Dr Johanna Walker is a Post Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. She specialises in data-driven innovation, public and private sector co- creation, data ecosystems, data governance and ethics, generative AI and data, and data literacy.

Since joining King’s she has worked on the Horizon Europe-funded projects MediaFutures and EUHubs4Data. She is an active participant in the Big Data Value Association generative AI and data working groups, and the AI, Data and Robotics Association.

She is a member of the Alan Turing Institute AI and Arts group and recently collaborated with artists to create ‘Destination Hallucination, a podcast musical aimed at communicating best practices and key risks relating to generative AI to non-academic audiences.

Johanna joined King’s from the University of Southampton where she worked on the Horizon 2020-funded project Data Pitch. She also worked on the Interreg Two Seas project Smart Cities Innovation Framework Implementation and contributed multiple reports to the European Data Portal, now data.europa.eu. While at Southampton she was a member of the Cabinet Office Open Data User Group, and seconded to the UK Cabinet Office Open Innovation Team, working on data trust policy. She also contributed to AHRC and ESRC research on data and software policy in the arts and humanities and social sciences.

She completed her PhD at the ESPRC Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at Southampton. Before entering academia Johanna had a successful career in ecommerce, working for early dot com retailers such as AOL, and entrepreneurship, delivering venture capital and social venture programmes. 

Research Interests

• Generative AI and Data Discovery
• Data-driven Innovation
• Data Literacy
• Data Sharing and Open Data
• Data Justice & Equality
• Community Engagement with Data
• Smart Cities
• Human-Data Interaction
• Arts-Data Collaborations

Johanna is currently exploring how individuals engage with generative AI in the workplace to support their data discovery and use needs. Previous work has analysed the use of data sharing in open innovation contexts in Smart City programmes. Other research has investigated the use of data by artists to counteract misinformation and disinformation Social themes such as data justice, AI and data accessibility and data equality permeate her work.

Johanna co-convened the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd data literacy workshops and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics on data literacy.

She has received 4 research and impact grants, contributed to 3 Horizon Europe projects, and published over 30 research outputs in journals, conferences, workshops and books.