Staff profile

An award winning Computer Scientist, Technology Evangelist and Digital Skills Expert, Professor Sue Black was awarded an OBE for “services to technology” in the 2016 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list. She is Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, a UK government advisor, thought leader, Trustee at Comic Relief, social entrepreneur, writer and public speaker. Sue set up the UK’s first online network for women in tech BCSWomen in 1998 and led the campaign to save Bletchley Park. Sue’s first book Saving Bletchley Park details the social media campaign she led to save Bletchley Park from 2008-2011, it has been an Amazon UK bestseller.

Sue didn’t have a traditional start to her career. She left home and school at 16, married at 20 and had 3 children by the age of 23. A single parent at 25 she went to university, gained a degree in computing then a PhD in software engineering. Sue now has 4 children and 3 grandchildren.

Twitter: @Dr_Black

• software engineering, Equity, diversity and Inclusion, Bias in AI, digital skills

Conference Paper

• Wake, P., Black, S., & Young, J. (2024, July). Optimising IT Security Research via a Low Cost, Instantly Available, Cloud Based Cyber Range. Presented at 2024 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Energy Technologies (ICECET), Sydney, Australia
• Liu, M., Frawley, J., Wyer, S., Shum, H. P. H., Uckelman, S. L., Black, S., & Willcocks, C. G. (2024, June). Self-Regulated Sample Diversity in Large Language Models. Presented at NAACL 2024: 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Mexico City
• Wake, P., Black, S., & Young, J. (2023, July). Work in Progress: Evaluation of Security Standards through a Cyber Range using Hackers’ Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. Presented at 2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW), Delft, Netherlands
• Aduragba, O. T., Yu, J., Cristea, A. I., Hardey, M., & Black, S. (2020, December). Digital Inclusion in Nothern England: Training Women from Underrepresented Communities in Tech: A Data Analytics Case Study. Presented at 2020 15th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE)
• Al-Subaihin, A., Sarro, F., Black, S., Capra, L., Harman, M., Jia, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2016, September). Clustering Mobile Apps Based on Mined Textual Features. Presented at 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement - ESEM '16

Journal Article

• Al-Subaihin, A., Sarro, F., Black, S., & Capra, L. (2019). Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniques. Empirical Software Engineering, 24(6), 3290-3315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5