Information School News

From Director of Research Professor Paul Clough: I am delighted to announce that Alessandro Checco and Jo Bates (together with Gianluca Demartini) have won the Best Paper award at the prestigious Human Computation or HCOMP 2018 conference for the following paper: Checco A, Bates J & Demartini G (2018) All That Glitters is Gold -- An Attack Scheme on Gold Questions in Crowdsourcing. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Abstract here; http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/130654/ Not only is it a significant achievement to even be accepted at this conference it is an outstanding achievement to be nominated for Best Paper and then to win it is incredible. Alessandro and Gianluca were awarded the prize at HComp 2018 . Alessandro had this to say about the paper and reviews: "Feedback from chairs was that they really liked the fact we opened a new direction (that is having workers using ML solutions on the employers). We will have the opportu...

PhD student Wasim Ahmed, Professor Peter Bath, and Dr Gianluca Demartini have recently had a peer-reviewed book chapter published which looked at the ethical, legal, and methodological challenges of researching Twitter. The chapter is now open access, and the abstract and the link to download the chapter are provided below. Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the specific legal, ethical, and privacy issues that can arise when conducting research using Twitter data. Existing literature is reviewed to inform those who may be undertaking social media research. We also present a number of industry and academic case studies in order to highlight the challenges that may arise in research projects using social media data. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the process that was followed to gain ethics approval for a Ph.D. project using Twitter as a primary source of data. By outlining a number of Twitter-specific research case studies, the chapter will be a valuable res...

How can we more systematically assess whether an information retrieval system (e.g., a search engine), delivers an engaging user experience?  This is the question that has initiated a research project among PhD student, Mengdie Zhuang and her supervisors, Professor Elaine Toms , and Dr.  Gianluca Demartini . To date, search systems are evaluated using a range of isolated measures and metrics, mostly drawn from computer logfiles that contain keystrokes and mouse clicks. Some systems are assessed at the end of using the system with a questionnaire or interview.  When the system delivers a negative user experience, the system has no time to rectify its actions when the evaluation occurs at the end of using the system. This research team is looking at how one might examine the patterns of those actions so as to predict whether the user is likely to express a positive or negative assessment, combining both types of evaluations used to date.  Th...

The Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the New Social Media New Social Science (NSMNSS) network are hosting a one day conference that aims to further develop and explore the ethics of social science research using social media. The purpose of the conference is to move the debate forward and provide examples of good practice. PhD student Wasim Ahmed will present a paper at the con fe rence, co-authored with Dr Gianluca Demartini and Prof Peter Bath in the Ethical Practicalities Parallel Session A on Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of ethical challenges. Conference Registration on eventbrite can be found here . Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics . The full programme can be found here or here [pdf] and the abstract booklet is here [pdf] . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics

Dr Gianluca Demartini , Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School has been published in The Conversation. Gianluca's article entitled ' Clinton-Sanders data breach spat goes to the heart of modern campaigning ' highlights the significance of data management in US electoral campaigning. How voter data is utilised to better understand the electorate and help campaigners craft their speeches as well as facilitating more targeted advertising and seeking prospective donors is explained. In addition, Gianluca highlights potential problems in using big data but explains how the use of this data may benefit the voter.

On 25 November 2015 Professor Paul Clough and Dr Gianluca Demartini will provide tutorials at the annual Search Solutions event , London. The event is organised by the British Computer Society and details of the tutorials can be found here .

Congratulations to Dr Barbara Sen and Dr Gianluca Demartini , both of the Information School, who have won Faculty Awards. Dr Sen has received a Faculty Learning and Teaching Award. Her nomination was based on her extensive and impressive contributions to learning and teaching throughout her time in the Information School, with a focus on bringing real world practice to the classroom and promoting students' professionalism and employability. She will be presented with her award at an Awards event in ICoSS on 7th October. Dr Demartini has received a Faculty Early Career Researcher Award at the recent Faculty Research Conference. The award is in recognition of his recent EPSRC First Grant (BetterCrowd: Human Computation for Big Data) .

Dr Gianluca Demartini of the Information School has been invited to Facebook's London headquarters to present his work on grammar correction by means of preposition ranking and on entity identification in idiosyncratic documents. The research faculty summit takes place on Tuesday 22nd September 2015 and will specifically focus on machine learning, security, and programming languages. A small group of invited academics from the UK and Europe will join Facebook staff in presenting their work. The machine learning track will specifically focus on machine translation and Natural Language Processing, two areas that Facebook is actively working on at the Facebook London office.

Dr Gianluca Demartini  of the Information School has secured funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ( EPSRC) for his project entitled "BetterCrowd: Human Computation for Big Data". A short summary of the project proposal can be read below: In the last few years we have seen a rapid increase of available data. Digitization has become endemic. This has lead to a data deluge that left many unable to cope with such large amounts of messy data. Also because of the large number of content producers and different formats, data is not always easy to process by machines due to its its diverse quality and the presence of bias. Thus, in the current data-driven economy, if organizations can effectively analyze data at scale and use it as decision-support infrastructure at the executive level, data will lead to a key competitive advantage. To deal with the current data deluge, in the BetterCrowd project I will define and evaluate Human Computation methods...

On 20 May 2015 Dr Gianluca Demartini of the Information School will present a paper on 'The Dynamics of Micro-Task Crowdsourcing' at the 24th World Wide Web Conference in Florence, Italy. Micro-task crowdsourcing is a modern technique that allows outsourcing of simple data collection tasks to a crowd of individuals online. Tasks such as image annotation, document summarisation, or audio transcription are easy for humans to complete but very challenging for computers. micro-task crowdsourcing is commonly used to build information systems that combine the scalability of computers over large amounts of data with the quality of human intelligence. Over the last 10 years different micro-task crowdsourcing platforms have been created. These platforms are marketplaces where crowd workers complete tasks (usually called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) in exchange of small monetary rewards and where requesters post their data and tasks to quickly obtain large scale annotations. ...