Nicola Fox is a PhD researcher in Criminology in the School of Social Science at the University of Manchester. Her research uses natural language processing and machine learning to better understand harm and vulnerability associated with missing children.
 
Nicola is an experienced IT professional with a Data Science MSc, Computing BSc and 20 years of experience working in the IT industry, in the UK and abroad, in the public sector and numerous global FTSE 100 organisations, including General Electric and Pearson. The roles she has undertaken include Development Manager, Programme Manager, Architect, Business/Data Analyst, Data Engineer & Machine Learning Engineer. As part of her work, she has developed prototypes for text classification web applications, human-in-the-loop workflows, and text-based data extraction tools for fraud detection. Nicola’s MSc research examined the detection of hate speech against women and immigrants, in English and Spanish, using text mining.
 
Nicola is passionate about harnessing the benefits of natural language processing and machine learning to facilitate improved child safeguarding, and create a positive social impact more broadly, whilst mitigating the many risks of negative unintended consequences of applying this technology, both for the practitioners who will use it and for those whose data will be processed.