Dr. Helen Gibson

Head of Innovation

Helen Gibson is the Head of Innovation at CENTRIC. Her core responsibilities focus on innovation, end-user and stakeholder engagement, and developing funding applications and other project opportunities. Helen works across the entire security domain collaborating with stakeholders to co-create, develop and test solutions to address contemporary security challenges.

Helen is from a Mathematics background completing her undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University before a Master's degree in Computing and Information Technology and a PhD in Information Visualization, specifically focused on graphs and networks, both at Northumbria University.

Helen started in CENTRIC at the beginning of 2014 primarily focused around crisis management and the ATHENA project, before going on to make significant contributions to UNITY and TENSOR. Helen played a central role in the set up and implementation of the OSINT Hub and continues to support OSINT activities. During her time in CENTRIC, Helen has undertaken numerous roles including Lecturer, Senior and Principal Research Fellow and Head of Operations before starting her current role as Head of Innovation in August 2023.

She has recent experience in analysing the legal, ethical and privacy implications of technology development for security, as well as contibuting to projects relating to cybercrime, artificial intelligence, and developing the security research ecosystem.

Publications

Day, T., Dennis, K., & Gibson, H. (2021). TENSOR: A Solution to Dark Web Investigations. In: Dark Web Investigation. (pp. 119-135). Springer, Cham.
Hancock, P., Gibson, H., & Akhgar, B. (2019). AEsOP: Applied Engagement for Community Participation. In: Serious Games for Enhancing Law Enforcement Agencies. (pp. 209-224). Springer, Cham.
Mitzias, P., Kompatsiaris, I., Kontopoulos, E., Staite, J., Day, T., Kalpakis, G. Tsikrika, T., Gibson, H., Vrochidis, S. & Akhgar, B. (2019). Deploying Semantic Web Technologies for Information Fusion of Terrorism-related Content and Threat Detection on the Web. In: WI '19 Companion IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence - Companion Volume. ACM Press, 193-199.
Brewster, B., Gibson, H., & Gunning, M. (2018). Policing the community together: The impact of technology on citizen engagement. In: Societal implications of community-oriented policing and technology. 91.
Akhgar, B. Bertrand, P., Chananouli, C., Day, T., Gibson, H., Kavallieros, D., Kompastsiaris, I., Kyriakou, E., Leventakis, G., Lissaris, E., Mille, S., Tsikrika, T., Vrochidis, S. & Williamson, U. (2017). TENSOR: retrieval and analysis of heterogeneous online content for terrorist activity recognition. In: Proceedings Estonian Academy of Security Sciences, 16 : From Research to Security Union. Estonian Academy of Security Sciences, 33-82.