Information School News

  “We rely so much on Google these days”, says Dr Frank Hopfgartner, Senior Lecturer at the Information School and Investigator on the ‘Do You See What I See’ project. “Google has a search engine market share of over 90% worldwide.” Undertaken by Dr Hopfgartner with several fellow members of the Cyprus Center for Algorithmic Transparency (CyCAT) - which was profiled in the research magazine Inform II in 2019 (page 29) - this project aimed to discover the differences in the search results that Google provides to users in different parts of the world. Google states that their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This project asked: is that true? Does everyone everywhere have equal access to the same information? And if not, what impact might that have? Dr Frank Hopfgartner “CyCAT for me was very interesting because algorithmic transparency and bias is a very timely topic and one which is receiving a lot of attention”, says ...

Lecturer in Information Management Dr Jonathan Foster responds to the recent news story about the historic 'Right to be Forgotten' ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in favour of search engine giant Google. The Ruling by the European Court of Justice earlier this week raises two important issues. First the issue of how democratic societies strike a balance between the privacy rights of the individual on the one hand, and the public interest on the other. Second, the limits of legal jurisdiction and of institutional obligation. The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ - or ‘Right to Erasure’ as it is now known - is a provision under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This provision provides individuals with the right to request organisations, search engine operators for example, to remove specific personally-identifying information about them. A number of reasons can be given by the user to justify their request: that processing of the data is no longer nec...

Information School staff Paula Goodale and Paul Clough are participating in the nationwide Pint of Science public engagement event next week. Pint of Science aims to bring the latest research to members of the public in an accessible format and friendly venue. A celebration of academic research, Pint of Science began in 2012 and has since grown to include universities across the UK, including Sheffield for the first time in 2016. Each event includes 2-3 talks, with plenty of time for Q&A with the researchers. Come along and find out what our iSchool researchers have been up to, and enjoy a pint, and some science. Paula will be talking about the Secret Life of a Weather Datum , as part of the ‘Earth, Wind and Sun: The Power of Weather’ event on Tuesday May 24 th at the Doctor’s Orders pub, 412 Glossop Road. Building on work done as part of a research project by the same name, Paula will explain how weather data collected right here in Sheffield contributes to global climate...

Information School PhD student Hua Xiang has been selected for the Google Summer of Code programme 2013. Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. This year, Hua’s proposal "Add time series reports for Bloodhound" was submitted to Apache Software Foundation . She will develop enhanced reports functionality for issue tracking system of software development projects.