Information School News

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is pleased to report that his chapter written with Faith Gordon , ‘Digital weapons in a post-conflict society’, has been published in ‘ Anti-Social Media ', a volume edited by John Mair, Richard Tait and Tor Clark. A copy of the chapter can be downloaded here .

24th-31st October is Global Media and Information Literacy week , the initiative sponsored by UNESCO. The iSchool is celebrating with a number activities that demonstrate its engagement with this field. We have organised three webinars, free and open to all: 2pm-2.30 pm UK time (which is 10-10.30am US EST) Tuesday 30th Oct. Dr Laura Sbaffi  (Information School) presents her research on What makes us trust online information? The perspective of health information . Join the webinar (via Adobe Connect) at https://sheffield.adobeconnect.com/globalmilweek2 Enter as a "guest". You may need to download the free Adobe Connect application, so please allow a few minutes for that. 2pm-2.30 pm (which is 10-10.30am US EST) Wednesday 31st Oct. Sheila Webber  (Information School) and Stephen Wyber (IFLA Manager, Policy and Advocacy.) will give their  Impressions of Global MIL Week feature conference. Join the webinar at  https://sheffield.adobeconnect.com/globalmil...

Dr Jo Bates and Professor Paul Clough from the Information School attended the launch of the new H2020 funded CyCAT (Cyprus Centre for Algorithmic Transparency) project in Nicosia 8-9 October 2018. Jo and Paul are investigators on CyCAT , a project hosted by the Open University of Cyprus (OUC), which aims to educate and raise awareness of ways in which data analytics and algorithmic processes can affect people's access to and interactions with information. The project will help promote digital literacy around algorithmic bias, transparency and fairness, a topic gaining considerable attention and media attention. The CyCAT project started 1st October 2018 and will run for 3 years. OUC is the lead partner of the project with additional contributions coming from The University of Sheffield , the University of Haifa , the University of Trento (Università degli Studi di Trento), and The University of Edinburgh.

It is always exciting to see a former PhD student again and find out more about what they are doing now, so it was amazing to be able to visit Mexico City and say hello again to Gibrán Rivera Gonzalez who gained his PhD at the Information School in 2013. He is now a lecturer at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, one of the top universities in Mexico. The picture below is of a seminar I gave on the need for qualitative research in the age of big data and AI. Together we also went to the Entre Pares conference, in Pueblo, organised by CONRICYT (The National Consortium of Scientific and Technological Information Resources). The conference aims to promote scholarly communication in academic communities across Mexico. This year’s event had an impressive programme of presentations on a wide variety of information science topics. There was a track on Research Data Management, reflecting the increasing interest in this topic in the country. It was good to be able to share some UK experi...

Congratulations to Gianmarco Ghiandoni, PhD student in the Chemoinformatics Research Group , who recently won the Best Student Poster prize at the UK QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship) Autumn 2018 Meeting, which took place at Lady Margaret Conference Centre, Oxford University, on September 26th. Gianmarco's poster was entitled 'Fingerprint-based recommendation Models in Reaction-driven Drug Design'. The prize gives Gianmarco the opportunity to convert his poster to a 30 minute talk which he will give at the next UK QSAR meeting on 4th April 2019 in Cambridge. Gianmarco's PhD research is on the topic of reaction-based molecular design, supervised by Professor Val Gillet of the Information School and Professor Beining Chen from the Department of Chemistry. You can find out more about his research here .

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly and Research Associate Dr. Ioanna Tantanasi have published an article entitled ‘Social media’s not all bad- it’s saving lives in disaster zones ‘ for the Conversation UK last week. The piece draws on their  CascEff and IMPROVER work on social media and crisis communication. Thanks to Stephen Harris for his editorial support and the invitation to comment on this issue.

Professor Josephine Nabukenya, Chair of Health Informatics in the Department of Information Systems, School of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, has paid a five-day visit to the Information School as a guest of Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Pamela Abbott, representing the Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups, respectively. Josephine’s visit follows on from a five-day research visit made by Drs Sbaffi and Abbott to Makerere University in April to establish research collaborations, which were initiated between Professor Nabukenya and Professor Peter Bath, Chair of Health Informatics and Head of the Information School. While visiting the School, Josephine met researchers mainly in the Health Informatics and Information Systems research groups and presented a seminar on “Transforming Uganda’s Healthcare and Ecosystem Using Health Informatics Research”; details of the seminar are here . She also spent time exploring current research ...