Information School News

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...

Doctoral student Wasim Ahmed delivered a keynote talk on social media research methods and software at Boston University College of Communication. The event, Making Social Media Data Matter , was run by Professor Jacob Groshek and included talks from world renowned experts who work between the intersection of media and academia. The event was very well attended from across academia, industry, and government and included members from organisations such as the United Nations. Wasim thanked his family for continued support and noted that the event was at the forefront of academic research methods and social media research tools. Wasim is supervised by Profesor Peter Bath , Dr Laura Sbaffi , and Dr Gianluica Demartini . Wasim is a doctoral student in the Health Informatics Research group