Mr Sajeel Ahmed, the BISC PhD student, was awarded the Audience choice award for best oral presentation for the First Annual Winter Conference organised by Research Graduate School on 28^th January 2016.

His research on 'The Influence of emoticons on communicative behaviour in social media' generated quite a lot of buzz. During the question and answer session the audience were asked to interpret the meaning of a grinning smiley face, interestingly the responses differ from person to person.

Sajeel’s research aims to understand emoticons and how it helps to enrich computer-mediated communication within the context of social media. He is supervised by Dr Markus Haag and Professor Yanqing Duan.