Information School News

There have been several changes to staffing within the School during 2015. Firstly, we are delighted to welcome the following new staff. Dr Christopher Foster has joined as Lecturer in ICT and Innovation. Chris was previously a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and his work focuses on the impact of digital technologies and information flows on innovation within organisations. With a background in engineering, IT innovation and R&D, Chris will mainly be contributing to teaching on the Information Systems and Information Management degrees. Dr Paul Reilly is Senior Lecturer in Social Media and Digital Society and joins us from his previous posiiton as Deputy Director of Research, Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Paul has a particular interests in the study of online political communication and how social media is used to promote better community relations in divided societies, and he is the author of...

At the start of March Dr Robert Villa presented a plenary talk entitled "Understanding assessors: a forgotten element of big data research?" at the 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics . This conference is run annually by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics and this year taking place in Valladolid. The talk discussed the importance of studying the human assessors who generate the training collections which are required when using supervised training methods, as is typical when applying machine learning techniques, and is based on work carried out in the AHRC funded project "Understanding the annotation process: annotation for Big data". In this project we're looking in more detail at the behaviour of assessors, and how gathering more information about assessor behaviour could potentially be applied in machine learning. This was a terrific opportunity to meet up with members of the corpus linguistics community, and to learning mor...

Today Barbara Sen and Robert Villa of the Information School are presenting the results of a European Association of Health Information and Libraries project at the EAHIL Conference in Rome. A full report of the project can be found on White Rose Research Online .

Papers are invited for submission ahead of the workshop on Gathering Efficient Assessments of Relevance (GEAR) at SIGIR 2014, 11 July 2014, Gold Coast, Australia . The workshop will revisit how relevance assessments can be efficiently created.  A discussion and exploration of this issue will be facilitated through the presentation of results based and position papers on the topic.  Participants will also be invited to participate in a design task focusing on developing a benchmarking exercise.   An aim of the workshop will be to provide a forum where short research papers can be presented, reporting work which may not conventionally be published in papers at formal venues, including ‘practice and experience’ papers concerning relevance assessment gathering, and position papers concerning the concepts and issues.  Papers reporting negative results are also welcome. Two types of paper are solicited:           Short papers: 4 pa...

Jo Bates and Robert Villa have both been successful applying to the AHRC's " Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities " Big Data projects call. Jo Bates - The Secret Life of a Weather Datum The Secret Life of a Weather Datum is a 15 month research project that will explore the socio-cultural values and practices shaping, and being shaped by, the production, collation, distribution and re-use of weather data produced by the UK’s Met Office. In order to achieve this aim, the project will be following the ‘journey’ of a single weather datum from its production into three cases of re-use: climate science, weather risk markets and citizen science projects. These cases will comprise of interviews, observations, digital ethnography and policy research. The final outcome of the project will be an interactive website and multimedia research data archive that will allow members of the public to explore this journey in more detail, thus contributing to the public ...