Information School News

Experts from the iSchool present a free and open 30 minute webinar on Friday March 22nd 2019, 10.00-10.30 UK time (see here for times elsewhere in the world): Media and Information Literacy for Informed Citizens in the Digital Age. They will highlight the value of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) for citizens’ lives, and the contribution that information and library professionals can make to developing MIL. This celebrates the first European Media Literacy week , set up to recognise the societal importance of media literacy and promote media literacy initiatives and projects. Sheila Webber (Interim Co-Chair of the European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships in Media and Information Literacy, former Standing Committee member of IFLA's Information Literacy Section and Head of the iSchool's Libraries and Information Society Research Group) will chair the webinar. She'll give her perspective on the European Media Literacy conference held earlier in the we...

Information School PhD student Wasim Ahmed from the Health Informatics Research Group delivered a research seminar to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Government Office in London early this week. The seminar was also broadcast to members from the DWP Office in Sheffield.  The talk centred on social media analytics based on Wasim’s PhD work and covered applications such as Echosec , Visibrain , NodeXL , and DiscoverText .  Wasim is supervised by Professor Peter Bath , and Dr Gianluca Demartini .

MEM0R1ES: Memory-based Information Systems Dr.  Michele Catasta EPFL, Switzerland Thursday 7th July | 12 noon (coffee from 11.30am) | Room 204, Information School, Regent Court Abstract In this talk I will discuss the feasibility of memory-based  information systems, namely, systems that take into account the  idiosyncrasies of human memories. Departing from classical integrated infrastructures providing static views over heterogeneous sources, we  propose to mimic the way our brain stores and accesses information in  order to provide a more natural extension of our cognitive functions  when it comes to tap into the chaotic piles of digital information  that we generate daily. First, I will present our effort in redefining 3 fundamental  information systems, taking into account the way in which human  memories work. Namely, we rethought a search architecture over  personal data, we devised a new crowdsourcing paradigm (l...

Dr Igor Bernik is Associate Professor of Information Sciences, and Head of the Information Security Department at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Slovenia. His research fields are information systems, information security, and the growing requirement for information security awareness. Dr Bernik is visiting the Information School from 9 to 20 May 2016 and durin g his visit will deliver the following seminars and workshops: Cybersecurity in a changing workplace environment 12th May 12-1pm , RC-204 Experts emphasise that cybersecurity is an important issue in the modern world as cybercrime is increasingly targeting individual users and, through them, also threatening the economic sphere and organisational environments, which possess large amounts of valuable data. In this seminar, we outline a practice-based understanding of contemporary cybersecurity problems from the perspective of individuals and organisations. Cybersecurity...

Building the architecture for research data services  Jez Cope, Research Data Manager and Andy Bussey, Head of Digital Services and Systems,   Sheffield University Library Thursday May 5th, 12 noon (coffee from 11:30am), Room 204 in Information School, Regent Court The role of the library in academic research institutions is rapidly evolving to keep pace with technological, societal and cultural developments and requirements. One area where this is keenly felt is in the provision of support for the curation and preservation of research data. Here at the University of Sheffield we have recently procured two systems from external providers to support related areas of digital curation. Ex Libris Rosetta enables us to provide a secure, actively managed environment to preserve and curate our data over the very long term. Figshare for Institutions acts as both a catalogue and public-facing repository for datasets created by our researchers. In this session we will...

Dr Alasdair Rae Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning 28th April 2016 | 12 noon | RC-204 Lecture Room in Information School, Regent Court No need to book. In this talk I discuss some recent data-driven projects, covering housing markets, commuting, internet search and neighbourhood deprivation. These projects involve collaboration with partners or funders such as Rightmove, Google, the Bank of England, the Department for Transport and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. What they all have in common is that I was seeking to find answers in data and communicate the results in visually meaningful ways, in order to make some kind of contribution to policy, practice or understanding. This kind of approach often helps capture the attention of policymakers and draw attention to important issues. In this sense, then, it takes numbers out of the domain of data and towards information and knowledge and, it is hoped, wisdom (i.e. 'what should we do?'). But s...