Dr James Williams
Research Fellow in Slavery and War (GeoAI & Data Science) · University of Nottingham
GeoAI · Foundation Models · Urban Intelligence · Conflict Data
Dr James Williams
I am a Research Fellow in Slavery and War (GeoAI and Data Science) at the University of Nottingham, with a PhD in GIScience spanning urban representation learning, conflict documentation, and human rights analytics.
I specialise in geospatial foundation models, graph neural networks, and discrete global grid systems. As development lead of CDISaW, I built cloud-native infrastructure indexing over 10 million conflict records. I also created MORPHEME, an open-source GNN embedding model quantifying urban characteristics across 24 global cities using OpenStreetMap data.
I am currently based at the Rights Lab and Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.
Technical Expertise
Background
My work spans geospatial AI research, spatial software development, and university teaching. I have built geospatial systems for local government and civic infrastructure, contributed to national active transportation policy through the Leisure Walking Systems Working Group, and completed a secondment with Ordnance Survey working on spatial routing engines. In academic settings I have taught computer science at university level and led programme development across two institutions. I am currently a Research Fellow in Slavery and War at the University of Nottingham, based at the Rights Lab and Leverhulme Centre, where I lead development of large-scale conflict data infrastructure and geospatial AI systems.
Academic Background
Funding
Community
Collaborators