Information School News

New Paper: Integrating FATE/Critical Data Studies into Data Science Curricula: Where are we going and how do we get there? A number of Information School academics have published a new paper for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. The paper (published by Dr Jo Bates, Dr David Cameron, Dr Alessandro Checco, Professor Paul Clough, Dr Frank Hopfgartner, Dr Suvodeep Mazumdar, Dr Laura Sbaffi, Dr Peter Stordy, and Dr Antonio de la Vega de León) reflects on the ethical and practical aspects of teaching critical data science to inform future data practices & make them fair.  Abstract:  There have been multiple calls for integrating topics related to fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics (FATE) and social justice into Data Science curricula, but little exploration of how this might work in practice. This paper presents the findings of a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) engaged in by a MSc Data Science teaching team b...

It is always exciting to see a former PhD student again and find out more about what they are doing now, so it was amazing to be able to visit Mexico City and say hello again to Gibrán Rivera Gonzalez who gained his PhD at the Information School in 2013. He is now a lecturer at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, one of the top universities in Mexico. The picture below is of a seminar I gave on the need for qualitative research in the age of big data and AI. Together we also went to the Entre Pares conference, in Pueblo, organised by CONRICYT (The National Consortium of Scientific and Technological Information Resources). The conference aims to promote scholarly communication in academic communities across Mexico. This year’s event had an impressive programme of presentations on a wide variety of information science topics. There was a track on Research Data Management, reflecting the increasing interest in this topic in the country. It was good to be able to share some UK experi...

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 first Data Science Forum Meeting took place on 4 May 2016 and was opened by Dr Gianluca Demartini and Professor Paul Clough. The event also included a talk from Christopher Hopkinson, Virgin Media. Professor Paul Clough  The forum is aimed at data professionals located within the city of Sheffield and surrounding areas to provide: Opportunities for networking between industry/business practitioners, academics and students Sharing of knowledge and experiences in topics of interest around data science and data analytics Informal and friendly environment to chat and get to know others working in the same or similar fields  The next meeting will be hosted by Sheffield Hallam University on 20 July 2016.

At the year’s end, LSE Review of Books announced its ten most popular book reviews for 2015 . Among these is a review of Patrick Meier’s ‘Digital Humanitarians’ by Dimitrinka Atanasova from the Information School. Dimitrinka recommends the book to all who wish to make sense of social media and Big Data during crises and disasters. She notes that the book will also appeal to Star Wars fans with its many movie analogies such as the comparison of digital humanitarians with Star Wars Jedi.  In May 2015 Patrick Meier gave a lab talk at the University of Sheffield co-hosted with The Sheffield Institute for International Development and the Information School’s Digital Society Network. More information on Patrick's lab talk can be found here . 

Dr Gianluca Demartini , Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School has been published in The Conversation. Gianluca's article entitled ' Clinton-Sanders data breach spat goes to the heart of modern campaigning ' highlights the significance of data management in US electoral campaigning. How voter data is utilised to better understand the electorate and help campaigners craft their speeches as well as facilitating more targeted advertising and seeking prospective donors is explained. In addition, Gianluca highlights potential problems in using big data but explains how the use of this data may benefit the voter.

Dr Gianluca Demartini  of the Information School has secured funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ( EPSRC) for his project entitled "BetterCrowd: Human Computation for Big Data". A short summary of the project proposal can be read below: In the last few years we have seen a rapid increase of available data. Digitization has become endemic. This has lead to a data deluge that left many unable to cope with such large amounts of messy data. Also because of the large number of content producers and different formats, data is not always easy to process by machines due to its its diverse quality and the presence of bias. Thus, in the current data-driven economy, if organizations can effectively analyze data at scale and use it as decision-support infrastructure at the executive level, data will lead to a key competitive advantage. To deal with the current data deluge, in the BetterCrowd project I will define and evaluate Human Computation methods...

The Faculty of Social Sciences Digital Society Network is pleased to invite you to 'Data Power: A Digital Society Network Event' featuring talks by Mark Andrejevic and José van Dijck. The event takes place on Tuesday 23 June, 09:30 – 11:15, in Cutlers’ Hall, Church Street, S1 1HG.  This is a free event, but please register here and bring a printed copy of your registration to get in to the event.   Mark Andrejevic (Pomona College, USA) Big Data Disconnects Drawing upon ongoing interviews, this presentation explores a series of disconnects between how people think about the ways in which their data is being put to work and the discourses of data mining and predictive analytics. In particular it explores the disconnect between individual conceptions of the value of data and commercial practices of aggregation and sorting; on differing conceptions of the relevance of particular forms of data to different types of decision making; and on the disconnection between expectat...

On 22 May Patrick Meier visited the University of Sheffield and gave a talk on Digital Humanitarians which was hosted by the Visual Social Media Lab , the Digital Society Network and the Sheffield Institute for International Development .   Patrick’s talk focused on the use of big data and social media during humanitarian crises including the Haiti and Nepal earthquakes of recent years.  He discussed a number of key issues surrounding digital humanitarians, which is emerging as an area of cross disciplinary research.  One particularly important and topical issue is that of image verification, which resonates with an area of the Visual Social Media Lab’s work.   In society today many images get shared on social media, but why do false images get shared and how does this cause rumours to spread?  Patrick argues there is a need for impact evaluations and secondary research into images on social media – a topic which students may potentially be interes...

Join us on Tuesday 9 June for a data science seminar on "data science in government, the OR profession and Department for Education” by Madeleine Greenhalgh, Head of Data Science at the Cabinet Office, Richard Allison and Jonathan Edwards. Large and complex data is increasingly becoming more readily and cheaply available, as is the technology to collect and analyse that data. Government already holds data which is being analysed by talented analysts, but we believe that applying data science techniques to this data and using insight from new and complex data sets can allow government to improve how we create policy and deliver services. Madeleine Greenhalgh works in the central data science team in government and will describe how we are taking a practical approach to testing data science techniques as well as embedding these skills within government as a whole, particularly in the analytical professions. Richard Allison is a member of the Operational Research profession and...

On 20 May 2015 Dr Gianluca Demartini of the Information School will present a paper on 'The Dynamics of Micro-Task Crowdsourcing' at the 24th World Wide Web Conference in Florence, Italy. Micro-task crowdsourcing is a modern technique that allows outsourcing of simple data collection tasks to a crowd of individuals online. Tasks such as image annotation, document summarisation, or audio transcription are easy for humans to complete but very challenging for computers. micro-task crowdsourcing is commonly used to build information systems that combine the scalability of computers over large amounts of data with the quality of human intelligence. Over the last 10 years different micro-task crowdsourcing platforms have been created. These platforms are marketplaces where crowd workers complete tasks (usually called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) in exchange of small monetary rewards and where requesters post their data and tasks to quickly obtain large scale annotations. ...

On Tuesday 12 May 2015, Ed Child, Head of Customer Data Team at Asda joined us in the Information School to present a seminar on 'How Asda are using big data to understand their customers'. The seminar explored how Asda is engaging Big Data to understand its customers. Ed considered a number of factors during the seminar: The opportunities that Big Data has presented to business to understand customer behaviour Examples of this data use in action to drive personal communications How technology is impacting the changing retail landscape and impact on shopping Ed is responsible for Customer Data at Asda, having created and managed the Single Customer View for a number of years. This includes leading a team of analysts delivering insights from data to understand customer behaviour, as well as the tools and technology powering Asda CRM systems. He is also responsible for Marketing Effectiveness, helping support one of the country's largest retailers to understand t...

We are pleased to invite you to a talk on ‘Digital Humanitarians’ by Patrick Meier. Patrick is an internationally recognized thought-leader on humanitarian technology and innovation and he will be speaking about the use of Big Data and social media during humanitarian crises. See abstract for full details. Date: Friday 22 May Venue: ICOSS Conference Room, University of Sheffield Time: 14:00-16:30 ( talk: 14:00-15:30 with coffee and tea served afterwards ) Registration: This talk is open to all, but registration is required as places are limited to 55. Please add your name to this form  to register. This talk is hosted by the Visual Social Media Lab , the Digital Society Network and the Sheffield Institute for International Development . We look forward to seeing you next Friday! If you have any questions, please contact Farida Vis: f.vis@sheffield.ac.uk Digital Humanitarians - The information overflow that occurs in the wake of a disaster can paralyze humani...

Dr Farida Vis will speak at the Politics of Big Data Conference at King's College London on 8 May 2015. Her speech is part of the masterclass series on big data, with the session on 8 May focusing upon interventions in big data politics.  Farida will speak about visual cultures in social media and will discuss work which is being carried out by the Visual Social Media Lab  to develop methodological and theoretical strategies for capturing and interpreting social media image data. More information about the conference can be found on the conference website .

On Tuesday 28 April Professor Peter Bath will speak as part of the British Council's Science For All Talks in Istanbul, Turkey. The series focuses upon popular topics in science and Professor Bath will speak about big data and health, specifically focusing upon the importance of big data in healthcare and peoples' lives.  He will also examine the experiences in the UK and in Turkey surrounding big data and health.  Big data and data science technologies are increasingly being used in the healthcare sector to gather patient data and provide a more complete picture of a patient which can help to inform care coordination, population health management, and patient engagement. The event takes place in the Istanbul Modern Cinema Hall at 19:00.  Further information is available on the British Council website .

Anne Burns, Research Assistant at the Information School for the Picturing the Social Project , recently attended the Selfie Citizenship workshop on 16 April 2015 at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her full write up from the workshop can be found here . The workshop was organised by Adi Kuntsman, Farida Vis and Simon Faulkner. It focused on exploring the connection between social media and citizenship theories, reinforcing the importance and relevance of the work that is being carried out by the Visual Social Media Lab of which Farida Vis and Simon Faulkner are members. Thanks to funding from the Digital Society Network, ten members of staff and students from across the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield were able to attend the Selfie Citizenship workshop.

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...

At the start of March Dr Robert Villa presented a plenary talk entitled "Understanding assessors: a forgotten element of big data research?" at the 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics . This conference is run annually by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics and this year taking place in Valladolid. The talk discussed the importance of studying the human assessors who generate the training collections which are required when using supervised training methods, as is typical when applying machine learning techniques, and is based on work carried out in the AHRC funded project "Understanding the annotation process: annotation for Big data". In this project we're looking in more detail at the behaviour of assessors, and how gathering more information about assessor behaviour could potentially be applied in machine learning. This was a terrific opportunity to meet up with members of the corpus linguistics community, and to learning mor...

In this blog post, Wasim Ahmed , PhD student in the Information School (pictured bottom left), reports on the recent Studies in Social Data Meetup at Twitter London. The first Studies in Social Data Meetup at Twitter London was held on the 1st of April, with 150 attendees who were all eager to discuss different aspects of social data. The event was organised by Patrick Callahan from compassRed and Carl Davis from so adaptive. The event was co-sponsored by the Big Boulder Initiative (BBI). Farida Vis, Faculty Research Fellow in The Information School and involved in the BBI, contributed to opening the event by saying a few words about what the initiative is about and to flag up the upcoming Big Boulder conference this summer. In opening the Meetup Patrick and Carl commented that the event had a good turnout from both academia and industry, which was seen as positive. The event provided an overview of how social data is used in industry, government, and academia, and the diffe...

Congratulations to Paula Goodale who has been nominated for the 'Best Poster Award' at the 2015 iConference. The iConference is an international gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. The iConference is presented by the iSchools organisation , and hosted each year by a different member school. The 2015 host is the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.  The theme for the 2015 conference is Create-Collaborate-Celebrate.  The Information School at the University of Sheffield was the first UK school to join the iSchools organisation. Paula Goodale's poster is entitled 'Mapping Data Journeys: Design for an interactive web site'.  It is based on research conducted as part of the Secret Life of a Weather Datum project and was produced with co-authors Dr Jo Bates of the Information School and Yuwei Lin of the University of Creative Arts. The w...