Rate My Professor Darren Dancey

Professor Darren Dancey is the Head of the Department of Computing and Mathematics in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University. He joined the university in 2011 as a Lecturer in Computer Science and has held various positions within the Faculty of Science and Engineering since then. Dancey holds a PhD in Artificial Neural Networks. His research background is in Artificial Intelligence, where he has developed methods to address the black-box problem of AI systems, revealing how such systems make decisions. His work spans explainable AI, deep learning applications in medical imaging such as skin lesion segmentation and diabetic foot ulcer analysis, remote sensing for plant stress detection, energy-efficient computing, robotics, multi-sensor target tracking, side-channel attacks, malware detection, and cloud workload consolidation. Key publications include 'Skin Lesion Segmentation in Dermoscopic Images with Ensemble Deep Learning Methods' (2020), 'Diabetic foot ulcers segmentation challenge report: benchmark and analysis' (2024, Medical Image Analysis), 'A fast Fourier convolutional deep neural network for accurate and explainable discrimination of wheat yellow rust and nitrogen deficiency from Sentinel-2 time series data' (2023, Frontiers in Plant Science), 'Layer-wise partitioning and merging for efficient and scalable deep learning' (2023, Future Generation Computer Systems), 'A novel energy-efficient spike transformer network for depth estimation from event cameras via cross-modality knowledge distillation' (2025, Neurocomputing), and 'Decision tree extraction from trained neural networks' (2004). Earlier contributions include 'Logistic model tree extraction from artificial neural networks' (2007) and 'Rule extraction from neural networks for medical domains' (2010).

Dancey serves on the Board of Governors at Manchester Metropolitan University as a Staff Governor since 1 April 2019. He is a strong advocate for industry and academia collaboration to address societal challenges. He launched the Degree Apprenticeship in Digital and Technology at the university and leads the Widening Participation theme within the National Institute of Coding, a consortium of over 30 UK universities and 100 commercial partners tackling the digital skills gap. Additionally, he organizes the Manchester Raspberry Pi Jam, hosting monthly events to foster digital skills in young people, and sits on the Manchester Branch Committee of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.