Dr Susan Lomax PhD, MBCS
Programme Support Tutor
My role includes helping students who are struggling with their lab exercises.
My profile
Biography
I am a Programme Support Tutor here at MMU. In addition to teaching on a variety of units on both Full Time and Apprenticeship programmes, supervising FT, Apprenticeship and MSc Final Year Projects and a Personal Tutor role for L5 students, I offer support for those students who are struggling with lab exercises. The units I offer help in are Programming in First Year, Algorithms and Data Structures and Advanced Programming in Second Year and Lab Support in L4 Databases. I obtained my PhD from University of Salford that focused on Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Learning. This was a continuation of my MSc. I am a Member of the BSC. I was a recipient of the Athena Prize in 2004 on completion of my BSc (Hons). I have worked mainly in academia on a variety of projects including a KTP as a Data Scientist and a Computing Research Assistant at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester. Other projects include data analysis, automation of a variety of procedures and creating learning material for data mining/machine learning modules. I have a few publications which can be viewed under the Research Output section.
Interests and expertise
My research interests are cost-sensitive learning, decision tree learning, expert systems and feature selection. I am also interested in the structure of data and how it affects machine learning algorithms. Additional areas of expertise are programming (C, C++, C#, Java, VB, R) and databases. I am also interested in a variety of other sciences, anthropology and history. Hobbies would be skiing, snooker, watching crime programmes and I also lived in Austria for a time, so visit there on a regular basis.
Teaching
I am a lecturer on the teaching team for the Apprenticeship unit Computing Fundamentals and for the unit L5 Operating Systems. I offer support for units Programming, Advanced Programming and Algorithms and Data Structures. I also supervise projects for undergraduate students, both final year and apprenticeship and MSc projects.
Supervision
I have a variety of projects available for final year students; currently these involve projects in my research area and other areas of interest such as dice games, card games and board games. I also have MSc projects in my research area and related areas.
Research outputs
I have 6 publications in leading journals, including a survey paper in ACM Computing Surveys Journal, which has been especially useful for my research area in that prior to the publication of this paper, no comprehensive survey of cost-sensitive decision tree algorithms had been carried out. In addition, a taxonomy of the algorithms was included, along with a detailed timeline.
Case Studies in Applying Data Mining for Churn Analysis ,International Journal of Conceptual Structures and Smart Applications, July - December 2017
A Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Learning Algorithm Based on a Multi-Armed Bandit Framework, The Computer Journal · Mar 30, 2016
Cost-sensitive decision tree learning using a multi-armed bandit framework. PhD Thesis, University of Salford
A Survey of Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Induction Algorithms, ACM Computing Surveys · Mar 1, 2013
A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach to Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Learning, Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference Data Mining · Dec 10, 2012
An Empirical Comparison of Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Induction Algorithms, Expert Systems: The Journal of Knowledge Engineering · Sep 1, 2011
An empirical comparison of cost-sensitive decision tree induction algorithms, Proceedings Fourth Conference on Intelligent Management Systems in Operations, OR, IMSIO4, 7-8 July 2009
An Empirical Comparison of Cost-Sensitive Decision Tree Induction Algorithms, MSc Thesis, University of Salford
Career history
2019 - Current
Programme Support Tutor at Manchester Metropolitan University. Supporting students in a variety of units, teaching on Apprenticeship units, Personal Tutor role, Final Year Project Supervisor, Final Year Apprenticeship Project Supervisor.
2016 - 2019
Worked on various projects for University of Salford. Highlights were developing learning material for MSc course mainly in Data Mining/Machine Learning topics.
2014 to 2016
Data Scientist KTP Associate for a company wishing to investigate whether data analytics could be used in their existing products. One output of the position was Churn Analysis carried out, resulting in a large increase in turnover for the company.
2007 to 2009
Computing and Research Assistant at University of Manchester. Working on a project to produce new datasets to be used to analyse population migration patterns in the UK. Additionally worked on population forecasting software and the automation of data manipulation tasks.