This is the website of Dr. Richard Mills, a freelance data scientist with an interest in corporations (particularly their Environmental, Social and Governance aspects), social media platforms, online communities and varied other subjects.

Richard has been pioneering his own distinct take on data science since 2008, when he switched from a part-time self-funded PhD programme in Psychology in Dundee to a PhD in Applied Social Statistics at Lancaster University, and was given the freedom to study online communities full-time by collecting data about their operations and subjecting it to statistical analysis.

After a PhD spent studying the communities of reddit, Stackoverflow and Wikipedia, the tools they used and resources they produced, Richard took up a Postdoc position in Cambridge University’s Department of Psychology in 2014, working on the European Commission funded WikiRate project. With WikiRate, Richard discovered a joy in working with people who are aiming to build socially transformative information resources, but also a despair at dealing with grant administration, reporting, applications and reviews.

After helping the WikiRate team to secure continued funding as part of the ChainReact project, Richard moved to the Sociology Department at Cambridge to work on this, again as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. At the conclusion of the ChainReact project in 2019, Richard commenced a break from academia, continuing to serve the globally distributed WikiRate team/community as Director of Research on a part-time basis while also working as an independent freelance consultant/researcher and parent to some delightful children.

Got a data-set that’s holding out on some of the insights it could yield?

I can analyse it for you! Wholesale prices for non-profit partners, open source code/data, and interesting subjects. Richard is well equipped to analyse your data-sets, no matter the scale - he knows the data format to suit your needs, be it csv, json, or moving up to a MySQL, PostgreSQL, noSQL database, or if needs be he can even take it to BigQuery!

You can expect analysis pitched to any and all levels, nice basic charts extending to some inferential statistics, network analysis, whatever makes sense for the case and audience at hand.

Maybe you’re into the data science yourself or you have people working on this already? Great! Richard likes to work with co-investigators too! Remotely is preferred.

If you would like to speak about such matters, Richard can be reached at an email address provided by Google - but instead of the more conventional first name last name combination, which was taken many years ago, the first name is replaced by his profession, “research”, which is followed without space or full stop or any other grammatical construction but by surname and the gmail bit. Apologies for the spam protection riddle, I don’t know how to add a CAPTCHA or forms to a static site like this one and I don’t want all the spam bots harvesting my email address.