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 ...

Over 40 of Peter Willett’s ex-PhD students and long-time collaborators gathered in Sheffield in mid-September to celebrate Peter’s long and very influential career and to thank him for the personal support that he has provided to very many throughout this time. It is a mark of the very high regard in which Peter is held that so many people attended. They had travelled from as far as Canada, North America, Germany and Taiwan, as well as from all over the UK. Many of the attendees are now in very influential positions of their own including in academia, software companies and industry. Their connections to Peter spanned the full range of Peter’s career with one of his early PhD students having obtained her PhD over 30 years ago. A number of presentations were given that included reflections on Peter’s contribution to the fields of Chemoinformatics, Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics, a “Peter Willett: This is your Life” tribute, as well as many personal messages of thank...

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.