Vidminas Vizgirda

Vidminas Vizgirda

Postdoctoral Research Associate

University of Oxford

Hi 👋😊! I’m Vidminas (most people call me Vid), a postdoc on the CHAILD project splitting time between the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford and the Institute of Education, University College London.

I am interested in technology and education, and more specifically researching and developing technologies that empower people. The current CHAILD project focus is about defining and designing for agency in children and young people’s use of AI tools.

Before this, I did my PhD at the Institute of Language Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. My then-supervisors are Professor Fiona McNeill and Professor Judy Robertson. The project was about better understanding and designing tools to help teachers search for educational resources.

I am always keen to chat about teaching and learning, human-computer interaction, participatory research, and designing applications for good, feel free to get in touch!

Interests

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Education
  • Information Seeking and Behaviour
  • Child-Centred AI

Education

  • PhD in Informatics

    University of Edinburgh · 2021–2025

  • PgCAP Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice

    University of Edinburgh · 2021–2023

  • BSc Computer Science and Management Science (Honours)

    University of Edinburgh · 2017–2021

Recent Publications

(2025). Crowdsourced and Automated Educational Resource Metadata. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.
(2025). Teacher Online Educational Resource Search in Education System Context. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.
(2024). SocialGenPod: Privacy-Friendly Generative AI Social Web Applications with Decentralised Personal Data Stores. Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024.
(2024). Educational Resource Search in Scottish Schools. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.
(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.

Conference Presentations

Open Education Global 2024 logo

Open Education Global 2024

Nov 13, 2024 — Nov 15, 2024 Brisbane, Australia

Supported an expert panel discussion and showcased video with interview excerpts about the meanings of “open” AI in open education.

Session details

Clips and full interviews are available on YouTube @OpenEdAI.

ACM Web Conference 2024 logo

ACM Web Conference 2024

May 13, 2024 — May 17, 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 logo

Open Educational Resources 24

Mar 26, 2024 — Mar 28, 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 logo

ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) 2024

Mar 10, 2024 — Mar 14, 2024 Sheffield, England
Participated in the Doctoral Consortium and presented extended abstract describing my PhD research: Educational Resource Search in Scottish Schools

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