The School of Natural and Computing Sciences

Dr Milan Markovic

In this section
Dr Milan Markovic
Dr Milan Markovic
Dr Milan Markovic

Senior Lecturer

Accepting PhDs

About
Email Address
milan.markovic@abdn.ac.uk
Office Address
207 Meston Building
Old Aberdeen Campus
Meston Walk
AB24 3UE

View on Map

School/Department
School of Natural and Computing Sciences
Google Scholar
Linkedin

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. My research is interdisciplinary and focuses on provenance-based infrastructures, built on semantic web technologies and knowledge graphs, that make complex socio-technical AI and data-driven systems transparent, accountable and trustworthy. Since completing my PhD at Aberdeen in 2016, I have collaborated with colleagues from transport, law, medical sciences and agri-food to explore topics such as IoT transparency, AI accountability, carbon accounting, and governance of health data in Trusted Research Environments.

My current research includes focus on research integrity, combining large language models with provenance knowledge graphs to support transparent assessment of clinical trial publications.

In 2026 I was appointed as a Deputy Director of SUSTAIN, the £10.6m UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in sustainable agri-food, and I lead its activity at Aberdeen. I have been an investigator on projects funded by EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

I also lead the Aberdeen Software Factory, a student software house - for more details please see here.

Research

Research Overview

 

My research investigates how knowledge graphs can be used to understand, explain and hold to account the systems we increasingly rely on. I investigate how provenance knowledge graphs can make modern socio-technical systems, such as AI-driven decision-making, data supply chains and IoT-enabled infrastructures, more transparent and accountable. They do this by capturing machine-readable records of how data, decisions and claims are produced, so these can be queried and audited.  I also explore how AI, particularly large language models, can help generate and curate knowledge graphs, turning unstructured sources such as publications, reports and records into structured, trustworthy knowledge.

Keywords: Provenance, Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web, Large Language Models, Accountable AI, Research Integrity, Carbon Accounting, Agri-food, Healthcare, Internet of Things (IoT)

Research Areas

Accepting PhDs

I am currently accepting PhDs in Computing Science.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research ideas further.

Computing Science

  • Supervising
  • Accepting PhDs
View Research Area

Research Specialisms

  • Computer Science

Our research specialisms are based on the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) which is HESA open data, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Current Research

Current Research Projects

AI-Assisted Integrity Assessment of Randomised Trials (ESRC)

Apr 2025 – Mar 2027

Systematic reviews of clinical trials inform healthcare guidelines, but untrustworthy trials can bias these reviews. This project develops INSPECT-AI, an LLM-assisted tool that supports reviewers in assessing trial integrity following the INSPECT-SR guidance. It also develops RIPE-O, an ontology that records the provenance of each assessment so that human and AI judgements stay transparent.

Past Research

Past Research

  • EATS: Enhancing Agri-Food Transparent Sustainability (EPSRC, 2022–2025). Trusted data infrastructures for net-zero agri-food supply chains.Project site
  • SARA: Semi-Automated Risk Assessment in TREs (MRC/DARE UK, 2023). Provenance and privacy risk tools for health data release.Project site
  • Automated Verification of Best Practices in Digital Public Infrastructures (RAEng, 2023–2024). LLM-based checking of best practices in digital public infrastructures.
  • Data Provenance for High-Security Health Data (2021–2022). Project site
  • RAInS: Realising Accountable Intelligent Systems (2020–2022). Project site
  • IoFT Data Trusts Working Group (2020–2021). Project site
  • TrustLens: user-centred transparency for the IoT (2016–2020)Project site
  • PROoFD-IT: Provenance of Food Delivery through IoT (2019–2020). Project site
  • Food Sentiment Observatory (ESRC, 2017–2018)
  • Smart Routing, Social Journeys, Food Safety Assurance and Informed Rural Passenger (2011–2017). IoT, social media and open data for transport and food safety.

Transparent Emissions Calculations (TEC) Toolkit

Organisations are often required to report carbon emissions associated with their operation. However, calculating emissions is not a trivial task and reported estimates differ depending on the calculation approach. The aim of this open source initiative is to provide ontology models and software tools to formalise provenance of carbon footprint calculations in a machine-understandable knowledge graphs to enhance their transparency. 

TEC Toolkit

Supervision

My current supervision areas are: Computing Science.

Student projects: 

Deep Compression and Sparse Methods for Efficient Deep Neural Architectures (Andy Li, Role:2nd Supervisor)

Transparent Carbon Footprint Quantification And Reporting in Agriculture (Alisa Holm, Role: 1st Supervisor)

Enhancing long-term evaluation and monitoring of responsible AI deployments in medical context (Arpita Gado Role: 1st Supervisor)

 

 

 

Funding and Grants

1/04/2025 – 30/09/2026

Title: Evaluating the Development and Impact of AI-Assisted Integrity Assessment of Randomised Trials in Evidence Syntheses

Funder: ESRC

Role: CI

Budget: ~£260k

2024

Title: Automated NLP pipelines for discovery of fabricated clinical studies

Funder: UoA Internal Pump Prime Funding

Role: PI

Budget £10k

2024

PHD Studentship -

Funder UoA Development Trust

Budget ~£100k

2024

Title PHD Studentship -

Funder: SUSTAIN CDT (via EPSRC)

Budget: ~£100k

 

01/09/2023 – 31/08/2024

Title: Automated Verification of Best Practices in Digital Public Infrastructures

Funder: RaENG

Role: CI (UK lead)

Budget: £20k (our share ~£6k)

01/02/2023 2023 – 31/10/2023

Title: SARA: Semi-Automated Risk Assessment of Data Provenance and Clinical Free-Text in TREs

Funder: MRC (via DARE UK)

Budget: our share £173k

07/06/2022 – 21/07/2022

Title: SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow (Academic or Industrial) Proposal - Daniel Garijo

Funder: SICS

Role: Main applicant

Budget: £1.5k

01/05/21 – 31/10/21 

Funder: PETRAS         

Title: PARTICIPATORY POLICIES FOR IOT (AT THE EDGE) ETHICS (P-PITEE)           

Role: CI in collaboration with University of Lancaster

Budget: total £55k (our share £4,997)

01/01/22 – 31/03/25

Funder: EPSRC

Title: ENHANCING AGRI-FOOD TRANSPARENT SUSTAINABILITY – EATS

Role: researcher CI in collaboration with University of Leeds, University of Dundee, Scottish Rural College

Budget: total £950k (our share £410k)

01/09/20 – 28/02/21

Funder: EPSRC (via Network +)

Title: DATA MANAGEMENT AND INTEROPERABILITY FOR DATA TRUSTS

Role: CI

Budget: total ~40k (our share £10k)

01/05/19 – 31/03/20

Funder: EPSRC (via Network +)

Title; PROOFD-IT: PROVENANCE OF FOOD DELIVERY THROUGH IOT

Role: CI

Budget: total ~40k

12/10/18 – 31/12/18

Funder: SICSA

Title: APPLICATION FOR A PECE BURSARY (travel grant)

Role: sole applicant

Budget: ~£4.5

 

01/12/15 – 30/06/16

Title: Food Safety Assurance: Combining Provenance & The Internet of Things

Funder: EPSRC (via Network +) & Food Safety Agency

Role CI

Budget: ~£20k
Teaching

Courses

Teaching Responsibilities

Courses taught in previous years: 

CS2020 Software Programming 

CS551g Data Mining and Visualisation

CS551s Web Development

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

I lead the Aberdeen Software Factory, where we give students hands-on, real-world experience by working on a variety of short-term projects—from developing a simple web app for a research initiative to creating an MVP for an emerging startup.

*** If  you need student SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING SUPPORT for your project email asf@abdn.ac.uk ***

 

Publications

Page 1 of 3 Results 1 to 25 of 56

Show 10 | 25 | 50 | 100 results per page

Refine

Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings

Contributions to Conferences

Contributions to Journals

Working Papers

Update