Information School News

After a very interesting meeting at the lovely premises of the Connected Places Catapult last week, I am back, researching Urban Planning initiatives, studying outcomes and output measures. Based in London, the Connected Places Catapult is a UK Government-backed urban innovation agency that aims to help UK firms develop innovative products and services to help meet the growing needs of cities across the world. The CPC works with Industry, SMEs, academics, transport and local authorities and provides an excellent setting for my Researcher in Residence project, UrbanMapper . Cities are constantly adapting, changing and innovating to meet the rising demands of increasing populations, constrained resources and increased expectations from residents. With the increased availability and affordability of sensors (IoT), faster connectivity (mobile, broadband and the Internet), smartphones and high computational resources, new opportunities are emerging where large volumes of data can be collec...

Over 40 of Peter Willett’s ex-PhD students and long-time collaborators gathered in Sheffield in mid-September to celebrate Peter’s long and very influential career and to thank him for the personal support that he has provided to very many throughout this time. It is a mark of the very high regard in which Peter is held that so many people attended. They had travelled from as far as Canada, North America, Germany and Taiwan, as well as from all over the UK. Many of the attendees are now in very influential positions of their own including in academia, software companies and industry. Their connections to Peter spanned the full range of Peter’s career with one of his early PhD students having obtained her PhD over 30 years ago. A number of presentations were given that included reflections on Peter’s contribution to the fields of Chemoinformatics, Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics, a “Peter Willett: This is your Life” tribute, as well as many personal messages of thank...

Global Media and Information Literacy week   is a UNESCO-sponsored annual celebration of media and Information Literacy, with events organised around the world. This year’s theme is Media and Information Literate Citizens: Informed, Engaged, Empowered and the centre for Information Literacy Research (Information School, University of Sheffield)  is responding with events and activities on this theme --------------------------------------------------------- Free bite-sized webinar for Global Media and Information literacy Week: Dr Pamela McKinney: The Information literacy of food and activity logging in three communities. 11-11.30am UK time, Thursday 24 October 2019 (check the time in your country at https://tinyurl.com/globalmila ) To join the webinar go to https://tinyurl.com/globalmilabb just before the webinar start time. It uses Blackboard Collaborate (see here  for details on how to use it). You do not have to register for the webinar in advance, but i...

As Head of the Information School, I would like to welcome all of those who are joining to study with us. I understand that this is a new start for you and I hope you have found your first few weeks with us to be beneficial. Like yourselves, this year is a new start for me too. It is the first year in my current term as Head of the Information School. I have been Head of the School previously, and I am excited to see that the School is still evolving to meet the needs of our students and employers with our cutting-edge courses and technological advances. That said, it’s not too much of a new start for me: After completing a degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, I took a short term research post in the Department of Information Studies (as the Information School was then called). This post fueled my interest in the discipline and I took the MSc in Information Science and subsequent PhD. Having spent such a long time at this School, and in higher education in the UK, I am abl...

Now the dust has cleared from the 2019 iSchool Conference, we’ve had a break and come up with some interesting findings from the presentations at the event. The conference boasted a wide range of disciplines that PhD students from the iSchool are researching. The day kicked off purely with quantitative research, followed by mixed methods methodologies and ending with some thought-provoking qualitative research presentations. Here are our top highlights: Recommendation Systems in Drug Design The morning began with the first presentation by Gianmarco Ghiandoni, a 3rd year PhD student in the Cheminformatics research group . The study looks at De Novo design, a branch of cheminformatics dealing with the design of molecular structures. Gianmarco adapted  methods that are widely applied for recommendation purposes on human data - for example by companies such as Google, Amazon, or Netflix - to the computational drug design processes, where chemical and biological data are mai...

Yingshen Huang, from Peking University, China, who is working with Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi surveying Chinese universities about research data services, presented their joint work at  the CODATA 2019 Conference, held on 19-20 September in Beijing, China. The conference theme was: “Towards next-generation data-driven science: policies, practices and platforms.” Yingshen Huang presented the paper “Research data management in Chinese academic libraries”.

Lecturer in Information Management Dr Jonathan Foster responds to the recent news story about the historic 'Right to be Forgotten' ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in favour of search engine giant Google. The Ruling by the European Court of Justice earlier this week raises two important issues. First the issue of how democratic societies strike a balance between the privacy rights of the individual on the one hand, and the public interest on the other. Second, the limits of legal jurisdiction and of institutional obligation. The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ - or ‘Right to Erasure’ as it is now known - is a provision under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This provision provides individuals with the right to request organisations, search engine operators for example, to remove specific personally-identifying information about them. A number of reasons can be given by the user to justify their request: that processing of the data is no longer nec...