Information School News

Dr Dalibor Fiala is visiting the Information School between 29 July and  1st August to work with Professor Peter Willett on a citation study of computer science  in Eastern Europe since 1989. Dalibor is is an associate professor at the Department of Computer  Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia, and has  interests in a range of informetrics topics.

The Information School's Dr Jonathan Foster has been awarded a £2,000 research stimulation grant from Research and Innovation Services to develop a research proposal for the Marie Curie ITN.  The objective of this is to establish a training network for PhD students in information governance. This began as an initiative in the Information School's Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval research groups.

Dr Miguel Baptista Nunes of the Information School will chair the 8th International Conference on e-Learning in Lisbon, Portugal, between 15 and 18 July 2014.  The conference explores technical and non-technical aspects of e-Learning and the key note speaker will be Professor Neil Morris, Professor of Educational Technology, Innovation and Change and Director of Digital Learning at the University of Leeds. He will then chair the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Post-implementation and Change Management between 17 and 19 July, also in Lisbon.  This conference focuses upon the socio-technological perspective of information systems, exploring issues related to using, exploiting and maintaining information systems within organisations and focusing upon the post-implementation stage of the information systems life cycle.  

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School is presenting o n 15 July 2014 at the Intelligent Cities Conference 2014 as an international expert on smart cities.  The Intelligent Cities Conference is a highly reputable event in its field and  invites insightful speakers   from the government, industry and academia.   The conference this year will explore not simply the connectivity infrastructure needed for smart cities but will discuss intelligent open data, green technologies, innovation, healthcare, mobile advances, wealth creation, digital inclusion and M2M capabilities.   Dr Peng will be presenting the results of two recent interdisciplinary and industrial-based projects in the conference, namely the GSMA Smart Cities Index project and the Smart City Market Sizing project.  

Dr Peter Stordy of the Information School will be presenting today (4 July 2014) at the Higher Education Academy STEM (Computing): Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Databases 2014 conference in Southampton. The presentation will focus on teaching approaches and will discuss how success rates have been improved in a database design module within the Information School.

Pictures shared on Twitter around the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher will be examined as part of the world’s first academic research project studying the explosion of images now shared across different social media platforms and apps, led by Dr Farida Vis of the Information School. Thanks to smartphones, most people now carry a camera with them at all times and use it to document different aspects of their lives – sharing more than 750 million social media images daily. For the Thatcher research, academics have so far collected nearly 150,000 tweets containing images directly shared on Twitter and have downloaded 17,000 different images.  This research can shed light on how a range of different types of images are used on Twitter to express opinions, discuss news and collectively remember well-known people and events. The ‘Picturing the Social’ project is the first to explore the impact images of this kind have on society. This includes images taken during brea...

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School has been invited to speak on his smart cities research at BIT’s 3 rd Annual World Congress of Emerging InfoTech 2014 at the Dalian World Expo Centre in China. He will speak about the ‘Socio-technical Challenges in Building Future Smart Cities’ on Friday 20 June and will also deliver a speech on ‘Benefits and Challenges for Migrating ERP Systems to the Cloud’ .