Information School News

Digital Data Flows and the COVID-19 Pandemic - should we be paying more attention?  As a third of the global population experiences some form of lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world are adapting to new ways of living and working, and looking for radical solutions to live with the virus until some form of immunity develops. Digital technologies and the data they process have been central to this response. The production and circulation of digital data is constrained by a complex web of deeply politicised social, cultural, legal, economic and technical factors. These constraints – or, “data frictions” - can be beneficial or problematic, and whether a particular friction is one or the other is often subject to significant debate. Shifts in the nature of data frictions have the potential to influence how societies function at the most fundamental level – they shape the relationship between state and citizens, the management of worker...

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Atlanta, USA to attend ACM FAT* - an interdisciplinary conference that addresses issues of Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning. Officially, I was there on the hunt for potential papers and authors to invite to submit their work to Online Information Review . However, the FAT* field is also closely related to my research interests around the politics of data and algorithms, and my teaching on the Information School’s MSc Data Science . I was keen to check out what was happening in the FAT* community, and feed my findings back into my teaching and into two new projects I am working on in this field: CYCAT & supervising a new PhD student – Ruth Beresford – whose research will investigate algorithmic bias in collaboration with the Department for Work and Pensions. I was privileged to hear a number of great papers – the best of which engaged critically with issues of social context and justice. My two favourite pa...

From Director of Research Professor Paul Clough: I am delighted to announce that Alessandro Checco and Jo Bates (together with Gianluca Demartini) have won the Best Paper award at the prestigious Human Computation or HCOMP 2018 conference for the following paper: Checco A, Bates J & Demartini G (2018) All That Glitters is Gold -- An Attack Scheme on Gold Questions in Crowdsourcing. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Abstract here; http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/130654/ Not only is it a significant achievement to even be accepted at this conference it is an outstanding achievement to be nominated for Best Paper and then to win it is incredible. Alessandro and Gianluca were awarded the prize at HComp 2018 . Alessandro had this to say about the paper and reviews: "Feedback from chairs was that they really liked the fact we opened a new direction (that is having workers using ML solutions on the employers). We will have the opportu...

Online Information Review, the international, ISI listed journal edited by Jo Bates, Andrew Cox, Robert Jäschke and Angela Lin from the Information School has just announced three Calls For Papers for Special issues on: Social Media Mining for Journalism http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/news_story.htm?id=7570 Lifelogging Behaviour and Practice http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7544 Open-access mega-journals: Continuity and innovation in scholarly communication http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7545

Information School Lecturer Dr Jo Bates has been invited to join the editorial board of Big Data and Society, the leading journal in the field of data studies. BD&S is published by SAGE and Dr Bates' term on the board is three years in duration. You can access the journal here .

The library and information association, CILIP, have recently launched a new publication for members of their organisation, entitled 'Information Professional'. Information School lecturers Dr Jo Bates and Paula Goodale and PhD student Penny Andrews are featured in the publication in an article about their research project 'The Secret Life of a Weather Datum'. The project aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how values and practice influence the transformation of weather data on its journey from production through various contexts of big data reuse. You can read the article here.

Earlier this month, Professor Paul Clough was interviewed on the first episode of Machine Minds, a podcast about the influence of technology in modern life. The episode, entitled 'Search Engine and Bias', looked at bias in search engines and Paul's input was based on work he undertook with Dr Jo Bates from the Information School and Jahna Otterbacher from Open University Cyprus. You can listen to the podcast here.

A blog post from the Information School's Dr Jo Bates has been published on the LSE Impact blog. Jo's post entitled 'Towards a critical data science - the complicated relationship between data and the democratic project' discusses the use of data science by politicians and policy makers to capture, analyse and respond to the public mood. The post considers how this development may impact on the democratic process and the full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here. Further discussion on the use of data management in US electoral campaigning can also be found in an article by Senior Lecturer Dr Gianluca Demartini at the Information School. Gianluca's article entitled 'Clinton-Sanders data breach spat goes to the heart of modern campaigning' was recently published in The Conversation.

March 2015 saw the launch of the lifeofdata.org.uk website by Jo Bates and Paula Goodale as part of the AHRC funded Secret Life of a Weather Datum project. The project, which has been running over the last 15 months, aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how socio-cultural values and practices interact with the transformation of weather data on its journey from initial production at Sheffield’s Weston Park weather station through to re-use in climate science and financial markets. The project also explored the contribution of citizen science generated weather data to this data infrastructure. The team worked with a variety of organisations and projects including Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum, the Met Office, the Old Weather project and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The lifeofdata.org.uk website that was developed as part of the project aims to present some of the initial findings of the project in an innova...

Yesterday Sheila Webber and Jo Bates presented at the University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Sciences seminar series on Methodological Challenges . This session focused on The relationship between social and digital worlds and the event was livestreamed. The talks were: Sheila Webber and Marshall Dozier (University of Edinburgh) "Social, ethical, digital: issues in 3D worlds research" (they delivered the talk within Second Life, delivered via a skype screenshare - see picture of them preparing). The presentation is on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/webber-dozier-methodological-challenges-web-40309925 Jo Bates "The Importance of understanding the socio-cultural shaping of big data infrastructures" The methods seminars website is here http://methodologicalchallenges.group.shef.ac.uk/?page_id=258

A blog post from the Information School's Dr Jo Bates has been published on the LSE Impact blog . Her post explores how the ideals behind open government data are being used to further interests of the neoliberal state.  The full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here .

The University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind event takes place between 18 and 28 September 2014, bringing together academics and industry professionals to showcase their research and bring it to life. Saturday 20 September sees the Resilient Cultures event take place as part of the Festival of the Mind.  This event explores open technology and resilience and participants can get involved in a variety of hands on activities during the event.   Two of these activities relate to Information School projects: Jo Bates’ current weather datum project and Farida Vis’ everyday growing cultures project . The Resilient Cultures event is open to everyone and will give adults and children alike the chance to try out activities that relate to Information School research projects.  The event takes place in the University’s Firth Court building and admission is free. 

A project to create a raspberry pi weather station is currently live in the Information School.  The Sheffield Pi weather station has been created by Romilly Close, undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Sheffield.  The project was funded by the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) scheme and is being supervised by Dr Jo Bates, Paula Goodale and Fred Sonnenwald from the Information School. Information about the Sheffield Pi station and how to create your own can be found on the project website .  You can also see live data from the Sheffield Pi station on Plot.ly , and further information can also be found on the Met Office Weather Observations Website .    This work compliments the School’s existing project entitled ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ which explores socio-cultural influences on weather data.  This project is funded under the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Big Data call.  It ...

On 10 April 2014 Dr Jo Bates appeared by video conference before the Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates as an invited international expert to present and answer questions for their study on Open Data practices. She was joined by three other panellists: Richard Stirling, International Director of the UK's Open Data Institute;  Barbara Ubaldi, an expert from the OECD; and  Lyne Da Sylva, Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Science, Université de Montréal. Jo presented on how Canada's Open Government Data initiative compares to other countries, and discussed the types of value that could be generated from opening up government data.   During the questions session of the conference issues which were discussed included the relationship between open data, democracy and social inclusion; the economic value of Open Government Data and some of the risks around some types of commercial re-use; where th...

Congratulations to Dr Jo Bates and Dr Farida Vis of the Information School who have recently been awarded funding for some of their work.   Jo has been awarded funding in collaboration with Professor Hamish Cunnigham (Department of Computer Science) and local artist Bo Meson, for a two day Festival of the Mind event called ‘Open Data | Open Hardware: Resilient Cultures’.   With the advent of cheap, easily configurable computing devices (of which the UK's Raspberry Pi is the most prominent example), and the opening of significant amounts of data for anyone to use and re-use, the boundary between creative culture and information engineering is re-opening.   The event, which will be held on Friday 19 th and Saturday 20 th September, will celebrate developments in open hardware, open data and maker culture.   It will bring together collaborations between extraordinary performance, science and engineering practitioners with around a dozen exhibits plus a r...

Jo Bates and Robert Villa have both been successful applying to the AHRC's " Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities " Big Data projects call. Jo Bates - The Secret Life of a Weather Datum The Secret Life of a Weather Datum is a 15 month research project that will explore the socio-cultural values and practices shaping, and being shaped by, the production, collation, distribution and re-use of weather data produced by the UK’s Met Office. In order to achieve this aim, the project will be following the ‘journey’ of a single weather datum from its production into three cases of re-use: climate science, weather risk markets and citizen science projects. These cases will comprise of interviews, observations, digital ethnography and policy research. The final outcome of the project will be an interactive website and multimedia research data archive that will allow members of the public to explore this journey in more detail, thus contributing to the public ...

Jo Bates’ work on the Big Data driven financial markets being developed in response to climate change has been published by The Conversation and New Statesman . Read more below.    Big agriculture, big data, big weather. Chemophilia The recent news story regarding Monsanto’s US$930million acquisition of the ‘Big Data’ science company, Climate Corporation, raises important questions about the economies developing in response to climate change. A new generation of data analytics firms are emerging, using innovations in the field of data science in order to turn vast datasets (‘Big Data’) into exploitable information. As the Financial Times reported , Monsanto’s purchase of Climate Corporation signals the ‘first significant acquisition’ of this emerging ‘Big Data’ industry. Climate Corporations’ key offering is a product called ‘Total Weather Insurance’  (TWI), which it currently sells directly to farmers in the USA. TWI pays out based solely upon obse...