Lynne Hall is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sunderland. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the British Computer Society. She was Chair of British HCI at Sunderland in 2017 and is the secretary to the BCS Interactions group.
She has worked in research projects including the EU projects eCIRCUS, eCute and EMOTE; and on innovation projects such as Digital Media Network and Sunderland Software City.
Lynne researches into designing and evaluating technologies such as social robotics, intelligent virtual characters and mixed reality experiences with children and has written over 140 publications for journals and conferences. Her research focuses on children’s participation and representation in technology design and on the development and use of evaluation and data-gathering approaches designed for children. Her interest lies both in improving the data-gathering experience for the participants and in increasing the quality and usefulness of the results for the users of the research findings.
Lynne leads the AHRC/ERDF funded Creative Fuse North East project at Sunderland, exploring how to stimulate and foster interdisciplinary, intersectoral innovative practices in the Creative, Digital and IT sectors. She is actively engaged in knowledge exchange and external engagement, working with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and organisations particularly in the creative, digital and IT sector. Recent projects with SMEs have involved online legal services development, energy brokerage systems and printwork productivity improvement. Her knowledge exchange research focuses on how to support academia-industry engagement from the academic perspective.