Information School News

Jo Bates’ work on the Big Data driven financial markets being developed in response to climate change has been published by The Conversation and New Statesman . Read more below.    Big agriculture, big data, big weather. Chemophilia The recent news story regarding Monsanto’s US$930million acquisition of the ‘Big Data’ science company, Climate Corporation, raises important questions about the economies developing in response to climate change. A new generation of data analytics firms are emerging, using innovations in the field of data science in order to turn vast datasets (‘Big Data’) into exploitable information. As the Financial Times reported , Monsanto’s purchase of Climate Corporation signals the ‘first significant acquisition’ of this emerging ‘Big Data’ industry. Climate Corporations’ key offering is a product called ‘Total Weather Insurance’  (TWI), which it currently sells directly to farmers in the USA. TWI pays out based solely upon observed weather c

Alex Peng was recently awarded a 3-month research placement project, funded by the Sustainable Society Network+ ( http:// sustainablesocietynetwork.net/ ). The placement will take place in the GSMA (a multi-national association uniting over 800 mobile operators across 200 countries,  http://www.gsma.com/aboutus/ ). During this project, Alex will be working together with the GSMA and the PwC to develop a robust metric and methodology that can be used to assess how ‘smart’ a city is.  A Global Smart City Index will be produced as the final outcome of this project.  The GSMA will make an official and global launch of this Index in their Mobile World Congress in Feb 2014.  Last year, the GSMA Mobile World Congress had 72,000 total attendees from more than 200 countries (including more than 4,300 CEOs), 1,700 total exhibitors, and 3,400 Media representatives ( http://mobileworldcapital. com/en/pagina/49 ). 

Andrew Cox will be speaking at Internet Librarian International 2013 this Wednesday. His talk is entitled "Roles in Research Data Management". Among other things he will be considering whether RDM is a wicked problem, and if it is, what this implies about how information professionals should approach it.