Information School News

BHCC 2020 - 2nd Symposium on Biases in Human Computation and Crowdsourcing Dr Alessandro Checco Human Computation and Crowdsourcing have become ubiquitous in the world of algorithm augmentation and data management. However, humans have various cognitive biases that influence the way they make decisions, remember information, and interact with machines. It is thus important to identify human biases and analyse their effect on complex hybrid systems. On the other hand, the potential interaction with a large pool of human contributors gives the opportunity to detect and handle biases in existing data and systems. The goal of this symposium is to analyse both existing human biases in hybrid systems, and methods to manage bias via crowdsourcing and human computation. We will discuss different types of biases, measures and methods to track bias, as well as methodologies to prevent and solve bias. An interdisciplinary approach is often required to capture the broad effects that these processe...

Award: CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing Dr Alessandro Checco A joint work between the University of Queensland, the University of Hanover, and the University of Sheffield titled CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing has received an Honorable Mention Award at the prestigious Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020). The work focused on paid micro-task crowdsourcing. This type of labour has gained in popularity mainly because of the increasing need for large-scale manually labelled datasets which are often used to train and evaluate Artificial Intelligence systems. Modern paid crowdsourcing platforms use a piecework approach to rewards, meaning that workers are paid for each task they complete, given that their work quality is considered sufficient by the requester or the platform. Such an approach creates risks for workers: their work may be rejected without being rewarded, and they may be working on poorly...

Celebrate UNESCO Global Media and Information Literacy week with the Information school Sheila Webber and Dr Pam McKinney Unesco’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week is an annual event to celebrate and promote Media and Information Literacy worldwide. This year the week of international (virtual!) events is taking place 24th-31st October, with the theme “Resisting Disinfodemic: Media and Information Literacy for everyone and, by everyone”. The Information School has co-organised two key contributions to the week: an expert panel on 28th October , chaired by Sheila Webber, and on 29th October a programme of exciting insights from Media and Information Literacy research . Both these free events are held in collaboration with FOIL: the Forum on Information Literacy. Sheila Webber and Pam McKinney are members of this new national network of information literacy researchers in the UK, FOIL, who aim to discuss and challenge ideas, and engage in critical reflection and enquiry about ...

Study on research data management in China Dr Andrew Cox The results of an international collaboration between Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi at the Information School and Yingshen Huang, from Peking University, have now been published in the prestigious Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Early view). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413 The research, based on web site analysis, a survey and interviews, reveals that the support of research data management by Chinese university libraries remains in its infancy. The full reference is: Huang Y, Cox A & Sbaffi L (2020) Research data management policy and practice in Chinese university libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413

Why you should never use Microsoft Excel to count coronavirus cases Professor Paul Clough Public Health England has admitted that 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK were missed from daily figures being reported between September 25 and October 2. The missing figures were subsequently added to the daily totals, but given the importance of these numbers for monitoring the outbreak and making key decisions, the results of the error are far-reaching. Not only does it lead to underestimating the scale of coronavirus in the UK, but perhaps more important is the subsequent delay in entering the details of positive cases into the NHS Test and Trace system which is used by a team of contact tracers. Although all those who tested positive had been informed of their results, other people in close contact with them and potentially at risk of exposure were not immediately followed up (ideally within 48 hours). This was a serious error. What could have caused it? It emerged later that that...

Book on Social Media Research Ethics contracted with SAGE Dr Paul Reilly Doing Ethical Social Media Research, contracted with SAGE, due 2022. Yesterday I received the contract for my next book. ‘Doing Ethical Social Media Research’ will be published by SAGE in 2022. This book will explore the foundations of ethical decision-making, the perspectives of researchers on how to conduct ethical social media research, and how to address these issues when researching high-risk contexts and contentious issues. The book will be a hybrid research methods text aimed at students, researchers and anybody with an interest in social media research. It will include summaries of key issues and exercises for those wanting to learn more about digital research ethics. Many thanks to Michael Ainsley at SAGE for all his help in getting this contract over the line, and for the thoughtful and generous feedback of all the reviewers. I look forward to working on this project with Michael and the team in 2021. I ...

The results of our survey of how academic libraries are supporting student wellbeing, before and during COVID19 are now published. Dr Andrew Cox The paper "Library support for student mental health and well-being in the UK: before and during the COVID19 pandemic" is available via Journal of Academic Librarianship @ DOI . During the pandemic, the emphasis was on alleviating anxiety around accessing online content. The paper proposes a holistic model of library support for student mental health and well-being, with eight aspects: library services impact, well-being as a library service, detection, hosting, signposting, inherent library value, library as a good partner and library staff well-being. Data from the survey was shared in a blog post in June