Information School News

I recently attended a VIP Preview Evening at Bletchley Park (BP) to launch their new exhibition called The Intelligence Factory. This also included a new temporary exhibition called The Art of Data. The new exhibition narrates how the activities at BP turned data into intelligence products that were then used for tactical and strategic decision making by the likes of Churchill. However, it is presented as a factory which not only includes the innovative technologies (e.g. Colossus for codebreaking), but also the organisation and management required to do this effectively. It also shows the need for good data and information management, analytics, visualization and storytelling etc and is a great blueprint for any analytics activities in modern day organisations. David Kenyon from BP came to present at the iSchool a couple of years back on the topic, which was his early thinking about an intelligence factory that eventually helped to this new exhibition. In the Art of Data exhibition th...

Professor of Search Analytics Paul Clough has been giving a selection of lectures at Devon County Council as part of their education programme. One of Paul's lectures was recently picked up in The Data Dispatch, a blog from Devon County Council. Read the blog here:  https://inside.devon.gov.uk/blogs/blog/the-data-dispatch-telling-stories/

Why you should never use Microsoft Excel to count coronavirus cases Professor Paul Clough Public Health England has admitted that 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK were missed from daily figures being reported between September 25 and October 2. The missing figures were subsequently added to the daily totals, but given the importance of these numbers for monitoring the outbreak and making key decisions, the results of the error are far-reaching. Not only does it lead to underestimating the scale of coronavirus in the UK, but perhaps more important is the subsequent delay in entering the details of positive cases into the NHS Test and Trace system which is used by a team of contact tracers. Although all those who tested positive had been informed of their results, other people in close contact with them and potentially at risk of exposure were not immediately followed up (ideally within 48 hours). This was a serious error. What could have caused it? It emerged later that that...

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...

Paul Clough (Information School, University of Sheffield and Peak Indicators) co-presented with Helen Kennedy (Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield) at a Sheffield Solutions Lunchtime Seminar Series for the Department of Work and Pensions on Thursday 28th March. The lunchtime seminars bring together Academics, policy makers and practitioners to develop networks and better understand policy issues. Paul and Helen discussed the implications of apps, digital services, smart devices, ‘datafication’ and social media platforms on issues in our everyday lives, such as gender, race, health, equality and public services. The seminar explored these issues and the ways they matter to government, DWP and citizens. The focus of Paul and Helen’s presentation was around data-driven decision making and notions of fairness and transparency in an age of algorithmic bias. The seminar was well attended with around 40 participants, including members of the Senior Leadership team from DWP. ...

Today, the 12th of March, marks 30 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web. In an interview for the BBC , Sir Berners-Lee said that global action is required to tackle the web's 'downward plunge to a dysfunctional future', especially in the wake of events like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In an open letter , Sir Berners-Lee also outlined three areas of 'dysfunction' that are harming the web today, encompassing areas like hacking and clickbait. Our own Professor of Search and Analytics, Paul Clough, had this to say about the anniversary and Berners-Lee's comments: "There have been numerous cases throughout history where technologies are not used for the purposes they were originally intended [1]. Indeed the underlying infrastructure of the Web - the Internet - was originally a military experiment conducted in the context of the Cold War that now forms the backbone of communications within every industry an...

Tuesday 4th December 2018 was the date of our annual ‘industry day’ event organised for students on the MSc Data Science programme. The event invites speakers from various sectors in industry to share their experiences with utilising machine learning, AI and data science for applications within their domain. This year speakers from 6 organisations presented at the event: · Billy Blythe, Head of Data Science, Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) · Leanne Fitzpatrick, Head of Data, Hello Soda · Lauren Rodgers, Data Scientist, and Tom Liptrot, Head of Data Science, Peak.ai · Lisa Clark, Data Scientist, Virgin Media Business (VMB) · Ben Chamberlain, Head of Machine Learning, AOS.com · Hayden Sansum, Senior Data Scientist, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Speakers discussed various topics such as the challenges, benefits and technologies involved in utilising data-driven analytical methods; current technological trends; and what role data scie...

Dr Jo Bates and Professor Paul Clough from the Information School attended the launch of the new H2020 funded CyCAT (Cyprus Centre for Algorithmic Transparency) project in Nicosia 8-9 October 2018. Jo and Paul are investigators on CyCAT , a project hosted by the Open University of Cyprus (OUC), which aims to educate and raise awareness of ways in which data analytics and algorithmic processes can affect people's access to and interactions with information. The project will help promote digital literacy around algorithmic bias, transparency and fairness, a topic gaining considerable attention and media attention. The CyCAT project started 1st October 2018 and will run for 3 years. OUC is the lead partner of the project with additional contributions coming from The University of Sheffield , the University of Haifa , the University of Trento (Università degli Studi di Trento), and The University of Edinburgh.

Professor Emeritus of the Information School and leading figure in the information field Tom Wilson was awarded the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science & Technology) Award of Merit , the Association's highest award, in September 2017. This award recognises sustained contributions to the field of information science and marks a lifetime of achievements for Professor Wilson, who now joins a list of well-respected figures in information science who have won the award previously. Professor Wilson was presented with the award at the 2017 ASIS&T Annual meeting held in October 27- November 1 2017 in Washington DC . Professor Wilson could not attend the event in person and his award was sent to his home in Sheffield. Professor Paul Clough was recently able to catch up with Professor Wilson and his award. Professor Wilson’s response to receiving the award: "Many of the previous recipients of the Award are heroes of mine - people like Cyril Cleverd...

On Friday 31st August 2017, members of the Information School (Dr Ana Vasconcelos, Prof Paul Clough and Dr Simon Wakeling) and Professor David Ellis (Department of Information Studies, University of Aberystwyth) visited Bletchley Park  to meet with staff and discuss potential collaborative research activities. Following an initial discussion about the role of Bletchley Park in WWII – home of the top-secret codebreakers and what is now GCHQ – the visitors were provided with examples of archival materials held at Bletchley, such as the cataloguing system maintained with index cards, examples of intercepted coded messages and synthesised highlights created each day and sent to people such as Winston Churchill. They also toured the site at Bletchley Park, which is a major UK visitor attraction and film location for the Oscar-nominated film “The Imitation Game”.  Thanks go to Dr David Kenyon (research historian) and Peronel Craddock (Head of Collections and Exhi...

David Walsh, a part-time PhD student at the Information School (also works as a Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University) has won second prize for Best Paper at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2017 (TPDL'17)  in Thessaloniki, Greece. David's paper explored categories of visitor to the National Liverpool Museums website via a large-scale museum user survey in which data on a wide range of user characteristics was collected to provide well founded definitions for the user group's motivations, tasks, engagement, and domain knowledge. The results highlighted that the general public and non-professional users make up the majority of users and allow us to clearly define these two groups. David is supervised by Paul Clough and Jonathan Foster from Sheffield and Mark Hall from Edge Hill. Walsh D., Hall M., Clough P., Foster J. (2017) The Ghost in the Museum Website: Investigating the General Public’s Interactions with Museum Websites....

On 13th and 14th July Professor Paul Clough and Professor Stephen Pinfield visited CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research which is located near Geneva. The visit was to meet with Xiaoli Chen, a PhD student being funded by CERN and supervised by Stephen and Paul, along with Dr Sunje Dallmeier-Tiessen an Information Manager at CERN and working on the INSPIRE digital library that serves the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Xiaoli’s PhD is investigating how INSPIRE can better support the Open Science practices of the HEP community. Paul and Stephen’s visit included a visit to the office where Tim Berner’s Lee invented the World Wide Web as well as visiting Geneva and its beautiful city centre.  Paul and Stephen also gave invited talks to staff at CERN. Paul gave a talk entitled “Competent men and warm women: Gender stereotypes and backlash in image search results” based on a CHI’2017 paper written with Jo Bates from the Information School a...

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.