Vidminas Vizgirda

Vidminas Vizgirda

PhD Student

University of Edinburgh

About Me

Hi 👋😊! I’m Vidminas (most people call me Vid), a PhD student in the Institute of Language Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. My primary supervisor is Fiona McNeill.

I am looking for ways to improve search for educational resources, so that teachers in schools across the world can reuse each others’ work instead of creating their own materials all the time.

Originally, I come from Lithuania, although I grew up in Luxembourg and moved to Edinburgh for my undegraduate degree in computer science and management science. I am always keen to chat about teaching, human-computer interaction, participatory research, and machine learning applications in education, feel free to get in touch!

Interests
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Education
  • Information Seeking and Behaviour
  • Information Retrieval
  • Retrieval Augmented Generation
Education
  • PhD in Informatics, 2021 - 2025 (expected)

    University of Edinburgh

  • PgCAP Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, 2021 - 2023

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc Computer Science and Management Science (Honours), 2017 - 2021

    University of Edinburgh

Recent Publications

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(2024). SocialGenPod: Privacy-Friendly Generative AI Social Web Applications with Decentralised Personal Data Stores. Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024.

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(2024). Educational Resource Search in Scottish Schools. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.

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(2023). ‘You Are You and the App. There’s Nobody Else.’: Building Worker-Designed Data Institutions within Platform Hegemony. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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(2023). The Go-GN Open Research Handbook. Global OER Graduate Network.

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(2022). GO-GN Research Review 2022.

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Conference Presentations

 
 
 
 
 
ACM Web Conference 2024
13 May 2024 – 17 May 2024 Singapore, Singapore
Presented a poster and live demo about SocialGenPod – a prototype showcasing retrieval augmented generation with private data using Solid. More information and resources are linked from the project website.
 
 
 
 
 
Open Educational Resources 24
26 Mar 2024 – 28 Mar 2024 Cork, Ireland
Participated in the GO-GN workshop and presented a talk on “Search and AI for schoolteachers in Scotland” with work-in-progress research findings.
 
 
 
 
 
ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) 2024
10 Mar 2024 – 14 Mar 2024 Sheffield, England
Participated in the Doctoral Consortium and presented extended abstract describing my research: Educational Resource Search in Scottish Schools
 
 
 
 
 
Open Education Global 2023
16 Oct 2023 – 18 Oct 2023 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Ran an action lab (workshop) on “Reinvent the Wheel or Find the Needle? Technology for Addressing Resource Reusability Barriers”.

Session details

Reflections post on SICSA blog

 
 
 
 
 
Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference 2023
27 Jun 2023 – 28 Jun 2023 Edinburgh, Scotland

Presented short talk on “Practical approaches to freeing university material stockpiles”.

Slides and recording

 
 
 
 
 
CHI 23
23 Apr 2023 – 28 Apr 2023 Hamburg, Germany (attended online)
 
 
 
 
 
Open Educational Resources 23
3 Apr 2023 – 7 Apr 2023 Inverness, Scotland

Presented work-in-progress findings on “Practical approaches to freeing university material stockpiles”.

Recording

Reflections post on GO-GN blog

 
 
 
 
 
Open Educational Resources 22
26 Apr 2023 – 28 Apr 2023 London, England

Presented “Learning resource hide and seek” in lightning talks round

Reflections post on GO-GN blog