Bio
Szymon was a PhD student at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of University College London (UCL) and The Alan Turing Institute. Before joining the Institute, Szymon obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology with Neuroscience from the University of Westminster in London and a Master of Science degree in Big Data Science from Queen Mary University London.
Szymon has an extensive industry experience in the data science and applied Artificial Intelligence. He worked as a data analysis consultant before becoming a Data Curator at the UK Data Service – the European largest publicly-funded socio-economic data repository. For the last several years he has been consulting boards and decision makers of leading banking/finance institutions, governmental departments and research organisations around Europe in areas of data science workflows and best practices, Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Since 2014, he has conducted more than 120 statistical computing training courses in data science and predictive analytics with R, Python, Java and Scala programming languages.
Szymon is also an author of the “Big Data Analytics with R” book (Packt Publishing, 2016) which is currently used as a Big Data statistical programming course handbook at various universities in USA, Europe and Asia.
Research interests
Szymon's PhD research resulted in estimating benchmarks of normal (i.e. “healthy”) navigation across the population and identifying cultural and geographic differences in wayfinding using large scale data obtained from a mobile application video game. This part of the research also helped to validate a number of theories (which were previously not tested on large, global data) related to the effect of individual differences such as sex or age on wayfinding abilities. Secondly, they designed an algorithm which allows detection of spatial disorientation in real-time and defined spatiotemporal features which can be used to predict disorientation based on behavioural characteristics of wayfinding trajectories e.g. accelerometric features, tortuosity, angular body/head direction, path-to-boundary distances etc.
Selected publications and papers
In January 2021, I delivered a well-received PhD upgrade presentation to the entire department of CASA UCL. This talk introduced my PhD topic, methods and approaches I used during the initial analyses and highlighted their results.
In September 2022, I delivered a presentation entitled “Is the way we navigate geographically and culturally determined?” to PhD students of CASA UCL. This presentation provided an in-depth analysis of cultural and geographical factors which may influence how people rate their own wayfinding skills and how they navigate according to e.g. societal norms, belonging to specific cultural clusters or type of home environment they grew up in (e.g. rural or urban).
In January 2023, I delivered a PhD seminar (open to the entire CASA UCL) on the overall progress of my research and specifically on the topic “Path-to-boundary distance metrics as predictors of cognitive ageing and topographical disorientation”.
So far I have worked on four manuscripts, one of which has been pre-printed and pre-approved by Nature Scientific Reports:
“Cultural determinants of the gap between self-estimated navigation ability and wayfinding performance: evidence from 46 countries” - pre-printed in BioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.19.512889; submitted to Nature Scientific Reports in December 2022; waiting for Turing Open Access Grant.
Achievements and awards
Santander Master Scholarship - Queen Mary University London
Various young researchers' training scholarships and awards from: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, Berlin Institute of Technology, Bernstein Focus: Neurotechnology Berlin, and Karolinska Institutet.