Funded Projects by GIST
Current Projects
- AUGSOC - Bringing the Augmented Society to Reality: Shaping Perception, Resilience and Rights for Everyday Augmented Reality (2024-2029)
- PI/Co-I: Mark McGill
- Funded by: ERC
- About: AUGSOC aims to understand how this capacity for perceptual mediation will be used both for social good (empowering individuals and communities to control how they are perceived) and social harm (violating user and bystander privacy, and perpetuating and amplifying our capacity to enact information disorder, censorship, discrimination, and manipulation).
- WearAI: Examining the Societal Vulnerabilities Exposed by AI / Multimodal LLMs Embedded in Context-Aware Smart Wearables (2025-2026)
- PI/Co-I: Mark McGill
- Funded by: AISI - AI Security Institute
- About: This project examines the risks and vulnerabilities posed by mobile AI embedded in everyday/all-day mass-consumer wearables, such as smart glasses (e.g., Meta Rayban, Orion) and AI pins (e.g., Humane AI Pin, Rabbit R1).
- VR-CLiCs: Child Local Clinics for Safety in Virtual Environments (2025-2026)
- PI/Co-I: Mohamed Khamis
- Funded by: REPHRAIN – Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online
- About: VR-CLiCs develops and pilots local, child-centred clinics that help young people understand and manage safety, privacy, and harm risks in social virtual reality Environments, in collaboration with trusted community partners.
- EVERESTS: Empowering Vulnerable Populations’ REsilience in Trustworthy Safe Spaces (2025-2027),
- PI/Co-I: Mohamed Khamis
- Funded by: Security, Privacy, Identity, Trust, Engagement NetworkPlus (SPRITE+)
- About: EVERESTS investigates how vulnerable populations can be supported to build resilience and trust in digitally mediated spaces, with a focus on safety, privacy, and inclusive design.
- Smart Garment Enabled Activity Monitoring and Social Awareness for Healthy Aging at Care Home (2025-2027)
- PI/Co-I: Xianghua (Sharon) Ding
- Funded by: Royal Society
- About: A collaborative project with Tongji University, China, to investigate smart technologies for healthy aging, with a particular focus on smart garments.
- PROFOUND-Prostate: Perceptions of changes in functional ability and help-seeking behaviours in patients with prostate cancer who live in deprived or remote areas in Scotland (2025-2027)
- PI/Co-I: Xianghua (Sharon) Ding
- Funded by: Movember Europe
- About: "A collaborative project with MVLS at the University of Glasgow to understand how patients with prostate cancer who live in poorer or remote areas in Scotland experience changes in their well-being and ability to function by using Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)"
- Photomod (2025-2026)
- PI/Co-I: Stephen Brewster
- Funded by: European Research Council
- About: Investigating photobiomodulation as a means of reducing motion sickness.
- GraspingData (2025-2026)
- PI/Co-I: Stephen Brewster
- Funded by: UKRI
- About: Empowering young children to understand and benefit from their personal data by using data physicalisation.
- Development of infant-caregiver attachment: In vivo, in silico, in theory (2024-2028)
- PI/Co-I: Marwa Mahmoud
- Funded by: The Dutch Research Council (NWO)
- About: This work investigates how differences in caregiver responsiveness shape infant attachment by studying behavior in everyday home environments using novel, objective, long-term measurement techniques. It proposes a testable interactive model to explain the mechanisms and variability of attachment development.
- Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents (2019-2027)
- PI/Co-I: Alessandro Vinciarelli
- Funded by: UKRI
- About: The centre will train 50 PhD students in Artificial Social Intelligence, the domain aimed at endowing machines with the ability to understand social interactions like people do.
Past Projects
- Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children’s Healthcare Experiences - Dr Mary Ellen Foster (UKRI/Canada joint project).
- Horizon digital economy research hub: https://www.horizon.ac.uk/research/ - Prof Matthew Chalmers
- FETProact Sonicom: Transforming auditory-based social interaction and communication in AR/VR. Funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program - Prof Alessandro Vinciarelli and Prof Stephen Brewster (€499,876.25)
- Horizon: Trusted Data-Driven Products (2020-2025) - Professor Matthew Chalmers (affiliate). Funded by EPSRC EP/T022493/1 (£4M).
- A toolkit for identification and mitigation of XR dark patterns (2023-2024). Funded by Meta Labs. Mohamed Khamis (PI), Pejman Saeghe (Co-I), Mark McGill (Co-I). ($75,000).
- MetaSafeChild: Assessing Child Safety in the Metaverse and Developing Safety-Enhancing Technologies (2023-2024). Funded by REPHRAIN. Mohamed Khamis (PI), Mark McGill (Co-I), Mathieu Chollet (Co-I). (£79,877.82)
- Personalised Acceptance and Commitment Therapy through app-based micro- content (PACT-am) – funded by Parkinson’s UK 2022-2024. Dr Simone Stumpf.
- Viajero: The aim of ViAjeRo (Traveller in Spanish) is to radically improve all passenger journeys by facilitating the use of immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality (together called XR) to support entertainment, work and collaboration when on the move (2019 – 2024) – Prof Stephen Brewster (PI). Funded by ERC #835197 (€2,443,657).
- RadioMe: Real-time Radio Remixing for people with mild to moderatedementia who live alone, incorporating Agitation Reduction, and Reminders (2019 – 2024) – Prof Stephen Brewster (PI). Funded by EPSRC EP/S026991/1 (£541,362)
- Facilitating Parental Insight and Moderation for Safe Social VR (2021-2024) - Dr Mark McGill (Co-I) and Dr Mohamed Khamis (PI). Funded by Facebook Reality Labs ($75,000).
- CoDesigning Fair AI (COFAI) – funded by Fujitsu 2019-2021. Dr Simone Stumpf.
- PriXR: Protecting Extended Reality (XR) user and bystander privacy by supporting legibility of XR sensing and processing (2022-2023) - Dr Mark McGill (PI), Dr Mohamed Khamis (Co-I). Funded by REPHRAIN (£79,997.14).
- Human Data Interaction: Legibility, Agency, Negotiability (2018-2022) - Prof Matthew Chalmers. Funded by EPSRC EP/R045178/1 (£1.04M).
- Emergence of Cybersecurity Capability across Critical National Infrastructure (2021-2022) - Dr Mohamed Khamis. Funded by the National Cybersecurity Centre (£140,731 out of which £133,659 for UofG).
- EuroFIT: Social innovation to improve physical activity and sedentary behaviour through elite European football (2013-2017) – Prof Matthew Chalmers. Funded by EU FP7.
- SoCoRo: Socially Competent Robots (2016 - 2020) - Prof Alessandro Vinciarelli. Funded by the EPSRC (£355,000).
- SAM: School Attachment Monitor (2015-2018) - Professor Stephen Brewster. Funded by the EPSRC (£776,875).
- MuMMER: MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot (2016 – 2020) – Dr Mary Ellen Foster. Funded by EU Horizon 2020.
- Populations: A Software Populations Approach to UbiComp Systems Design (2011 – 2016) – Prof Matthew Chalmers. Funded by EPSRC (£4M).
- EuroFIT: Social innovation to improve physical activity and sedentary behaviour through elite European football (2013-2017) – Prof Matthew Chalmers. Funded by EU FP7 (€5M).
- Anyscale Apps (2013 – 2017 - Prof Matthew Chalmers. Funded by EPSRC EP/L000725/1 (£1.1M)
- ABBI: Audio Bracelet for Blind Interaction (2014 – 2017) – Prof Stephen Brewster. Funded by EU FP7
- HAPPINESS: Haptic Printed Patterned Interfaces for Sensitive Surfaces (2015 – 2018) – Prof Stephen Brewster. Funded by EU Horizon 2020.
- Zoo Devices for Animal Welfare and Visitor Education. Funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022-2023). Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (PI). (£65,000).
- Effi: End-users fixing fairness issues: Industry-funded investigation into the role and impact of end-user human-in-the-loop tools in ensuring fair Artificial Intelligence (2022-2023) - Dr Simone Stumpf (PI). Funded by Fujitsu Ltd., Japan (£163,000).
- A toolkit for identification and mitigation of XR dark patterns - Mohamed Khamis (PI), Pejman Saeghe (Co-I), Mark McGill (Co-I). Funded by Meta Labs ($75,000).
- Interaction Design for Trusted Sharing of Personal Health Data to live Well with HIV (INTUIT) – funded by EPSRC 2018-2022. Dr Simone Stumpf.
- First RespondXR: Digital vulnerability of immersive training for first responders - Dr Mark McGill. Funded by SPRITE+ (2021-2022)
- PT.HEAT: Preventing THErmal ATtacks (2021-2023) - Dr Mohamed Khamis (PI). Funded by PETRAS (£177,075).
- TAPS: Assessing, Mitigating and Raising Awareness of the Security and Privacy Risks of Thermal Imaging (2021-2023) - Dr Mohamed Khamis (PI). Funded by EPSRC EP/V008870/1 (£262,119).