Information School News

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.

Elizabeth Chapman , who recently successfully completed her PhD viva in the iSchool, has a featured post on the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) blog. It focuses on the subject of her dissertation, and is entitled: Improving LGBTQ* provision in your library: why and how to do it http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/improving-lgbtq-provision-your-library-why-how-do-it

Dr Jonathan Foster  of the Information School recently visited India to speak at several universities in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and to meet prospective Information School students to discuss the department's range of courses. The following article on course opportunities at the Information School was written by Dr Foster and appeared in the August issue of India's Careers360 magazine:

Wasim Ahmed, a first year PhD student at the Information School and member of the Health Informatics Research Group, has recently been featured in a White Rose Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) newsletter in the White Rose DTC PhD Researchers In The News section. The newsletter highlights Wasim’s recent impact activities such as his LSE impact blog post , his very successful research blog and his management of both the @iFutures2015 and the @DataPowerConf Twitter accounts, including the moderation of a Twitter chat which was a first for a University conference. The feature highlights Wasim’s membership of the ‘New Social Media New Social Science’   network, and his management of the @NSMNSS Twitter account which has over 3,600 strong followers comprised of researchers across disciplines from around the world. The newsletter also acknowledges collaborations Wasim has set up with researchers across continents from Europe, the Americas, and Australia which have generated po...

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...

Professor Peter Bath and Research Associate Dr Julie Ellis of the Information School have had an article published in The Conversation - a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary. The article, entitled "Save your outrage: online cancer fakers may be suffering a different kind of illness", can be read in full  here .