Skip to main content

Love Data Week - Student Blog

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. Let’s imagine that you plan to give a nice gift to your partner for Valentine's day. The first thing you might do is browse an online or offline store to find something good. The item emerging on the top page of the website or placed on the entrance shelves catches your eyes, so you might buy it. This decision is a consequence of marketing strategies that carefully select and position the products based on the collected data. 

Almost everything, from shopping to developing AI technologies, is decided by data. Data have brought a new logic and decision method to companies, and a new way to behave and present to the public. We are the real-time observers of data innovation. Some people feel positive, and some people feel pessimistic about the changes caused by data. One thing is for sure: resisting convenience stemming from data is not easy. We've become so accustomed to being surrounded by data that we cannot live without these anymore, like we cannot live without our close families, friends, and pets. If this is not love, then what other word can describe it?

Youngmin Jin

MSc Data Science student


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Generative AI paper authored by Dr Kate Miltner among British Academy's 13 discussion papers on "good" digital society

 The British Academy has today published thirteen discussion papers from a range of expert perspectives across the ‘SHAPE’ disciplines (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) to explore the question: ‘What are the possibilities of a good digital society?’  The papers explore a wide range of issues, from the environmental impacts of digitalised daily life to the possibilities of ‘good’ Generative AI in the cultural and creative industries, to examining more closely what we mean by a ‘good digital society’. Among the papers is one authored by information School Lecturer Dr Kate Miltner, with Dr Tim Highfield from the Department of Sociological Studies. Their paper focuses on "good" uses of generative AI in the cultural & creative industries. Alongside the papers is an introductory summary that provides a thematic overview of the papers and points to how we might conceptualise the principles that underpin these diverse visions of a good digital ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The MORPHSS project: Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences

MORPHSS aims to investigate and promote open research practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).  The project is designed to create frameworks and guidelines to encourage adoption of open practices in HSS as well contribute to our knowledge of such practices. The three-year, £800,000 project is a collaboration between Cambridge University Library, Cambridge Digital Humanities, Coventry University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton. It is jointly funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  The work to be carried out at Sheffield will be led by Stephen Pinfield, who now has a process in train to recruit a postgraduate research associate to work on the project for the next two years. The Sheffield team will contribute to the project as a whole but will focus for a significant proportion of their time investigating open practices in the Social Sciences, pa...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Time in Sheffield as a Visiting Researcher - Dr Abdulhalik Pinar

Returning to Sheffield after more than a decade has been a mixture of nostalgia and new opportunities. I first came here in 2011 to complete my MA in Librarianship, and now, I find myself back as a visiting scholar at the Information School. My time as a visiting researcher at the University of Sheffield has been truly rewarding. I am an academic staff at Harran University in Turkey supported for this visit by Tubitak (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). This visit has been a great opportunity for my academic and professional development. I am conducting research on artificial intelligence within GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions. I have especially valued the support of my supervisor Dr. Andrew Cox who has guided me through this process. He is an extremely helpful, supportive and understanding person. The University of Sheffield has provided me with an excellent working environment, surrounded by helpful staff and dynamic research...
Post a Comment
Read more