing algorithms and applications for the extraction of emotion features from images/videos of human faces. Through his experience as a freelance ICT consultant, Alberto developed advanced skills in web technologies, interface design, user experience and computer vision. He is also the co-founder and CTO of tournelsud.com, an online tour operator promoting slow and sustainable tourism in Puglia, Italy.

Michelle Bachler (Software Development)

Michelle is a software developer working primarily on collective intelligence and knowledge mapping technologies. She brings years of industry experience in Java, Php, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, MySQL and other technologies, and she has been the full-time programmer of the IDea group since it’s inception. Previous work includes Compendium and Cohere