Information School News

On October 8 2022, the fourth and final public policy dialogue table  "Ancestral knowledge, climate change and innovation policies: steps for a common agenda", was held. Co-organized by the Institute of Nature, Land and Energy (INTE ) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the University of Sheffield with the support of the NGO Andes, it involves the participation of representatives from the National Institute of Agrarian Innovation, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Culture and the International Potato Center. Participants traveled to the city of Cusco to meet with the members of the Potato Park of the district Pisac and Parque Chalakuy in the district of Lares and learn about their experiences working with innovation.  This activity was the last in a series of four roundtables that have been implemented for more than a year, as part of the research project which seeks to make visible the contributions of innovation by I...

Dr Savins Puertas Martin, a Postdoc from the Chemoinformatics research group, received the Young Researcher Award in Computer Science 2022, a prestigious award from the Scientific Informatics Society of Spain (SCIE, Sociedad Científica Informática de España) and the BBVA Foundation . He received the award for his excellent contributions in the field of high-performance computing, which led to the development of innovative techniques that facilitate the design of new drugs, as well as his high level of internationalisation. His research has focused on virtual screening, a technique that allows the selection of compounds most similar to a reference molecule from a database that may contain millions of them, with the aim of accelerating drug discovery and development. "The objective is to identify, in this database, which molecules are the most similar to the one we have selected as a reference, analysing different characteristics such as shape, number of atoms, etc. Initially, we st...

 The pharmaceutical industry, the Higher Education sector and the world of the arts may seem like three very disparate areas but, along with almost all arenas of modern life, all three are heavily entwined with technology. Machine learning, data mining and AI in particular are hot topics in the information and technology spheres right now, and each of the aforementioned sectors has their own way of interacting with it. The AHRC-funded project ‘Patterns in Practice’ - which is led by Senior Lecturer Dr Jo Bates from Sheffield’s Information School, working with Professor Helen Kennedy from the University’s Department of Sociological Studies and Dr Erinma Ochu, Associate Professor of Immersive Media at UWE Bristol, as well as Dr Itzelle Medina Perea and Dr Monika Fratczak working as postdoctoral researchers in the Information School - aims to explore how the beliefs, values and feelings of practitioners from the pharmaceutical, education and arts sectors shape how they engage with mac...

People fall in love if someone or something helps them and makes them feel happy. This can be family, a friend, a pet, a hobby, and even technology. Modern society has fallen in love with data because of astonishing things they can do. People have become fascinated by the convenience that data bring. Data are used as a vital element to develop the technologies that we demand. The recommended movies and videos for you in Netflix and YouTube are the results of algorithms trained on tons of relevant data. ChatGPT, a language model that became sensationally popular recently due to its surprising performance, has also been trained on over 8 million web pages and 300 billion words of data. These advanced technologies are enough to impress people and companies. Accordingly, the belief that data would change the world or decide a company’s life and death at least has been strengthened recent years.  Even aside from the cutting-edge technologies, data affect small decisions of our lives. Le...