Information School News

The University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Social Science hosts its inaugural inter-disciplinary Faculty research conference on 19 September 2014 with strong representation from the Information School. Six members of the Information School are speaking at the conference, with subjects highlighting the range of leading research which is carried out in the School: ·           Alex Peng – ‘Socio-Technical Challenges in Building Future Smart Cities’ ·          Barbara Sen – ‘The information coping trajectory’ ·          Peter Bath – ‘Sharing information online among people with life-threatening, chronic and terminal conditions’ and ‘Experiences of a Sandpit – life before, during and after the ESRC EMoTICON sandpit’ ·          Sheila Webber – ‘Is this a game?   Blended interplay of information between digital and physical worlds'...

The University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind event takes place between 18 and 28 September 2014, bringing together academics and industry professionals to showcase their research and bring it to life. Saturday 20 September sees the Resilient Cultures event take place as part of the Festival of the Mind.  This event explores open technology and resilience and participants can get involved in a variety of hands on activities during the event.   Two of these activities relate to Information School projects: Jo Bates’ current weather datum project and Farida Vis’ everyday growing cultures project . The Resilient Cultures event is open to everyone and will give adults and children alike the chance to try out activities that relate to Information School research projects.  The event takes place in the University’s Firth Court building and admission is free. 

The 6 th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing , run by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), takes place at the Paris Headquarters of UNESCO between 17 and 19 September 2014. Dr Stephen Pinfield of the Information School will be speaking at the Conference on 19 September on ‘Engaging with the general public on research and the future of open access’. The full conference programme is available on the OASPA website .

The annual MmIT national conference takes place in Sheffield on 11 and 12 September.  The 2014 conference focuses on sound and vision, exploring the world of video, podcasts, visualisations, augmented reality and iTunesU. Dr Andrew Cox of the Information School is attending the event, along with a number of student volunteers from the Information School who will be helping to run the event: Sharon Wagg, Rosa Sadler, Sarah Wilson, Naomi Calhoun and Foteini Karagianni.  MSc Digital Library Management student Penny Andrews is also speaking at the event on open resources and sharing media . Further details are available on the conference website .

 A new University of Sheffield course that explores the nature and value of play across cultures and communities begins on 29 September.  Sheila Webber of the Information School is a lead contributor to the course. ‘Exploring Play: the Importance of Play in Everyday Life’ is a seven week long course which introduces different play worlds and lives.  The course covers aspects of play from its history and play in virtual worlds; to how knowledge can inform play and how play spaces are designed.  It will also explore how play helps learning and how it can help young people become successful as adults.  The aim of the course is to get participants to think differently about play and to understand how significant it is in our lives and our development.  Sheila Webber is the lead contributor for week six of the course which will explore virtual worlds.  Videos used during this week were filmed by Sheila in Second Life and include interviews with ...

CLEF 2014 , the fifth Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) conference, takes place in Sheffield between 15 and 18 September 2014, hosted by the Information School at the University of Sheffield. This year’s event comprises an independent peer-reviewed conference which explores multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation as well as workshops and lab sessions which will test different aspects of mono- and cross-language information retrieval systems.  As with previous CLEF conferences, there will be a strong focus upon community-based evaluation and discussion on evaluation issues. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Susan Dumais of Microsoft, Fabio Ciravegna of the University of Sheffield and Ann Blandford of University College London. The General Chairs of CLEF 2014 are Paul Clough of the Information School at the University of Sheffield and Mark Sanderson at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University Mel...

A project to create a raspberry pi weather station is currently live in the Information School.  The Sheffield Pi weather station has been created by Romilly Close, undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Sheffield.  The project was funded by the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) scheme and is being supervised by Dr Jo Bates, Paula Goodale and Fred Sonnenwald from the Information School. Information about the Sheffield Pi station and how to create your own can be found on the project website .  You can also see live data from the Sheffield Pi station on Plot.ly , and further information can also be found on the Met Office Weather Observations Website .    This work compliments the School’s existing project entitled ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ which explores socio-cultural influences on weather data.  This project is funded under the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Big Data call.  It ...