Information School News

On October 8 2022, the fourth and final public policy dialogue table  "Ancestral knowledge, climate change and innovation policies: steps for a common agenda", was held. Co-organized by the Institute of Nature, Land and Energy (INTE ) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the University of Sheffield with the support of the NGO Andes, it involves the participation of representatives from the National Institute of Agrarian Innovation, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Culture and the International Potato Center. Participants traveled to the city of Cusco to meet with the members of the Potato Park of the district Pisac and Parque Chalakuy in the district of Lares and learn about their experiences working with innovation.  This activity was the last in a series of four roundtables that have been implemented for more than a year, as part of the research project which seeks to make visible the contributions of innovation by I...

Dr Savins Puertas Martin, a Postdoc from the Chemoinformatics research group, received the Young Researcher Award in Computer Science 2022, a prestigious award from the Scientific Informatics Society of Spain (SCIE, Sociedad Científica Informática de España) and the BBVA Foundation . He received the award for his excellent contributions in the field of high-performance computing, which led to the development of innovative techniques that facilitate the design of new drugs, as well as his high level of internationalisation. His research has focused on virtual screening, a technique that allows the selection of compounds most similar to a reference molecule from a database that may contain millions of them, with the aim of accelerating drug discovery and development. "The objective is to identify, in this database, which molecules are the most similar to the one we have selected as a reference, analysing different characteristics such as shape, number of atoms, etc. Initially, we st...

 The pharmaceutical industry, the Higher Education sector and the world of the arts may seem like three very disparate areas but, along with almost all arenas of modern life, all three are heavily entwined with technology. Machine learning, data mining and AI in particular are hot topics in the information and technology spheres right now, and each of the aforementioned sectors has their own way of interacting with it. The AHRC-funded project ‘Patterns in Practice’ - which is led by Senior Lecturer Dr Jo Bates from Sheffield’s Information School, working with Professor Helen Kennedy from the University’s Department of Sociological Studies and Dr Erinma Ochu, Associate Professor of Immersive Media at UWE Bristol, as well as Dr Itzelle Medina Perea and Dr Monika Fratczak working as postdoctoral researchers in the Information School - aims to explore how the beliefs, values and feelings of practitioners from the pharmaceutical, education and arts sectors shape how they engage with mac...

People fall in love if someone or something helps them and makes them feel happy. This can be family, a friend, a pet, a hobby, and even technology. Modern society has fallen in love with data because of astonishing things they can do. People have become fascinated by the convenience that data bring. Data are used as a vital element to develop the technologies that we demand. The recommended movies and videos for you in Netflix and YouTube are the results of algorithms trained on tons of relevant data. ChatGPT, a language model that became sensationally popular recently due to its surprising performance, has also been trained on over 8 million web pages and 300 billion words of data. These advanced technologies are enough to impress people and companies. Accordingly, the belief that data would change the world or decide a company’s life and death at least has been strengthened recent years.  Even aside from the cutting-edge technologies, data affect small decisions of our lives. Le...

  “We often try to do multidisciplinary work, but it’s not often you work so closely with people from very different academic backgrounds”, says Dr Morgan Harvey, Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School and Sheffield’s Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘ Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy ’. Though the Civil War Period of American history - the 1860s - is the context for this project, Dr Harvey says “it’s actually pretty much exactly a clean 50/50 split between the historical part of the project and the information science part.” Along with Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Adam Funk in Sheffield and former Sheffield colleague Professor Frank Hopfgartner of the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, Dr Harvey is collaborating with historians Professor David Gleeson and Dr Damien Shiels at Northumbria University. Gleeson and Harvey lead the project as co-PIs, and the team is completed by Associate Professo...

More than 60 students on the MSc Data Science programme attended the annual Industry Day on Monday 28th November. The event invites speakers from various sectors in industry to share their experiences with utilising machine learning, AI and data science for applications within their domain.  Dr Lisa Clark, Head of Data Science from Atos, gave the talk "Variety is the spice of Data Science", covering a wide range of projects with government agencies and businesses.  Dr Cass Zhao, University of Sheffield, Department of Computer Science, talked about her PhD experience and how it helped her career as a data scientist and machine learning modeller. Joanna Hemingway, Team Lead of Data Visualisation and André Locher Data Engineering & Analytics Manager , gave a talk on how data science methods are used by Jet2 & Jet2holidays.  Dr Aidan Peppin, Senior Researcher from Ada Lovelace Institute, gave the talk "Careers in social research and public policy", covering a un...

The University of Sheffield Information School has announced a new undergraduate course, the BSc in Data Science. The new course has sustainability, equality, diversity and ethical practice at its core and takes a social sciences approach to responsible data science alongside giving students the practical and technical skills to analyse, critically evaluate, and solve a wide range of real-life problems. Expert industry partners involved in the design of the programme were clear that the data scientists of the future will need not just the technical skills but also the ability to contextualise the work they are undertaking. This degree will give students the skills they will need to be able to not only develop ethically and socially responsible data-driven solutions but also translate what the data means for a variety of stakeholders. The course is taught by researchers with expertise in a wide range of data science-related research areas, and was developed with input from industry expe...