Information School News

 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 ...

Dr Dalibor Fiala is visiting the Information School between 29 July and  1st August to work with Professor Peter Willett on a citation study of computer science  in Eastern Europe since 1989. Dalibor is is an associate professor at the Department of Computer  Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia, and has  interests in a range of informetrics topics.

The Information School's Dr Jonathan Foster has been awarded a £2,000 research stimulation grant from Research and Innovation Services to develop a research proposal for the Marie Curie ITN.  The objective of this is to establish a training network for PhD students in information governance. This began as an initiative in the Information School's Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval research groups.

Dr Miguel Baptista Nunes of the Information School will chair the 8th International Conference on e-Learning in Lisbon, Portugal, between 15 and 18 July 2014.  The conference explores technical and non-technical aspects of e-Learning and the key note speaker will be Professor Neil Morris, Professor of Educational Technology, Innovation and Change and Director of Digital Learning at the University of Leeds. He will then chair the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Post-implementation and Change Management between 17 and 19 July, also in Lisbon.  This conference focuses upon the socio-technological perspective of information systems, exploring issues related to using, exploiting and maintaining information systems within organisations and focusing upon the post-implementation stage of the information systems life cycle.  

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School is presenting o n 15 July 2014 at the Intelligent Cities Conference 2014 as an international expert on smart cities.  The Intelligent Cities Conference is a highly reputable event in its field and  invites insightful speakers   from the government, industry and academia.   The conference this year will explore not simply the connectivity infrastructure needed for smart cities but will discuss intelligent open data, green technologies, innovation, healthcare, mobile advances, wealth creation, digital inclusion and M2M capabilities.   Dr Peng will be presenting the results of two recent interdisciplinary and industrial-based projects in the conference, namely the GSMA Smart Cities Index project and the Smart City Market Sizing project.