Information School News

PhD student Ian Widdows shares his experiences of his internship with UKRI, engaging with the government on policy-making. Like all researchers, I want my research to make a difference.  When I first considered the possibility of writing a research proposal for a PhD, I was powerfully motivated by a desire to make things better.  My research is into secondary school performance measures in England - their effectiveness, effects and an exploration of alternative approaches. In part this comes from having spent 28 years working in secondary schools. During that time I formed some strong opinions about the way that schools are judged. I feel that things really need to change and I want my research to contribute to the debate.  Over the years, I have made many contacts already working in this field, including academics, data scientists, school and school trust leaders, consultants and senior representatives of teaching unions. I have been part of numerous working parties look...

The Information School is funding up to two PhD scholarships to start in 2023! Successful applicants to these GTA scholarships will be expected to provide up to 180 hours of teaching support per year (minimum 80 hours per year) alongside their research. Therefore, applicants must be able to teach topics on our Postgraduate programmes - we're particularly interested in applicants who could contribute to teaching on our Data Science and Information Systems programmes. If you're based in Sheffield, have a research question/focus in mind, have prior experience in research  and  in teaching and meet our academic entry requirements, then we'd love to hear from you! For the full specification and requirements, as well as a breakdown of the application process and links to apply, see point 5 on our website  here . You'll also find links to the other sources of PhD funding offered by the university on the same page, so you can see what is most suitable to you.

  The Information School at the University of Sheffield, ranked number one in the world for library and information management in the QS World University Rankings 2021, is advertising for up to two funded PhD Scholarships to start in the 2021/22 Academic Year. Job Title:  Departmental PhD Scholarship – GTA Department:  Information School, University of Sheffield Deadline for applications: Monday 5 th  July 2021 at 5pm The successful applicant(s) will be expected to provide up to 180 hours of teaching support per academic year. Payment for teaching support will be made in addition to bursary and fees, at the rate set by the  Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA)  scheme. We welcome applications for research in any of our  research specialisms . Research Environment When you undertake a research degree with the Information School, you can be assured that you are getting not only world-class supervision, but also exceptional facilities. In the 2014 REF (Resea...

Writer, researcher and Information School PhD student Phoenix C S Andrews has recently signed a book deal with Atlantic Books, who will release Andrews’ book I Heart Politics: Why Fandom Explains What’s Really Going On in 2022. "From Brexit rallies to the Capitol Hill Riot and QAnon to Extinction Rebellion, I Heart Politics argues that to understand what’s really happening behind the headlines we need to think about one overlooked phenomenon: fandom”, the synopsis reads. Whilst this is an area not explicitly related to Phoenix’s PhD study, it’s something that they have been interested in and writing about for some time. Fandoms and politics may not seem obviously linked at first, but at their core, fandoms are about the shared emotional attachments that people have to certain ideas, people or media. For many, this can certainly extend to individual politicians, political parties, campaigns or even politics as a whole, whether or not the fans themselves realise it. “Lots of peopl...

 A new article has been published today in the Journal of Social Media for Learning, authored by PhD student Paul Fenn and Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly. The article, entitled 'Problematising the use of Snapchat in Higher Education Teaching and Learning' can be found here:  https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/index.php/JSML/article/view/383 Abstract: There has been relatively little research exploring how Snapchat can be used within Higher Education teaching to date. In this viewpoint, we draw on extant empirical data to explore the strengths and weaknesses of using the Instant Messaging (IM) app to support student learning and teaching within universities. We conclude by considering whether it is appropriate to fully integrate apps like Snapchat into Higher Education in light of the revelations of data misuse by these platforms. The growth of ‘surveillance realism’, whereby citizens feel increasingly powerless at their personal data being repurposed by these companies for financ...

Media: How TikTok got political By Penny CS Andrews   Our PhD Researcher in information, media and communication, Penny CS Andrews, has written a piece for The Conversation.  They discuss how Tik Tok has become a platform for political messages.  You can read their article here.

New Book Review: "The Deep Learning Revolution"  Our IT Manager and PhD Student, Paul Fenn, has had a book review published   by the ICS Journal online and will be in print format in the next issue. The Deep Learning Revolution is a guide to the past, present and future of deep learning. Sejnowski gives a very personal account of the key advances in Deep Learning during the past 40 years, with a specific focus on the community of researchers responsible for these innovations. The book is split into three sections: Part I, Intelligence Reimagined; Part II, Many Ways to Learn; Part III, Technological and Scientific Impact. A useful timeline of important events is included at the beginning of each section for the reader. You can read the review here.

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...

Now the dust has cleared from the 2019 iSchool Conference, we’ve had a break and come up with some interesting findings from the presentations at the event. The conference boasted a wide range of disciplines that PhD students from the iSchool are researching. The day kicked off purely with quantitative research, followed by mixed methods methodologies and ending with some thought-provoking qualitative research presentations. Here are our top highlights: Recommendation Systems in Drug Design The morning began with the first presentation by Gianmarco Ghiandoni, a 3rd year PhD student in the Cheminformatics research group . The study looks at De Novo design, a branch of cheminformatics dealing with the design of molecular structures. Gianmarco adapted  methods that are widely applied for recommendation purposes on human data - for example by companies such as Google, Amazon, or Netflix - to the computational drug design processes, where chemical and biological data are mai...

The triennial conference on Chemoinformatics was held at the University of Sheffield Edge building earlier this month, organised by our own Professors Val Gillet and Peter Willett and Dr Antonio de la Vega de Leon. A new prize has been established at the conference: The Peter Willett Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation, established by the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group. The establishment of the prize is in recognition of Peter's outstanding contributions to the field, for which he was warmly congratulated. The Chemoinformatics research group at the conference The first winner of the prize is PhD student James Webster for his poster entitled 'Reaction Vector Based Monte Carlo Tree Search for De Novo Design'. James Webster with his poster and award In addition, PhD students Christina Founti, Giammy Ghiandoni and Jess Stacey were all given honourable mentions for their posters. The posters were judged by...

Last week saw the first presentation in a series of joint talks between the Information School's Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups in Sheffield. and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.The talks aim to promote research collaboration and knowledge sharing. Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Efpraxia Zamani are organising this series and chairing the Sheffield presentations, and Prof Josephine Nabukenya will be chairing the presentations from Makerere. In this first session, PhD student Liliana Sepulveda offered the audience a great overview of her PhD research on "An experiential study of the human-technology relationship between informal caregivers of people with dementia and assistive technologies". There will be similar virtual meetings every month and the next schedule one is for Tuesday 11th June, when a PhD student from Makerere will be presenting their work. More details will be forthcoming. You can view the recording of the session here: ...

Gianmarco Ghiandoni, PhD student in our Chemoinformatics research group, recently attended and presented at the UK-QSAR conference in Cambridge. Gianmarco attended the conference and presented a part of his PhD project, which involves the development of "Reaction Class Recommender Systems in de novo Drug Design". 'These algorithms are machine learning models that have recently acquired great importance due to their effectiveness in product recommendation', Gianmarco said. 'In particular, companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, etc., have built their reputations and businesses on the top of these models. At Sheffield, we have decided to apply these methods in order to produce suggestions for decision making in automated molecular design. The results from their application indicate that recommender systems can improve the synthetic accessibility of the designed molecules whilst reducing the computational requirements.'

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...

ICT Manager and PhD candidate Paul Fenn  will be presenting at the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference on the 9th January. Social media is now part of “the mainstream” but in terms of Higher Education it is the mainstream of marketing and selling education or an integral part of the mainstream of learning and teaching through developing digital confidence, capabilities and critique.  The SocMedHE18 conference provides open spaces to share, discuss and develop notions of what and why we currently do, what we could do and what should we do next with social media within an Higher Education learning and teaching context. Paul's session will be titled 'Exploring the impact of institutional policies on the use of social media in UK HE teaching'. 'The above will focus on my PhD, started Jan 2019', says Paul. 'At the conference presentation I will be discussing my research objectives, research methods and discuss part of my PhD research in ...

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...

Congratulations to Gianmarco Ghiandoni, PhD student in the Chemoinformatics Research Group , who recently won the Best Student Poster prize at the UK QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship) Autumn 2018 Meeting, which took place at Lady Margaret Conference Centre, Oxford University, on September 26th. Gianmarco's poster was entitled 'Fingerprint-based recommendation Models in Reaction-driven Drug Design'. The prize gives Gianmarco the opportunity to convert his poster to a 30 minute talk which he will give at the next UK QSAR meeting on 4th April 2019 in Cambridge. Gianmarco's PhD research is on the topic of reaction-based molecular design, supervised by Professor Val Gillet of the Information School and Professor Beining Chen from the Department of Chemistry. You can find out more about his research here .

The 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society was held earlier this month in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr Wasim Ahmed, recent Information School PhD graduate (now assistant Professor at Northumbria University) presented his PhD work at the conference and his trip was funded by the Information School. The paper Moral Panic through the Lens of Twitter: An Analysis of Infectious Disease Outbreaks was co-authored by Head of School and Professor of Health Informatics Peter Bath, and Dr Laura Sbaffi. You can access the paper here .

I was fortunate enough to receive one of the Information School’s student bursaries to attend the 2018 CILIP Conference, which this year was held in a very sunny Brighton. This was my first experience of the conference, which is one of the main events for library, knowledge and information professionals in the UK, and it certainly did not disappoint. The programme consisted of a variety of interesting sessions and keynote speakers that showcased some of the important and diverse work being carried out in the sector. Below are just a few of my highlights of the conference: Penny Young, House of Commons Librarian, opened the conference with a fascinating keynote speech on the history of the Library and how it supports MPs by providing them with the information they require to do their work. Not only did it provide an intriguing insight into the workings and challenges of a Library I knew very little about, it also highlighted the important role information plays in democracy and ho...