Amy Guy
Raw Blog
Showing posts with label attendee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attendee. Show all posts
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
OKFN Meetup #6
Thursday 16th of May was the 6th Open Knowledge Foundation meetup in Edinburgh. We had a great room in Techcube, more speakers than usual and loads of attendees. Here's an account.
Bill Roberts
Bill, founder of Swirrl ("the linked data company") talked about tools and user interfaces they are developing to make handling data easier for communities; particularly for the less technical. They've encountered a spectrum of users with different levels of technical abilities and needs, so they have to account for this in the tools they build. Technical complexity for accessing data ranges from SPARQL endpoints, JSON APIs, downloadable spreadsheets to visualisations, maps and charts.
They're focussing on providing the data in accessible ways rather than building visualisations though. They'd struggle to meet or even understand everyone's needs; instead, it's important to concentrate in empowering the communities to use the data themselves.
Kim Taylor
An undergraduate Informatics student and participant of the Smart Data Hack, Kim showed us placED, the project her team had worked on, and are continuing to develop.
This is a place finder for people who are looking to maintain or improve their personal wellbeing. They used datasets from the City of Edinburgh Council (and presumably ALISS?) to create an Android app. They stored their data in a Google AppEngine datastore, but I'm not sure if it has a web frontend as well.
Some of the problems they encountered include copyright issues with ordnance survey place data, and royal mail postcode data, which made up part of the Council's data but wasn't available for anyone to use due to licensing restrictions. They worked around this by recomputing location data from the parts of addresses the did have access to with Google's geocoding API.
When they open their database up for user input, which they inevitably will if they want their app to stay current and useful, they'll have to think about how to maintain the content.
Gavin Crosby
Gavin works for the Council, with a title I've forgotten, but it's to do with youth work. Youth work has a very specific definition to do with people aged between 11 and 25, meeting in organised groups with a volunteering adult present. There's loads of this going on in Edinburgh, organised by Scouts/Guides, schools, churches or maybe even self-organised. There's no central database about what is going on where, which is one of the Council's biggest issues in this area. Word of mouth is usually how this kind of information is spread amongst young people, and Gavin suggested that a lot of youths may be unwilling to attend something they'd heard about without a direct invitation from someone they know.
In an attempt to reign some of this information in, they've created the Youth Work Map.
It's not an ideal system, as they have to update it manually when a youth group or activity organiser decide to inform the Council that they exist. Not everybody opts in, so there is data missing. Manual updating also means the map is not 'live'; things might go out of date and not be removed straight away.
Gavin said it is the constraints of the Council's web system that has caused a lot of the problems, and points out that they haven't considered accessibility issues (for example, access for people with vision problems), and it's not interactive. He'd love to see the ability for kids to chat to each other through the map, or leave reviews for particular events. There are issues with child protection here, of course.
He would also like to see better tagging and organisation of the content on the map, links to other data repositories (there are parallel similar projects), and the ability to connect events to areas or routes rather than single points.
Gavin pointed out that a lot of the audience for this map is likely to be adults looking for youth projects, rather than young people themselves.
Leah Lockhart
Leah made a quick announcement about the new Local Government Open Data Working Group. They're organising open data surgeries (similar to her social media surgeries that you've definitely heard of by now if you're floating around the OD scene in Edinburgh). They're also hoping to fill in the OKFN Open Data Census for Scotland, and meet regularly in the pub.
Tweet Leah if you're interested!
Fiona McNeill
Fiona works in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and she told us about Open Data in climate change science, or the lack thereof. A team she has put together have got some funding to carry out a small investigation about Open Data use in climate change science, and to try to build a network around this. They'll be looking at trends and patterns of the past decade to see if research has been any more successful when existing datasets were used, or if papers are more well-cited when they make their data open at the end of it (for example).
She thinks the lack of Open Data in this area could be due to the expensive nature of making data good enough quality to share, and of course the fact that when people have worked hard to gather data they feel that they own it; why should they share?
They're hoping that their report might go some way to persuading funding bodies to have sharing of data as a criteria for applications.
Contact Fiona if you're interested in this kind of thing.
John Kellas
John said, brilliantly, that talking about information visualisation usually means graphs. But normal people "don't think in graphs".
He works in community education, and a couple of years ago he started working in "volumetric and comparative" visualisations, which can be much more useful and empowering to people. He showed us a visualisation of one trillion dollars (which I can't find a link to, so let me know if anyone has one).
He's not had much support with creating tools and visualisations, because he's not interested in making money from it, so it's hard to attract funding. What he's doing looks really useful though, so hopefully we'll see more!
Ben Jeffery
Ben is another undergraduate Informatics student who took part in the Smart Data Hack and whose team is still working on the project they started at the hack. They're re-imagining the University's student information portal by pulling in lots of different data sources, and presenting the information more sensibly. They've been doing a fantastic job, but of course are all busy with exams and general learning, so the haven't been able to spend as much time on this as they'd like.
They're also struggling to get raw data out of the University, and point to (my alma mater) the University of Lincoln's open data portal as an example of what could and should be done about this. So they're turning their project into a pilot to demonstrate what they could do if they had the data they wanted. They're also conscious of similar-but-different projects, like projects.ed.ac.uk, and don't want to duplicate effort.
Ben said they've found that a lot of the University of Edinburgh's data is held by middleware vendors, so it's particularly hard to access. But this is information that is funded by students, so it should be available to them! He said the "University should be a breeding ground for knowledge" so data shouldn't be silo'd up.
He also said that there are a lot of politics in the way with this sort of thing. They, as any level-headed software developer, just want to build stuff. They're still in various talks though, so this is a space to watch...
Susan Pettie and Marc Horne
These guys are from So Say Scotland and aim to change culture to make Scotland better. Open Data is important for democratic movements, so they told us about some of their events. They're building a network of activists and campaigners, and hold large scale assemblies themed around 'thinking together', which is a kind of en masse guided brainstorming. They're trying to spark a movement, and are aiming for 25,000 people. They're investigating ways to make their assemblies more efficient, as currently collating all of the ideas that are generated is a manual process. This would be nigh on impossible when they reach their participation goal.
There will be a report about their progress on the 27th of May.
Devon Walshe
Devon was our Techcube host, and he told us about Sync Geeks, Geeks in Residence. This is a program funded by Creative Scotland that puts the technologically minded into arts organisations. Previous efforts by arts organisations to employ 'geeks' to solve a technical problem or produce a digital solution for something have been problematic due to the 'black box' approach. The developers produce an outcome, get paid and leave, often aiming to do the minimum amount of work. Geeks in Residence promotes developers and the organisations working together more closely, to allow for sustainable solutions.
Part of the project is to analyse the relationships of people who know about technology, and those who don't, with each other.
In my notes I've scribbled "convert fear into technology", and I can't remember what that originated from, but it sounds awesome.
Devon did some work with Stills photography centre. Nobody knew what they needed, so after some collaboration they developed an interactive floor plan (because the Stills building is way confusing) and some kind of interactive timeline because Stills has an interesting history.
He also plugged the Culture Hack Scotland in Glasgow in July (12th-14th), which I'm terribly disappointed I won't be in the country for.
Next OKFN meetup
Will be on the 22nd of August, in Informatics. Here's a link to the Meetup so you can RSVP. I'll sure be there, if I'm not somewhere else.. (depends if/when/where my Mum books an obligatory family holiday).
Bill Roberts
Bill, founder of Swirrl ("the linked data company") talked about tools and user interfaces they are developing to make handling data easier for communities; particularly for the less technical. They've encountered a spectrum of users with different levels of technical abilities and needs, so they have to account for this in the tools they build. Technical complexity for accessing data ranges from SPARQL endpoints, JSON APIs, downloadable spreadsheets to visualisations, maps and charts.
They're focussing on providing the data in accessible ways rather than building visualisations though. They'd struggle to meet or even understand everyone's needs; instead, it's important to concentrate in empowering the communities to use the data themselves.
Kim Taylor
An undergraduate Informatics student and participant of the Smart Data Hack, Kim showed us placED, the project her team had worked on, and are continuing to develop.
This is a place finder for people who are looking to maintain or improve their personal wellbeing. They used datasets from the City of Edinburgh Council (and presumably ALISS?) to create an Android app. They stored their data in a Google AppEngine datastore, but I'm not sure if it has a web frontend as well.
Some of the problems they encountered include copyright issues with ordnance survey place data, and royal mail postcode data, which made up part of the Council's data but wasn't available for anyone to use due to licensing restrictions. They worked around this by recomputing location data from the parts of addresses the did have access to with Google's geocoding API.
When they open their database up for user input, which they inevitably will if they want their app to stay current and useful, they'll have to think about how to maintain the content.
Gavin Crosby
Gavin works for the Council, with a title I've forgotten, but it's to do with youth work. Youth work has a very specific definition to do with people aged between 11 and 25, meeting in organised groups with a volunteering adult present. There's loads of this going on in Edinburgh, organised by Scouts/Guides, schools, churches or maybe even self-organised. There's no central database about what is going on where, which is one of the Council's biggest issues in this area. Word of mouth is usually how this kind of information is spread amongst young people, and Gavin suggested that a lot of youths may be unwilling to attend something they'd heard about without a direct invitation from someone they know.
In an attempt to reign some of this information in, they've created the Youth Work Map.
It's not an ideal system, as they have to update it manually when a youth group or activity organiser decide to inform the Council that they exist. Not everybody opts in, so there is data missing. Manual updating also means the map is not 'live'; things might go out of date and not be removed straight away.
Gavin said it is the constraints of the Council's web system that has caused a lot of the problems, and points out that they haven't considered accessibility issues (for example, access for people with vision problems), and it's not interactive. He'd love to see the ability for kids to chat to each other through the map, or leave reviews for particular events. There are issues with child protection here, of course.
He would also like to see better tagging and organisation of the content on the map, links to other data repositories (there are parallel similar projects), and the ability to connect events to areas or routes rather than single points.
Gavin pointed out that a lot of the audience for this map is likely to be adults looking for youth projects, rather than young people themselves.
Leah Lockhart
Leah made a quick announcement about the new Local Government Open Data Working Group. They're organising open data surgeries (similar to her social media surgeries that you've definitely heard of by now if you're floating around the OD scene in Edinburgh). They're also hoping to fill in the OKFN Open Data Census for Scotland, and meet regularly in the pub.
Tweet Leah if you're interested!
Fiona works in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and she told us about Open Data in climate change science, or the lack thereof. A team she has put together have got some funding to carry out a small investigation about Open Data use in climate change science, and to try to build a network around this. They'll be looking at trends and patterns of the past decade to see if research has been any more successful when existing datasets were used, or if papers are more well-cited when they make their data open at the end of it (for example).
She thinks the lack of Open Data in this area could be due to the expensive nature of making data good enough quality to share, and of course the fact that when people have worked hard to gather data they feel that they own it; why should they share?
They're hoping that their report might go some way to persuading funding bodies to have sharing of data as a criteria for applications.
Contact Fiona if you're interested in this kind of thing.
John Kellas
John said, brilliantly, that talking about information visualisation usually means graphs. But normal people "don't think in graphs".
He works in community education, and a couple of years ago he started working in "volumetric and comparative" visualisations, which can be much more useful and empowering to people. He showed us a visualisation of one trillion dollars (which I can't find a link to, so let me know if anyone has one).
He's not had much support with creating tools and visualisations, because he's not interested in making money from it, so it's hard to attract funding. What he's doing looks really useful though, so hopefully we'll see more!
Ben Jeffery
Ben is another undergraduate Informatics student who took part in the Smart Data Hack and whose team is still working on the project they started at the hack. They're re-imagining the University's student information portal by pulling in lots of different data sources, and presenting the information more sensibly. They've been doing a fantastic job, but of course are all busy with exams and general learning, so the haven't been able to spend as much time on this as they'd like.
They're also struggling to get raw data out of the University, and point to (my alma mater) the University of Lincoln's open data portal as an example of what could and should be done about this. So they're turning their project into a pilot to demonstrate what they could do if they had the data they wanted. They're also conscious of similar-but-different projects, like projects.ed.ac.uk, and don't want to duplicate effort.
Ben said they've found that a lot of the University of Edinburgh's data is held by middleware vendors, so it's particularly hard to access. But this is information that is funded by students, so it should be available to them! He said the "University should be a breeding ground for knowledge" so data shouldn't be silo'd up.
He also said that there are a lot of politics in the way with this sort of thing. They, as any level-headed software developer, just want to build stuff. They're still in various talks though, so this is a space to watch...
Susan Pettie and Marc Horne
These guys are from So Say Scotland and aim to change culture to make Scotland better. Open Data is important for democratic movements, so they told us about some of their events. They're building a network of activists and campaigners, and hold large scale assemblies themed around 'thinking together', which is a kind of en masse guided brainstorming. They're trying to spark a movement, and are aiming for 25,000 people. They're investigating ways to make their assemblies more efficient, as currently collating all of the ideas that are generated is a manual process. This would be nigh on impossible when they reach their participation goal.
There will be a report about their progress on the 27th of May.
Devon Walshe
Devon was our Techcube host, and he told us about Sync Geeks, Geeks in Residence. This is a program funded by Creative Scotland that puts the technologically minded into arts organisations. Previous efforts by arts organisations to employ 'geeks' to solve a technical problem or produce a digital solution for something have been problematic due to the 'black box' approach. The developers produce an outcome, get paid and leave, often aiming to do the minimum amount of work. Geeks in Residence promotes developers and the organisations working together more closely, to allow for sustainable solutions.
Part of the project is to analyse the relationships of people who know about technology, and those who don't, with each other.
In my notes I've scribbled "convert fear into technology", and I can't remember what that originated from, but it sounds awesome.
Devon did some work with Stills photography centre. Nobody knew what they needed, so after some collaboration they developed an interactive floor plan (because the Stills building is way confusing) and some kind of interactive timeline because Stills has an interesting history.
He also plugged the Culture Hack Scotland in Glasgow in July (12th-14th), which I'm terribly disappointed I won't be in the country for.
Next OKFN meetup
Will be on the 22nd of August, in Informatics. Here's a link to the Meetup so you can RSVP. I'll sure be there, if I'm not somewhere else.. (depends if/when/where my Mum books an obligatory family holiday).
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Starting up in IT panel discussion
I had an amazing evening at the Starting up in IT panel discussion, followed by Innis & Gunn beer tasting on Thursday evening. It was held in the shiny MMS Quartermile One offices. (When I'm rich, I want a flat on Quartermile. A turret-y one, not a glass one. Or maybe both).
I felt chronically under-dressed when I arrived - a majority were suited - but everyone was really friendly and forthcoming with advice.
Anyway, speaking of being rich. There were lots of interesting business-wise people to talk to at this event, including CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams, and Craig Anderson of Pentech Ventures. Plus lawyers specialising in things like IP, employment, company formation, from MMS. The panel discussion was enlightening; I'll go through some
Funding
- Skyscanner - 2 mil from Scottish Equity Partners 2007.
- Getting funding isn't a goal or validation.
- Best way to get funding is not to need it.
- Scottish Enterprise: match funding.
- Give as much as you get. Confide in investor.
Getting wise
- Don't pitch too early. Build traction first.
- Prove potential marketshare one way or another.
- Preparing business plan is productive. Converting to a vision to a plan when you get funding.
- Subscribe to investment bloggers.
- Networkiiiing. Find someone to champion you to an investor.
- Gareth: As many people are delusional as have a key insight. How to know which you are yourself?
Employees
- Do you need employees or contractors? Casual employees in between.
- Consultant / contractors own IP for work they do. Unless contract says otherwise. Employees don't, employer owns it.
I heard about some really interesting ventures, too, like Identity Artworks which looks like they're making a huge difference to young people, and have really inspiring stories to tell. Plus ShareIn, soon launching an equity crowdfunding platform. Veeerrry interesting...
The panel was followed by beer tasting hosted by Innis & Gunn. I don't drink, but I would have sipped along to be sociable. However, it turned out the beer wasn't vegetarian (filtered through isinglass). This, at least, meant more for everyone else on my table. MMS had come up with a written seating plan, by the way, that separated people who had arrived together. Forced networking! Excellent.
This served as great chance for Steve and I to independently practice our GeoLit elevator pitching, and I think we'd got it down to perfection by the end of the evening. Extremely encouragingly, we were consistently met with enthusiasm and responses like "that's an amazing idea!". We left pretty buzzing.
Monday, April 22, 2013
[Notes] How to write a literature review workshop
Just notes!
Workshop by Dr Mimo Caenepeel on Monday 22nd April.
'Critical' does not mean you have to pass judgement, or say why it's good or bad.
Not taking things at face value.
Started with freewriting about what has particularly influenced / inspired our own research. Five minutes, not allowed to stop or edit, don't worry about quality of writing, not for anyone else to read. A good way to get ideas out of your head and start to organise your thoughts without censoring or constraining yourself.
How many pages will a review usually take up in a thesis? My policy is to write what needs to be written and stop when you're done. But apparently 20 to 30, sometimes more, is normal in sciences.
There's no consistent / right answer to 'how many publications to review'. For some people it's in the tens, for some the hundreds.
Think about how to integrate literature review into the thesis. You're unlikely to have a chapter that is just 'literature review' and no mention of the background reading elsewhere.
Good qualities for a lit review?
- Coherence (avoid fragmentation)
- Structure, clarity.
- Proof of novelty - purposeful.
A review can often be considered as an indicator of the quality of the rest of the research - demonstrating scholarship.
A good place to start:
1. Write your research question, formulated as a question.
2. Write up to five research areas that are relevant to your research question.
3. Note some related issues/areas that will not be considered in your review.
Think about balance of content.
1. Three studies influential in your field (I couldn't answer this, I clearly need to read more).
2. Two significan older contributions.
3. Five recent sources.
4. Two sources that have strongly influenced your thinking.
You don't need to consider all papers in the same level of detail. Decide which papers are more important / useful than others.
For some papers (important ones) you should work through these questions in the same way every time you read something (this is 'SQ3R'):
1. Survey: What is the gist of the article? Skim the title, abstract, introduction, conclusion and section headings. What stands out?
2. Question: Which aspects of the research are particularly relevant for your review? Articulate some relevant questions the article might address.
3. Read: Read through the text more slowly and in more detail and highlight key points / key words. Identify connections with other material you have read.
4. Recall: Divide the text into manageable chunks and summarise each chunk in a sentence.
5. Review: To what extent has the text answered the questions you formulated earlier?
Critical reading (these seem like really useful questions to work through whilst reading papers):
1. What is the author's central argument or main point, ie. what does the author want you, the reader, to accept?
2. What conclusions does the author reach?
3. What evidence does the author put foward in support of his or her conclusions?
4. Do you think the evidence is strong enough to support the arguments and conclusions, ie. is the evidence relevant and far-reaching enough?
5. Does the author make any unstated assumptions about shared beliefs with readers?
6. Can these assumptions be challenged?
7. Could the text's scientific, cultural or historical context have an effect on the author's assumptions, the content and the way it has been presented?
See Ridley, D. The Literature Review: A step-by-step guide for students. Sage Study Skills Series. Sage Publications, 2011 (2008).
Thursday, April 18, 2013
[Notes] 'How to write a thesis' workshop
Just notes from a three-hour workshop about how to write an Informatics thesis, on the 16th of April.
State contributions (to knowledge) explicitly. Intro, conclusions; each chapter should have some (probably not all) contributions discussed. Be obvious; use headings.
Knowledge - background:
Evidence, well-reasoned arguments, acknowledge limitations.
Clear openings for future work. Be clear where they are.
Make it reproduceable.
Short / concise. Examiners like short theses.
Introduce what's interesting and important.
When outline thesis, look at structure of main argument, not of document.
Background material must have point. Only include as much detail as you need to make point.
Points, eg:
Then we had five minutes to write down what our PhDs are about and what we have already found out. I wrote:
How do the futures of the Semantic Web and amateur digital content creation fit together?
Can Semantic Web tools and technologies be used to enhance collaborative creative partnerships and encourage fruitful outputs?
There are knowledge sharing systems and collaborative tools for scientific fields and in education, but nothing for creative artsy things.
Attitudes towards data sharing and privacy amongst content creators are in flux. There are lots of projects and energy around open data and decentralised social networks that allow data to become portable and not tied to one platform. One of TBL's visions for the Semantic Web is the dissolution of data silos and 'walled' applications that disadvantage the user, and as such the promotion of the 'ownership' of a user's data by the user themselves, rather than the software or organisation that uses the data.
There are lots of reasons people make content. There are lots of reasons people don't make content (who could / would like to).
[Notes resume]
Use backreferences; don't repeat yourself.
Info / advice
...homepages.../sgwater/resources.html
..homepages.../imurray2/teaching/writing
Style: Toward Clarity & Grace (book)
The Craft of Research (book)
When to start writing thesis?
Don't assume appendices will be read. More for extra info if needed by people trying to reproduce your work (not your examiners).
Too many direct quotes look like you don't understand and are avoiding explaining yourself.
Keep copies of web resources and cite access dates in case they change / disappear.
Figures might be copyright if you just copy them from papers, even if you cite them. Remake them, and put 'adapted from' as citation.
Examiners?
No grading system (ie no different levels of passed PhD). Might be external prizes if you want extra recognition.
State contributions (to knowledge) explicitly. Intro, conclusions; each chapter should have some (probably not all) contributions discussed. Be obvious; use headings.
Knowledge - background:
- justify choices
- explain methods
- acknowledge alternatives
- evaluate
Evidence, well-reasoned arguments, acknowledge limitations.
Clear openings for future work. Be clear where they are.
Make it reproduceable.
Short / concise. Examiners like short theses.
Introduce what's interesting and important.
When outline thesis, look at structure of main argument, not of document.
Background material must have point. Only include as much detail as you need to make point.
Points, eg:
- Explain method you use.
- Novelty of your approach. Similarities with existing work.
- Justify choices (evaluate other work).
- Don't tear down others' work. 'Build on'.
- Cite examiners, they've probably published something relevant.. (but not for the sake of it).
Then we had five minutes to write down what our PhDs are about and what we have already found out. I wrote:
How do the futures of the Semantic Web and amateur digital content creation fit together?
Can Semantic Web tools and technologies be used to enhance collaborative creative partnerships and encourage fruitful outputs?
There are knowledge sharing systems and collaborative tools for scientific fields and in education, but nothing for creative artsy things.
Attitudes towards data sharing and privacy amongst content creators are in flux. There are lots of projects and energy around open data and decentralised social networks that allow data to become portable and not tied to one platform. One of TBL's visions for the Semantic Web is the dissolution of data silos and 'walled' applications that disadvantage the user, and as such the promotion of the 'ownership' of a user's data by the user themselves, rather than the software or organisation that uses the data.
There are lots of reasons people make content. There are lots of reasons people don't make content (who could / would like to).
[Notes resume]
Use backreferences; don't repeat yourself.
Info / advice
...homepages.../sgwater/resources.html
..homepages.../imurray2/teaching/writing
Style: Toward Clarity & Grace (book)
The Craft of Research (book)
When to start writing thesis?
- Do you already have papers? Slot them into a thesis template asap.
- Maybe a year beforehand. Slower pace is better.
Don't assume appendices will be read. More for extra info if needed by people trying to reproduce your work (not your examiners).
Too many direct quotes look like you don't understand and are avoiding explaining yourself.
Keep copies of web resources and cite access dates in case they change / disappear.
Figures might be copyright if you just copy them from papers, even if you cite them. Remake them, and put 'adapted from' as citation.
Examiners?
- Depends on your supervisor. Discuss. Student might be able to suggest someone to examine.
- Maybe a balance between internal and external knowledge.
- Won't be someone junior, even if they're considered an expert in the field.
- Helpful if supervisor knows how that person will behave in viva. Might be a good reason to avoid someone you think would be perfect from their background.
- Conflict of interest regulations. You can know them personally though. External can't have been affiliated with UoE in the last three years, or substantially involved in your research (like co-authoring a paper). No ex-supervisors, from any university.
No grading system (ie no different levels of passed PhD). Might be external prizes if you want extra recognition.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
2nd UK Ontology Networks Workshop
The UK Ontology Networks Workshop took place over one day in the Informatics Forum.
There was a mix of people there; some talks were way over my head and very technical, and some talks were by people who confessed they had had to look up "ontology" that morning. And things in between.
Lazy writeup, but following are notes as I scribbled them:
John Callahan
US navy research.
Focused information integration.
Human intervention to keep predictive part on track. Tweaking.
Alan Bundy
Interaction of representation and reasoning.
Changing world so agents must evolve. How to automate? What would trigger a need for change:
Inconsistency
Incompleteness
Inefficiency
how to diagnose which?
Interested in language and perception change.
Unsorted first order logic algorithm called Reformation. Based on standard unification algorithm.
Allows blocking and unblocking unification.
Phil Barker
Schema.org
Cetis (JISC funded)
learning resource metadata initiative.
Big names behind schema.org.
= ontology + syntax
Big and growing ontology.
Dumbed down for people.
LRMI adds to it. W3C go through it. It's creeping, how much do the big names actually care about stuff that's added?
don't know how Google uses it.
People should consider using it for more sophisticated search and disambiguation.
Gill Hamilton
Doing more with library metadata. Learnt from OKFN. Had to convince people in charge.
Dublin core, didn't like; not specific enough. Instead RDF > OWL. "We know best how to structure our data"
Hardest was convincing marketing people that there was no commercial value. Metadata is advert to actual resource.
Enrico Motta
Traditionally top down approach. So now so many people interacting with semantic structures, so should involve users.
Recognise there isn't a unique or best way of doing things.
Initial study included modeling task with binary relations.
Patterns that are more or less intuitive. 4D least, 3D+1 most.
N-ary most widely used by experts.
Relationship between reasoning power and intuitiveness of writing? More creativity needed for simpler ones. (Not really sure what he's saying)
Email him for copy of study.
Chris Mellish
Ontology authoring is hard. Better ways to do it.
Controlled language input (mature tech); responsive reasoning (also mature, information as you're editing); understanding the process (beginning to understand more).
Hypotheses:
users don't know what they're doing. What if questions. Many answers, what is relevant? Depends on context.
Authoring as dialogue.
Todo list.
Useable in the same ways as protégé.
Peter Winstanley
UN classification schemes.
Various vocabularies.
Allow development of cross mapping between government administrations.
Mostly internal currently. Moves to bring externalizing data into the 21st century.
Peter Murray-Rust
Fight for your Ontologies.
Ontologies in physical sciences. Chemists don't want ontologies. They'll sue you.
Crystallography uses 'dictionary'. Written in CIF. 20 years to build CIF.
Compare physical sciences to government.
Every program author writes dictionaries that work for them. When different parties agree, promote to communal dictionary. Provide conventions to help disagreements.
Show a company can do it as opposed to a rabbiting academic ..
Jeff Pan
Tractable ontological stream reasoning.
Need to be more efficient, scaleable, as things change. Inputs from web.
Dealing with complexities: approximate owl2.
Dealing with frequent updates: to-add stream and to-do delete stream. Truth maintenance. Evaluation criteria.
Trowl.EU can use with protégé, also supports jena.
Edoardo Pignotti
Semantic web tech to support Interdisciplinary research.
ourSpaces VRE
Provenance crucial.
OPM prov ontology.
Deployed since 2009, 180 users. Comprehensive ontologies but people unwilling to provide metadata.
paper! Edwards et al. ourSpaces.
Tom Grahame (BBC) @tfgrahame
Content arrangement on BBC sport by tagging, automatic to free up editors to write.
LD API so systems don't need to know about each other.
Growing from simple rdfxml to more complex ontology.
Can ask much more general and much more detailed questions about sport.
Mapping incoming data is outsourced.
Lots of errors, sometimes system alerts, sometimes manual.
Working on opening the data. Maybe a dump, but licensing issues.
Ewan Klein
Mining old texts for commodities, adding place and time and putting in structured database.
Transcriptions of customs import records.
Skos for synonyms.
Dbp concepts.
Why? Want to query.
Visualisations.
Tools? Python script.
Janice Watson
Harnessing clinical terminologies and classifications for healthcare improvements.
Bob Barr
Geographical addressing.
Addressing and address geocoding is important and broad. Not always postal, but this not addressed (punlol) in ontologies.
Different contexts change meaning of address (for delivering, you only care about postbox; property sale whole building).
Loads of things to address. Loads of reasons why.
Work held up as national address file is owned by royal mail and might be sold!
Fiona McNeill
Run time extraction of data. Failure driven. Looking at extraction of specific information.
Emergency response. Lots of data, timely sharing of data required.
From domestic level to humanitarian disasters.
How can it be automated?
Multilayered incompatibility.
Format
Terminology
Structure
...
Richard Gunn
Towards an intelligent information industry.
Elena Simperl (Soton, sociam)
Crowdsourcing ontology engineering.
CSrc: Brabham 2008.
Distribute task into smaller atomic units.
Humans validating results that are automatically detected as not accurate.
What are the costs? What resources?
Games with a purpose. Like quizzes.
Micropayments or vouchers.
MTurk. CrowdFlower.
Paper about useage of microtask crowdsourcing. ISWC 2012.
Claudia Paglieri
Ontologies in ehealth.
Enrico Motta - Rexplore
Klink algorithm mines relations between research topics.
Use this! Nope, it's not public. Uees MS Academic research.
Peter Murray-Rust
Content mining expands regular text mining.
Focus on academic stuff.
Chemical Tagger. Takes chemistry jargon and annotated it, knows actions, conditions, molecules etc.. NLP. Uses ontologies and contributes to ontologies.
In chemistry, no need to put everything in rdf because there are already lots of formalisms.
Proper cool PDF to sensible format conversion. Amy the kangaroo. Looking for collaborators.
Yuan Ren
Ontology authoring in whatif project.
Reasoning with protégé and trowl .
Tractable reasoning. Trowl v fast.
Notes from conversations / breakout discussions:
BBC use owlm triplestore .
Store all their datasets in svn. But they have reads and writes to the live triplestore all the time.
Lots of people saying minimise owl use because of unpredictable output.
Versioning ontologies (available in owl2) in case third parties change stuff you use. You're dependent on their software engineering practices. Only good if they're ahead of the game.
IRIs, Arabic characters in ontologies!
Semantic heavy, maybe make a decision to abstract away to ids and make heavier use of labels.
Difference between importing and using someone else's.
There's no (practically useful) software that lets you reason over stuff you haven't imported? (over HTTP?)
Build ontology from reality (data), don't start with no data.
Lode.
Problems with dbpedia URIs changing or disappearing.
Hard to visualize massive graphs. Relational, tabular much easier to understand.
There was a mix of people there; some talks were way over my head and very technical, and some talks were by people who confessed they had had to look up "ontology" that morning. And things in between.
Lazy writeup, but following are notes as I scribbled them:
John Callahan
US navy research.
Focused information integration.
Human intervention to keep predictive part on track. Tweaking.
Alan Bundy
Interaction of representation and reasoning.
Changing world so agents must evolve. How to automate? What would trigger a need for change:
Inconsistency
Incompleteness
Inefficiency
how to diagnose which?
Interested in language and perception change.
Unsorted first order logic algorithm called Reformation. Based on standard unification algorithm.
Allows blocking and unblocking unification.
Phil Barker
Schema.org
Cetis (JISC funded)
learning resource metadata initiative.
Big names behind schema.org.
= ontology + syntax
Big and growing ontology.
Dumbed down for people.
LRMI adds to it. W3C go through it. It's creeping, how much do the big names actually care about stuff that's added?
don't know how Google uses it.
People should consider using it for more sophisticated search and disambiguation.
Gill Hamilton
Doing more with library metadata. Learnt from OKFN. Had to convince people in charge.
Dublin core, didn't like; not specific enough. Instead RDF > OWL. "We know best how to structure our data"
Hardest was convincing marketing people that there was no commercial value. Metadata is advert to actual resource.
Enrico Motta
Traditionally top down approach. So now so many people interacting with semantic structures, so should involve users.
Recognise there isn't a unique or best way of doing things.
Initial study included modeling task with binary relations.
Patterns that are more or less intuitive. 4D least, 3D+1 most.
N-ary most widely used by experts.
Relationship between reasoning power and intuitiveness of writing? More creativity needed for simpler ones. (Not really sure what he's saying)
Email him for copy of study.
Chris Mellish
Ontology authoring is hard. Better ways to do it.
Controlled language input (mature tech); responsive reasoning (also mature, information as you're editing); understanding the process (beginning to understand more).
Hypotheses:
users don't know what they're doing. What if questions. Many answers, what is relevant? Depends on context.
Authoring as dialogue.
Todo list.
Useable in the same ways as protégé.
Peter Winstanley
UN classification schemes.
Various vocabularies.
Allow development of cross mapping between government administrations.
Mostly internal currently. Moves to bring externalizing data into the 21st century.
Peter Murray-Rust
Fight for your Ontologies.
Ontologies in physical sciences. Chemists don't want ontologies. They'll sue you.
Crystallography uses 'dictionary'. Written in CIF. 20 years to build CIF.
Compare physical sciences to government.
Every program author writes dictionaries that work for them. When different parties agree, promote to communal dictionary. Provide conventions to help disagreements.
Show a company can do it as opposed to a rabbiting academic ..
Jeff Pan
Tractable ontological stream reasoning.
Need to be more efficient, scaleable, as things change. Inputs from web.
Dealing with complexities: approximate owl2.
Dealing with frequent updates: to-add stream and to-do delete stream. Truth maintenance. Evaluation criteria.
Trowl.EU can use with protégé, also supports jena.
Edoardo Pignotti
Semantic web tech to support Interdisciplinary research.
ourSpaces VRE
Provenance crucial.
OPM prov ontology.
Deployed since 2009, 180 users. Comprehensive ontologies but people unwilling to provide metadata.
paper! Edwards et al. ourSpaces.
Tom Grahame (BBC) @tfgrahame
Content arrangement on BBC sport by tagging, automatic to free up editors to write.
LD API so systems don't need to know about each other.
Growing from simple rdfxml to more complex ontology.
Can ask much more general and much more detailed questions about sport.
Mapping incoming data is outsourced.
Lots of errors, sometimes system alerts, sometimes manual.
Working on opening the data. Maybe a dump, but licensing issues.
Ewan Klein
Mining old texts for commodities, adding place and time and putting in structured database.
Transcriptions of customs import records.
Skos for synonyms.
Dbp concepts.
Why? Want to query.
Visualisations.
Tools? Python script.
Janice Watson
Harnessing clinical terminologies and classifications for healthcare improvements.
Bob Barr
Geographical addressing.
Addressing and address geocoding is important and broad. Not always postal, but this not addressed (punlol) in ontologies.
Different contexts change meaning of address (for delivering, you only care about postbox; property sale whole building).
Loads of things to address. Loads of reasons why.
Work held up as national address file is owned by royal mail and might be sold!
Fiona McNeill
Run time extraction of data. Failure driven. Looking at extraction of specific information.
Emergency response. Lots of data, timely sharing of data required.
From domestic level to humanitarian disasters.
How can it be automated?
Multilayered incompatibility.
Format
Terminology
Structure
...
Richard Gunn
Towards an intelligent information industry.
Elena Simperl (Soton, sociam)
Crowdsourcing ontology engineering.
CSrc: Brabham 2008.
Distribute task into smaller atomic units.
Humans validating results that are automatically detected as not accurate.
What are the costs? What resources?
Games with a purpose. Like quizzes.
Micropayments or vouchers.
MTurk. CrowdFlower.
Paper about useage of microtask crowdsourcing. ISWC 2012.
Claudia Paglieri
Ontologies in ehealth.
Enrico Motta - Rexplore
Klink algorithm mines relations between research topics.
Use this! Nope, it's not public. Uees MS Academic research.
Peter Murray-Rust
Content mining expands regular text mining.
Focus on academic stuff.
Chemical Tagger. Takes chemistry jargon and annotated it, knows actions, conditions, molecules etc.. NLP. Uses ontologies and contributes to ontologies.
In chemistry, no need to put everything in rdf because there are already lots of formalisms.
Proper cool PDF to sensible format conversion. Amy the kangaroo. Looking for collaborators.
Yuan Ren
Ontology authoring in whatif project.
Reasoning with protégé and trowl .
Tractable reasoning. Trowl v fast.
Notes from conversations / breakout discussions:
BBC use owlm triplestore .
Store all their datasets in svn. But they have reads and writes to the live triplestore all the time.
Lots of people saying minimise owl use because of unpredictable output.
Versioning ontologies (available in owl2) in case third parties change stuff you use. You're dependent on their software engineering practices. Only good if they're ahead of the game.
IRIs, Arabic characters in ontologies!
Semantic heavy, maybe make a decision to abstract away to ids and make heavier use of labels.
Difference between importing and using someone else's.
There's no (practically useful) software that lets you reason over stuff you haven't imported? (over HTTP?)
Build ontology from reality (data), don't start with no data.
Lode.
Problems with dbpedia URIs changing or disappearing.
Hard to visualize massive graphs. Relational, tabular much easier to understand.
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Inspiring and empowering: The Lovelace Colloquium, Nottingham 2013
In 2008 I was in my first year of university, and the second ever Lovelace Colloquium was held in Leeds. I was encouraged to attend by Professor Cornelia Boldyreff and then-PhD student, now-Dr, Beth Massey. Doing so may have changed my life.
At my first Lovelace, I was introduced to the very concepts of conferences, mentors and (importantly) networking. The event was, and has been ever since, a forum for thought-provoking technical talks, inspiring motivational speeches and stimulating discussions about technology-related disciplines, careers, and womens' role within this world. To attend Lovelace is to be surrounded by extraordinary and excited minds; undergraduates at the top of their game, and successful academics and industry professionals to advise and mentor. Having now been along as an attendee, a poster competition entrant and for the past two years as a judge, the conference has provided perfect annual milestones to mark my own academic progression and personal development. I have met so many wonderful people and made so many important connections thanks to this event that I genuinely think I would be in a different place today, perhaps as a different person, had I never been. I can trace back directly or indirectly to one or other Lovelace Colloquium many of the opportunities I have had to develop academically (poster presenting, inspiring conversations), professionally (networked my way to a Google internship) and personally (overcoming low self-confidence, understanding imposter syndrome and conquering public speaking).
This year's, hosted by the School of Computer Science at Nottingham University, has been no different.
For the first time ever I arrived with time to spare before registration, and got to know some of the other helpers and attendees. I was put in charge of organising posters, directed towards a room containing lots of large fuzzy blue boards, divided up the space based on the number expected in each category (First Year, Second Year, Final Year, and taught Masters) and cheerfully handed out drawing pins to entrants as they arrived.
At 10 the crowd who had gathered in a lecture theatre were welcomed by the superhuman Dr Hannah Dee, and the first round of talks began.
Instantly relevant (to me), Natasha Alechina discussed work on logic in ontologies. The use of logic can help with debugging when creating new ontologies by detecting inconsistencies (eg. fallasies, contradictions) or incoherance (eg. empty sets). The method they use is to compute a minimal set from a big graph in which nodes are statements, and they keep track of where all the statements are derived from. It was "surprisingly fast" when tested with 1600 large random ontologies, compared to state of the art methods to compute minimal sets.
Logic is also useful in ontology matching, for example Ordnance Survey vocabularies versus Open Street Map. Logic helps the process by finding what might need to be changed or removed, but human intervention is needed to make the final call.
Next up, Jemma Chambers turned out to be a brilliant speaker and surely inspired everyone in the room by telling us how she'd made the most of a career in technology over the past decade. She was in her last week as a CISCO business development manager, about to move to a similar role at Virgin Media.
She started with some statistics:
(Disclaimer: I may have botched the context of those stats slightly, my notes aren't very clear. But you get the idea. Also she didn't say where these stats are from).
Jemma did a year-in-industry during her degree, programming for Oracle. She was bored out of her mind coding (I'm sure some people in the audience sympathised, but probably a minority) and thus learnt what job she didn't want to do when she graduated. Instead, she joined an accounts management graduate program at CISCO, had some doubts but stuck it out, rocked hard in sales and climbed the ladder through hard work and force of will, despite various sexist or ageist behaviour directed her way. A key point here is whatever you end up doing, do it well; being successful wherever you end up opens doors to what you really want to do, if you're not already there. Especially in the big tech companies like CISCO, where moving between jobs internally is facilitated and even encouraged.
On a related note, Jemma talked a bit about the flexibility of CISCO (and other similar companies). Working hours, for example, are yours to choose so long as you get the job done. Similarly she's had no problem negotiating maternity leave, and eighteen months after the birth of her son she's working three days a week (and still feels guilty about dropping him with the babysitter).
Naturally she mentioned a few (legitimate) generalisations about women in the workplace (nothing I haven't heard before, but this is my fifth Lovelace) and followed them up with some solid advice. Women seem to attribute success to outside forces like luck, or kindness of others, where men attribute success to themselves. It's much easier to move forward if you remind yourself that you worked hard for this and deserve it.
Successful men are more likely to be percieved as likeable than successful women, who are often construed as bitches. Ignore what other people think, and don't let yourself get walked on to try and make friends. At the same time, don't let this stereotype go to your head; remember to support other women in the workplace rather than being competitive.
Women and men have different leadership styles (generally) as well as other strengths and weaknesses of their own, and it's a combination of the two that really make a successful team, not more of one than the other.
Jemma recommends reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.
She also discussed the various merits of networking (of which I am happy to attest there are many!) and how to source mentors in the tech community.
This talk was a fantastic one to start the day with, especially to prompt any in the audience who might otherwise have not done so, to talk to everybody. Jemma's enthusiastic speaking style will have kept everyone engaged, too, even those still waking up.
Dr Julie Greensmith filled us in on her journey from a pharmacy undergraduate through to her current work on artificial immune systems. These are algorithms inspired by human immune systems; robust, decentralized, adaptive and tolerant. They work by knowing what is normal instead of what isn't, which is particularly useful if you don't know what attack is going to come next. Their early work, though excellent, was based on a rudimentary computer scientist understanding of how immune systems work; these days they have a more interdisciplinary team with biologists to improve things even further.
Gillian Arnold, who is exceptionally well known and officially recognised as An Inspiring Woman, was filling in for a speaker who couldn't make it. She talked through the best career moments of various people she knew, which ranged from getting software into the hands of the public to promotions and financial incentives. She also talked through a few of the stereotypical problems women have in the a male-dominated workplace, but most of what she could have said had been covered by Jemma. A pro tip for getting attention at meetings if you're being talked over is to bang the table.
Dr Hannah Dee gave us a technical talk about her current research, as well as a little background on how she got where she is. She is much happier as a lecturer as opposed to a post doc, as she gets to direct her own research areas, and isn't constrained within fields she's not totally comfortable (like surveillance). So now she's interested in time and change in nature, doing things like laser scanning and time lapsing plants to find out new things that are particularly hard to find out. Some really interesting stuff about camera hacking with the Canon development kit, which lets you write programs in Lua or BASIC, and provides the sorts of menu options you'd usually only find on a really expensive camera.
Milena Nikolic is an engineer at Google London who has worked on Google's mobile sites, integrating results from mobile app stores into search results and the Android Market / Play Store. She says she has undergone a "journey of scale", and loves shipping projects that make a real difference and are used by real people. She answered lots of questions about working at Google. As with Jemma's experience at CISCO, hours are flexible at Google, and there are no strict iterative phases for development, but projects have their own cycles. She doesn't spend as much time coding as she'd like, but this varies depending on the stage a project is in, too.
Then someone asked "why are girls scared of coding?" and a lively discussion ensued. For some reason I didn't take notes, but things I can remember that were suggested include:
There were more; I'll add them if I remember.
In between these fantastic talks were coffee, lunch and networking breaks and of course, poster judging. I teamed up with Milena Radenkovic to assess the second years, and after three quarters of an hour of lunch, plus a 'last minute' extra half-hour before the decision had to be made (thus I missed the panel discussion), we had narrowed it down to five... It was hard. Seriously. We discussed the poster content, presentation, practicality of the ideas, whether the student was showing a project they were personally involved with or intending to do (this holds weight with me) and how well the student explained their ideas in person. They were all brilliant on all counts. We negotiated splitting the second place prize in two, but still had to choose three out of our final five.
Eventually we settled on Carys Williams (quantum cryptography; University of Bath) for the first prize, and Heidi Howard (routers that pay their way; University of Cambridge) and Jo Dowdall (smart tickets; University of Dundee) for joint second place.
I only wish I'd had time to look at the rest of the posters!
I finished off the day by joining other attendees for dinner, which was all round brilliant, and resulted in a late night.
See other fantastic blog posts...
At my first Lovelace, I was introduced to the very concepts of conferences, mentors and (importantly) networking. The event was, and has been ever since, a forum for thought-provoking technical talks, inspiring motivational speeches and stimulating discussions about technology-related disciplines, careers, and womens' role within this world. To attend Lovelace is to be surrounded by extraordinary and excited minds; undergraduates at the top of their game, and successful academics and industry professionals to advise and mentor. Having now been along as an attendee, a poster competition entrant and for the past two years as a judge, the conference has provided perfect annual milestones to mark my own academic progression and personal development. I have met so many wonderful people and made so many important connections thanks to this event that I genuinely think I would be in a different place today, perhaps as a different person, had I never been. I can trace back directly or indirectly to one or other Lovelace Colloquium many of the opportunities I have had to develop academically (poster presenting, inspiring conversations), professionally (networked my way to a Google internship) and personally (overcoming low self-confidence, understanding imposter syndrome and conquering public speaking).
This year's, hosted by the School of Computer Science at Nottingham University, has been no different.
For the first time ever I arrived with time to spare before registration, and got to know some of the other helpers and attendees. I was put in charge of organising posters, directed towards a room containing lots of large fuzzy blue boards, divided up the space based on the number expected in each category (First Year, Second Year, Final Year, and taught Masters) and cheerfully handed out drawing pins to entrants as they arrived.
At 10 the crowd who had gathered in a lecture theatre were welcomed by the superhuman Dr Hannah Dee, and the first round of talks began.
Instantly relevant (to me), Natasha Alechina discussed work on logic in ontologies. The use of logic can help with debugging when creating new ontologies by detecting inconsistencies (eg. fallasies, contradictions) or incoherance (eg. empty sets). The method they use is to compute a minimal set from a big graph in which nodes are statements, and they keep track of where all the statements are derived from. It was "surprisingly fast" when tested with 1600 large random ontologies, compared to state of the art methods to compute minimal sets.
Logic is also useful in ontology matching, for example Ordnance Survey vocabularies versus Open Street Map. Logic helps the process by finding what might need to be changed or removed, but human intervention is needed to make the final call.
Next up, Jemma Chambers turned out to be a brilliant speaker and surely inspired everyone in the room by telling us how she'd made the most of a career in technology over the past decade. She was in her last week as a CISCO business development manager, about to move to a similar role at Virgin Media.
She started with some statistics:
- 51% of gamers are girls, but only 6% of those who make games are female.
- 21% of jobs in technology overall are held by women.
- Companies with women in their management report a 34% return on investment over companies with only males.
- 20% of C-level (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc) leaders worldswide are female.
(Disclaimer: I may have botched the context of those stats slightly, my notes aren't very clear. But you get the idea. Also she didn't say where these stats are from).
Jemma did a year-in-industry during her degree, programming for Oracle. She was bored out of her mind coding (I'm sure some people in the audience sympathised, but probably a minority) and thus learnt what job she didn't want to do when she graduated. Instead, she joined an accounts management graduate program at CISCO, had some doubts but stuck it out, rocked hard in sales and climbed the ladder through hard work and force of will, despite various sexist or ageist behaviour directed her way. A key point here is whatever you end up doing, do it well; being successful wherever you end up opens doors to what you really want to do, if you're not already there. Especially in the big tech companies like CISCO, where moving between jobs internally is facilitated and even encouraged.
On a related note, Jemma talked a bit about the flexibility of CISCO (and other similar companies). Working hours, for example, are yours to choose so long as you get the job done. Similarly she's had no problem negotiating maternity leave, and eighteen months after the birth of her son she's working three days a week (and still feels guilty about dropping him with the babysitter).
Naturally she mentioned a few (legitimate) generalisations about women in the workplace (nothing I haven't heard before, but this is my fifth Lovelace) and followed them up with some solid advice. Women seem to attribute success to outside forces like luck, or kindness of others, where men attribute success to themselves. It's much easier to move forward if you remind yourself that you worked hard for this and deserve it.
Successful men are more likely to be percieved as likeable than successful women, who are often construed as bitches. Ignore what other people think, and don't let yourself get walked on to try and make friends. At the same time, don't let this stereotype go to your head; remember to support other women in the workplace rather than being competitive.
Women and men have different leadership styles (generally) as well as other strengths and weaknesses of their own, and it's a combination of the two that really make a successful team, not more of one than the other.
Jemma recommends reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.
She also discussed the various merits of networking (of which I am happy to attest there are many!) and how to source mentors in the tech community.
This talk was a fantastic one to start the day with, especially to prompt any in the audience who might otherwise have not done so, to talk to everybody. Jemma's enthusiastic speaking style will have kept everyone engaged, too, even those still waking up.
Dr Julie Greensmith filled us in on her journey from a pharmacy undergraduate through to her current work on artificial immune systems. These are algorithms inspired by human immune systems; robust, decentralized, adaptive and tolerant. They work by knowing what is normal instead of what isn't, which is particularly useful if you don't know what attack is going to come next. Their early work, though excellent, was based on a rudimentary computer scientist understanding of how immune systems work; these days they have a more interdisciplinary team with biologists to improve things even further.
Gillian Arnold, who is exceptionally well known and officially recognised as An Inspiring Woman, was filling in for a speaker who couldn't make it. She talked through the best career moments of various people she knew, which ranged from getting software into the hands of the public to promotions and financial incentives. She also talked through a few of the stereotypical problems women have in the a male-dominated workplace, but most of what she could have said had been covered by Jemma. A pro tip for getting attention at meetings if you're being talked over is to bang the table.
Dr Hannah Dee gave us a technical talk about her current research, as well as a little background on how she got where she is. She is much happier as a lecturer as opposed to a post doc, as she gets to direct her own research areas, and isn't constrained within fields she's not totally comfortable (like surveillance). So now she's interested in time and change in nature, doing things like laser scanning and time lapsing plants to find out new things that are particularly hard to find out. Some really interesting stuff about camera hacking with the Canon development kit, which lets you write programs in Lua or BASIC, and provides the sorts of menu options you'd usually only find on a really expensive camera.
Milena Nikolic is an engineer at Google London who has worked on Google's mobile sites, integrating results from mobile app stores into search results and the Android Market / Play Store. She says she has undergone a "journey of scale", and loves shipping projects that make a real difference and are used by real people. She answered lots of questions about working at Google. As with Jemma's experience at CISCO, hours are flexible at Google, and there are no strict iterative phases for development, but projects have their own cycles. She doesn't spend as much time coding as she'd like, but this varies depending on the stage a project is in, too.
Then someone asked "why are girls scared of coding?" and a lively discussion ensued. For some reason I didn't take notes, but things I can remember that were suggested include:
- Girls are more hesitant about diving in, or scared of breaking things. To progress with programming, you've gotta just keep trying and failing.
- Girls are more emotionally affected if their code does fail. Guys just shrug it off and try something out. (I personally have never felt like this).
- Girls are less likely to be exposed to programming or programming-like activities at an early age, so by the time they come across computer science they may see it as boring, too mathsy or not creative. I suspect that had I not got interested in making websites aged ten, it might have passed me by during high school, and I would have ended up doing chemistry or French at university.
There were more; I'll add them if I remember.
In between these fantastic talks were coffee, lunch and networking breaks and of course, poster judging. I teamed up with Milena Radenkovic to assess the second years, and after three quarters of an hour of lunch, plus a 'last minute' extra half-hour before the decision had to be made (thus I missed the panel discussion), we had narrowed it down to five... It was hard. Seriously. We discussed the poster content, presentation, practicality of the ideas, whether the student was showing a project they were personally involved with or intending to do (this holds weight with me) and how well the student explained their ideas in person. They were all brilliant on all counts. We negotiated splitting the second place prize in two, but still had to choose three out of our final five.
Eventually we settled on Carys Williams (quantum cryptography; University of Bath) for the first prize, and Heidi Howard (routers that pay their way; University of Cambridge) and Jo Dowdall (smart tickets; University of Dundee) for joint second place.
I only wish I'd had time to look at the rest of the posters!
I finished off the day by joining other attendees for dinner, which was all round brilliant, and resulted in a late night.
See other fantastic blog posts...
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Resonate new media festival
Resonate, held between the 21st and 23rd of March in Belgrade, Serbia, is "...a platform for networking, information, knowledge sharing and education. It brings together distinguished, world class artists with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture." (from the website).
Before I left, I suggested I might return with the following:
I largely failed on all three counts.
Before I left, I suggested I might return with the following:
- Information about creative processes for digital artworks.
- Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements.
- Potential case studies or people to work with.
I largely failed on all three counts.
I was thrown from the outset by the apparent poor organisation of the event. Not to mention a complete lack of free food. But the main problem was that well over one thousand people had tickets, but on the first day the main lecture room could hold a few hundred at best. Seating consisted of a handful of sofas and armchairs and valuable floor space was occupied by altogether too many stylish coffee tables. For everyone not lucky enough to be among the first ten in the room it was aching backs and/or pins and needles all round. This situation improved slightly after the first day, when two more tracks opened in slightly bigger rooms, but there was still nowhere near enough space. People were bursting out all doors, so switching tracks ever wasn't an option. There were also several long delays or postponements. A few were weather related, but too many (ie more than none) were organisational; lack of projector in main room, etc.
That aside, I was aware that an event labelled 'festival' wasn't going to be right at the conference end of the party<->conference scale, but I was surprised at just how much party it was. A party with thousands of people, where everybody knew someone else but me. This made it particularly difficult to interact. You might expect the opposite. Indeed, I suspect that for most people this was the perfect environment to make new friends, start collaborations etc. I'm (usually) great at networking. I'm never great at social situations involving large crowds, a bar and loud music. I tried. But I couldn't catch anyone's eye, there was never a moment to start a conversation. The most interaction I had over three days was being elbowed out of the way by people who felt more entitled to see what was going on than me.
I might have fared better if...
...I had succeeded in getting a place at one of the workshops. Places were very limited, but it was explained that all workshops were open for anyone to listen in on even if you couldn't participate directly. Had I taken part in one, it would have been a lot easier to talk to some specific people. I went along to attempt to listen in, however, to find all of the workshops (twenty or so) consisted of people grouped around tables, together in the same giant hall. The actual participants were craning their necks, straining to hear their workshop instructor over the general clamour of the event, so it was impossible for bystanders to be involved at all. Plus, only a couple of the workshops had (handwritten) signs indicating which they were, so there was also no way of tracking down the ones I was particularly interested in.
...I had been to any of the performances or night club tours that started about about 9pm each day and ran until the early hours of the morning. The performances, as far as I could tell, were electronic music sets, held in night clubs or similar venues. I don't do night clubs, and I was knackered by 7pm anyway, so that was a no go. Having said that, it probably wouldn't have been easier to meet new people over very loud music in a place where everyone was getting drunk, so maybe I didn't miss out.
Now I've explained that, I will write a bit about the talks I did manage to get in to, which were generally interesting and of good quality. (The itinerary I sketched out for myself beforehand differed greatly from what I actually achieved because of crowd/small room issues mentioned previously).
These aren't the only things I went to, but the only ones I took notes or tweeted about.
Marcin Ignac, talking about Data Art, showed some really cool things he's done with Plask and WebGL, including 3D data visualisations, hacking with fonts, and realtime installations like a 3D visualisation of global energy market transactions. Plask and WebGL are capable of a lot, just in the browser. He also mentioned basil.js, which is "a library that brings scripting and automation into layout and makes computational and generative design possible from within InDesign" (cite) which looks useful for artists wanting to get into coding.
Mike Tucker ("Unity as a Tool for Non-Games") suggested that Unity fills the creative gap recently vacated by Flash. He started out as a Flash guy, but isn't sad or bitter about Flash's demise, and understands that it's time to move on. His current WIP is an app to explore an abstract visual and audio landscape using the device's gyroscope. The audio is 'physically' located in a virtual 3D world, and changes as you navigate around by moving the device in space.
Julia Laub told us about her Generative Design book, that she worked on as part of her thesis project. She defined (with a diagram) generative design as creating choices, then making choices, rather than controlling a visual output. She created a visualisation of Wikipedia pages that presents as a self-optimising network - as you interact with the diagram to expand the information you want to see, it rearranges itself for optimal viewing. Her book looks amazing, and getting my hands on a copy is on my things-to-do list.
Dmitry Morozov ("An Autonomous Synthesis") showed some great circuit bent installations and sound projects; check out http://www.vtol.tk/.
Signal | Noise (oops, I didn't take down the names of the actual guys) ("Datatainment") talked about gamification of data collection. People like "digital navel gazing"; they derive satisfaction from their own data, and comparing themselves to others. They mentioned a "top secret" client project for which they're aiming to "quantify everything people do"... intriguing...
Lucas Werthin ("Design, Tech and Architecture for Large Scale Projection Mapping") showed us the ins and outs of an incredible project he'd worked on.. Described here (with videos).
The onedotzero screening was a compilation of digital animation work from a number of artists. It was weird and awesome, with some inspiring visuals and music I need to listen to more (inspiring for writing fiction, not for the PhD unfortunately). Notes I wrote during that suggested I need to listen to the music in Warsnare, and the one with the giant Catzilla in.
Markus Heckmann and Barry Threw ("Building by Doing - Visually guided design in TouchDesigner") described another easy bridge for artists who want to code. I wrote down "TouchDesigner" in my notes during this talk, but I can't remember why now. Find out more here.
My favourite talk was by Ivan Poupyrev ("Computing Reality"). I tweeted loads about it, but none of them got sent because the wifi and my phone weren't playing nice or something. Fortunately I also made a ton of notes.
Ivan describes himself as an 'inventor'; he worked for Sony, and now works for Walt Disney, and he is inventing the future. He has a great ethic and vision for the world; all about "giving people tools to make the world the way they want it to be." He envisions a decentralisation of production; large corporations only want to make their part of the world interactive, not the whole world. So ordinary people must have the technology to use, develop, spread, build on.
In 1999, his team created an augmented reality toolkit, before it's time. In 2001, they developed a flexible display with is interacted with by bending it and sliding fingers around the back of the screen. A huge amount of interactions are possible just by bending and flexing in different ways. In 2004, Sony said "users will never accept a device with no buttons", and all early touchscreen devices also had buttons because of this. He says the iPhone was the "fall" of the button, proving everyone wrong. Last year (2012) the Sony PS Vita has touchback interaction, and Samsung have released a flexible display this year (2013) but "nobody cares".
Now, he says, everything has been invented already, the market is saturated with new gadgets. He sees the future of the technology curve as embedded in people and surroundings: "no question... that it's coming to your body ... going to seep into the environment, disappear into the environment ... seamlessly, invisibly, efficiently" and describes a reality that computes itself, where "the computer doesn't have to exist at all."
Ivan was very expressive about not being any kind of "tree-hugger", but is convinced that we don't need to "make more junk". So many resources have been used, and the earth can't support another industrial revolution. Instead, he wants to turn everything that already exists into interactive objects, including humans, animals and plants. That may sound weird / scary / far-futuristic but guess what... they've already done it.
Flipping interaction on its head, they're all about not changing the environment, but changing you, or your perception of the environment. Touché is used for 'virtual tactile perception'... they can create a charged field around the human hand so that you feel things differently. The objects themselves are passive, simple, unchanged. The person just has to be in contact with the device that creates the field, which can be embedded in an object you're already touching like clothing, a shoe or an umbrella. Then, with no wires or weird contraptions, the person can touch some object (like a teapot) and as the settings of the field are changed, so the texture of the object appears changed.
With this technology they can also tell who is touching something, or which part of your own body you are touching, because everything has a different electronic resistance. An example they produced was a touchscreen drawing application that changed the pen colour depending on who was drawing, with no additional information than sensing the fingers on the screen.
Disney has the botannicus interacticus - an interactive plant. Electrodes in the soil transform any plant into a multi-touch controller! Gestures around the plant (à la theremin) or touching the plant in different ways, can be mapped to things like sound. It's possible to have very high precision. All plants are different, too! So the same tech applied to different plants will cause different outcomes. Video.
There's an open source version of Touché for Arduino.
Ivan also played with 3D printing, and sees this as something that will become hugely accessible to the extent that people will start to manufacture most things themselves; or at least, pop down to their local corner shop to get something printed from an existing design.
They've done some experiments with 3D printing transparent objects, and 'light pipes' which direct colours and sizes of light precisely. They can create interactive displays by projecting light from below or behind objects and piping images onto them.
It's possible now to 3D print a broad variety of sensors.
These things result in interactive objects that respond to you, but all of the electronics are outside of the object, so you can switch one object for another one and have it work the same very easily.
He concluded with:
1. Digitizing what we already have, not making more junk.
2. Sustainability requires augmenting humans and growing your electronics.
3. Distributed manufacturing vs. mass production.
Resulting thoughts and ideas
I got a general feeling of disparity between 'art' and 'real-life', with strong suggestions that it doesn't matter if interactive, technology-powered art installations break, so long as people are compelled to play with them. That's something I absolutely loved and absolutely hated simultaneously during my MSc in the ECA last year, and still causes internal conflict. (Ie. I understand the value of play and experimentation, but I'm passionate about things being useful and empowering, and it's possible to do both, and it bothers me when people take the easy way out, slap the 'experimental art' label on it and move on to their next solid-outcome-less project).
Despite not actually talking to anyone about what I am doing and how it might in some way link to what they do, I suspect digital artists like these kinds of people might be good use cases for what I'm trying to make. They collaborate, have varied processes. And are more likely than amateur YouTubers to be interested in engaging with a new experimental technology. They could, for example, be incentivised to record their processes and actions over the course of a project, and be rewarded with visualisations of their data, and comparisons with the data of others. (Actually making the visualisations is out of my remit, but there will be someone who can..).
A thing I should do is analyse blogs, articles, reports, etc about creative digital projects for the vocabulary about their processes. I thought about this as one of the speakers was just describing step by step the process for one project... but I wasn't listening properly; I only realised in time to have this thought, too late to write it all down. But there will be loads of documentation already out there that can be harvested.
I always think of my project as something that helps a lot toward connecting with others for collaborating, but a large part can be finding other art/media projects for inspiration. That kind of pitch would sell it to this kind of audience, at least.
So that's that. Photos from all the time I wasn't at Resonate are here.
Now I've explained that, I will write a bit about the talks I did manage to get in to, which were generally interesting and of good quality. (The itinerary I sketched out for myself beforehand differed greatly from what I actually achieved because of crowd/small room issues mentioned previously).
These aren't the only things I went to, but the only ones I took notes or tweeted about.
Marcin Ignac, talking about Data Art, showed some really cool things he's done with Plask and WebGL, including 3D data visualisations, hacking with fonts, and realtime installations like a 3D visualisation of global energy market transactions. Plask and WebGL are capable of a lot, just in the browser. He also mentioned basil.js, which is "a library that brings scripting and automation into layout and makes computational and generative design possible from within InDesign" (cite) which looks useful for artists wanting to get into coding.
Mike Tucker ("Unity as a Tool for Non-Games") suggested that Unity fills the creative gap recently vacated by Flash. He started out as a Flash guy, but isn't sad or bitter about Flash's demise, and understands that it's time to move on. His current WIP is an app to explore an abstract visual and audio landscape using the device's gyroscope. The audio is 'physically' located in a virtual 3D world, and changes as you navigate around by moving the device in space.
Julia Laub told us about her Generative Design book, that she worked on as part of her thesis project. She defined (with a diagram) generative design as creating choices, then making choices, rather than controlling a visual output. She created a visualisation of Wikipedia pages that presents as a self-optimising network - as you interact with the diagram to expand the information you want to see, it rearranges itself for optimal viewing. Her book looks amazing, and getting my hands on a copy is on my things-to-do list.
Dmitry Morozov ("An Autonomous Synthesis") showed some great circuit bent installations and sound projects; check out http://www.vtol.tk/.
Signal | Noise (oops, I didn't take down the names of the actual guys) ("Datatainment") talked about gamification of data collection. People like "digital navel gazing"; they derive satisfaction from their own data, and comparing themselves to others. They mentioned a "top secret" client project for which they're aiming to "quantify everything people do"... intriguing...
Lucas Werthin ("Design, Tech and Architecture for Large Scale Projection Mapping") showed us the ins and outs of an incredible project he'd worked on.. Described here (with videos).
The onedotzero screening was a compilation of digital animation work from a number of artists. It was weird and awesome, with some inspiring visuals and music I need to listen to more (inspiring for writing fiction, not for the PhD unfortunately). Notes I wrote during that suggested I need to listen to the music in Warsnare, and the one with the giant Catzilla in.
Markus Heckmann and Barry Threw ("Building by Doing - Visually guided design in TouchDesigner") described another easy bridge for artists who want to code. I wrote down "TouchDesigner" in my notes during this talk, but I can't remember why now. Find out more here.
My favourite talk was by Ivan Poupyrev ("Computing Reality"). I tweeted loads about it, but none of them got sent because the wifi and my phone weren't playing nice or something. Fortunately I also made a ton of notes.
Ivan describes himself as an 'inventor'; he worked for Sony, and now works for Walt Disney, and he is inventing the future. He has a great ethic and vision for the world; all about "giving people tools to make the world the way they want it to be." He envisions a decentralisation of production; large corporations only want to make their part of the world interactive, not the whole world. So ordinary people must have the technology to use, develop, spread, build on.
In 1999, his team created an augmented reality toolkit, before it's time. In 2001, they developed a flexible display with is interacted with by bending it and sliding fingers around the back of the screen. A huge amount of interactions are possible just by bending and flexing in different ways. In 2004, Sony said "users will never accept a device with no buttons", and all early touchscreen devices also had buttons because of this. He says the iPhone was the "fall" of the button, proving everyone wrong. Last year (2012) the Sony PS Vita has touchback interaction, and Samsung have released a flexible display this year (2013) but "nobody cares".
Now, he says, everything has been invented already, the market is saturated with new gadgets. He sees the future of the technology curve as embedded in people and surroundings: "no question... that it's coming to your body ... going to seep into the environment, disappear into the environment ... seamlessly, invisibly, efficiently" and describes a reality that computes itself, where "the computer doesn't have to exist at all."
Ivan was very expressive about not being any kind of "tree-hugger", but is convinced that we don't need to "make more junk". So many resources have been used, and the earth can't support another industrial revolution. Instead, he wants to turn everything that already exists into interactive objects, including humans, animals and plants. That may sound weird / scary / far-futuristic but guess what... they've already done it.
Flipping interaction on its head, they're all about not changing the environment, but changing you, or your perception of the environment. Touché is used for 'virtual tactile perception'... they can create a charged field around the human hand so that you feel things differently. The objects themselves are passive, simple, unchanged. The person just has to be in contact with the device that creates the field, which can be embedded in an object you're already touching like clothing, a shoe or an umbrella. Then, with no wires or weird contraptions, the person can touch some object (like a teapot) and as the settings of the field are changed, so the texture of the object appears changed.
With this technology they can also tell who is touching something, or which part of your own body you are touching, because everything has a different electronic resistance. An example they produced was a touchscreen drawing application that changed the pen colour depending on who was drawing, with no additional information than sensing the fingers on the screen.
Disney has the botannicus interacticus - an interactive plant. Electrodes in the soil transform any plant into a multi-touch controller! Gestures around the plant (à la theremin) or touching the plant in different ways, can be mapped to things like sound. It's possible to have very high precision. All plants are different, too! So the same tech applied to different plants will cause different outcomes. Video.
There's an open source version of Touché for Arduino.
Ivan also played with 3D printing, and sees this as something that will become hugely accessible to the extent that people will start to manufacture most things themselves; or at least, pop down to their local corner shop to get something printed from an existing design.
They've done some experiments with 3D printing transparent objects, and 'light pipes' which direct colours and sizes of light precisely. They can create interactive displays by projecting light from below or behind objects and piping images onto them.
It's possible now to 3D print a broad variety of sensors.
These things result in interactive objects that respond to you, but all of the electronics are outside of the object, so you can switch one object for another one and have it work the same very easily.
He concluded with:
1. Digitizing what we already have, not making more junk.
2. Sustainability requires augmenting humans and growing your electronics.
3. Distributed manufacturing vs. mass production.
Resulting thoughts and ideas
I got a general feeling of disparity between 'art' and 'real-life', with strong suggestions that it doesn't matter if interactive, technology-powered art installations break, so long as people are compelled to play with them. That's something I absolutely loved and absolutely hated simultaneously during my MSc in the ECA last year, and still causes internal conflict. (Ie. I understand the value of play and experimentation, but I'm passionate about things being useful and empowering, and it's possible to do both, and it bothers me when people take the easy way out, slap the 'experimental art' label on it and move on to their next solid-outcome-less project).
Despite not actually talking to anyone about what I am doing and how it might in some way link to what they do, I suspect digital artists like these kinds of people might be good use cases for what I'm trying to make. They collaborate, have varied processes. And are more likely than amateur YouTubers to be interested in engaging with a new experimental technology. They could, for example, be incentivised to record their processes and actions over the course of a project, and be rewarded with visualisations of their data, and comparisons with the data of others. (Actually making the visualisations is out of my remit, but there will be someone who can..).
A thing I should do is analyse blogs, articles, reports, etc about creative digital projects for the vocabulary about their processes. I thought about this as one of the speakers was just describing step by step the process for one project... but I wasn't listening properly; I only realised in time to have this thought, too late to write it all down. But there will be loads of documentation already out there that can be harvested.
I always think of my project as something that helps a lot toward connecting with others for collaborating, but a large part can be finding other art/media projects for inspiration. That kind of pitch would sell it to this kind of audience, at least.
So that's that. Photos from all the time I wasn't at Resonate are here.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making
I was fortunate enough to attend the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop, conveniently situated on the ground floor of the building I work in, on the 14th of February.
Whilst more technical than the Digital Methods conference I went to in December, the talks and panel sessions served to build upon things I started to think about then. Namely, beginning to situate my research interests amongst many concepts from the currently quite alien fields of sociology and anthropology.
The talks were varied, and key themes that emerged were the collection/use of data for social improvement (health and wellbeing, teaching and learning, disaster recovery), and the importance of context in making collected data genuinely useful. A notable challenge is that one piece of data might have a thousand different contexts from the perspectives of a thousand different human beings. So how to communicate these variations to software that processes this data, and perhaps makes decisions using it?
Perhaps not to worry too much about that at all. Process things locally instead of globally, using local contexts and understandings, but make sure everything is annotated such that information can still be exchanged across the whole network, and differences in understanding can be accounted for or reasoned out if a need occurs.
For the record, I'm looking at how Semantic Web technologies could be used to better connect human and machine in the context of amateur digital content creation (movies, comics, music, art), including how semantically annotating creative (often collaborative) processes as well as the end products of these processes and the engagement of an audience with these products, could improve the overall experience of creating content (along a number of dimensions). A massive part of this will be creating tools that actually collect the necessary data from users. Ultimately, these tools will need to be invisible, ie. easily integrated into existing online routines, with no effort required to use them for the non-technically minded so that a network effect can take place.
Incentives for crowdsourcing came up during CMSSM, and someone pointed out that by gamifying data collection for research projects, incentives become the same as ones offered by gambling companies; something competitive and potentially addictive. I think things like global systems of reputation and trust are useful on a network where people are to share data about their own work (or opinions of the work of others) and may be nurturing a desire for popularity or exposure on the network (a network where the people are central, because the data could not exist without them, but where the users and the data are simultaneously co-dependant).
Anyway, I'm still brainstorming.
Whilst more technical than the Digital Methods conference I went to in December, the talks and panel sessions served to build upon things I started to think about then. Namely, beginning to situate my research interests amongst many concepts from the currently quite alien fields of sociology and anthropology.
The talks were varied, and key themes that emerged were the collection/use of data for social improvement (health and wellbeing, teaching and learning, disaster recovery), and the importance of context in making collected data genuinely useful. A notable challenge is that one piece of data might have a thousand different contexts from the perspectives of a thousand different human beings. So how to communicate these variations to software that processes this data, and perhaps makes decisions using it?
Perhaps not to worry too much about that at all. Process things locally instead of globally, using local contexts and understandings, but make sure everything is annotated such that information can still be exchanged across the whole network, and differences in understanding can be accounted for or reasoned out if a need occurs.
For the record, I'm looking at how Semantic Web technologies could be used to better connect human and machine in the context of amateur digital content creation (movies, comics, music, art), including how semantically annotating creative (often collaborative) processes as well as the end products of these processes and the engagement of an audience with these products, could improve the overall experience of creating content (along a number of dimensions). A massive part of this will be creating tools that actually collect the necessary data from users. Ultimately, these tools will need to be invisible, ie. easily integrated into existing online routines, with no effort required to use them for the non-technically minded so that a network effect can take place.
Incentives for crowdsourcing came up during CMSSM, and someone pointed out that by gamifying data collection for research projects, incentives become the same as ones offered by gambling companies; something competitive and potentially addictive. I think things like global systems of reputation and trust are useful on a network where people are to share data about their own work (or opinions of the work of others) and may be nurturing a desire for popularity or exposure on the network (a network where the people are central, because the data could not exist without them, but where the users and the data are simultaneously co-dependant).
Anyway, I'm still brainstorming.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
1st International Open Data Dialogue, Berlin, 5-6 December
Read my complete notes from day one, and complete notes from day two.
The 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin in December was broadly a discussion about real-world applications of Open Data. Lots of practice, less theory. Despite this (or perhaps because of this, now I think about it) it wasn't as technical as I expected. Felix Sasaki [1] talked about some basic technicalities of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, kind of the first things you'd learn if you were studying it in a structured way, and I heard a lot of people afterwards complaining that that had been too technical.
Importantly, there was a real message of getting things done at this event, and plenty of evidence that a world built on Open Data is not an idealistic pipe dream, but a reality right now. Challenges are being articulated, and solutions are being created, and problems are being overcome.
I stress this particularly because a couple of sceptics who weren't at the conference tweeted things along the lines of "Sounds like your conference is a bunch of idealist hippies preaching to the choir…" A genuine concern, but what's really exciting is that this definitely wasn't the case. It was instead a bunch of realist technologists with the expertise and influence to actively overcome barriers to improving the world.
Open Data is about social change and empowerment. It is about accountability of organisations with massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. It is not about an abandonment of personal privacy, or everybody knowing everything about everyone else.
It should go without saying (yet it still needs to be said) that it is not appropriate to blindly make all data available to everyone about every aspect of everybody's life. But what if you had access to all of the data anyone had ever collected about your life? Think about purchase history (shop loyalty cards, travel tickets), online activities (searches, browsing history, social networking). All this stuff is being stored anyway, all over the place. Often by organisations who fully intend to profit from it, presumably with your unwitting consent. They went to the trouble of collecting it, but you went to the trouble of providing it. It's your data too. What could you do with it (or hire a software developer to do with it)? Then imagine you had access to the same data from everyone in your town, aggregated and anonymised, and visualised in a nice way. Maybe you could team up with your neighbours for cheaper bulk food purchases? Maybe you'd realise that others had similar hobbies or problems nearby, and could form special interest or support groups? Reduce costs by sharing transport to similar destinations (or just have some company on the journey)?
There's so much potential within data that's already held.
The UK government's Midata initiative is a massive step in the right direction [3] toward compelling commercial enterprises to hand over machine-readable datasets to consumers upon request.
In Slovakia and Kenya (and possibly others, but these were the ones that came up), there is a constitutional right to data held by the government. Not without loopholes and other problems, of course [5, 2].
One of the obvious problems is convincing large organisations that hold lots of data (like commercial enterprise and governments) of the circumstances in which it would be in everybody's best interest to release (some of) it. Reasons they don't include a lack of understanding of the benefits; disproportionate assessment of risks; aversion to change; a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure; "data hugging syndrome" [2]; licencing issues; outdated business models.
Nigel Shadbolt's experience says that large organisations who open data always see benefits. It's always worth the effort. When the data is there, suddenly developers start doing things with it; applications appear, many unexpected, and usually free. He stressed that it's important to have a stockpile of success stories in case you need to convince someone in charge of the value of Open Data, and his favourite one was the publication of MRSA rates in hospitals (resulting in sharing of good practice, and an 85% reduction in MRSA over two years). See a list at the end of this post for all of the success stories I came across over the course of the two days.
There were lots of discussions about the users or audiences of Open Data, and the various different roles people can have. Most consumers of Open Data are developers, and 'ordinary people' see the data via an application. Many won't know (or care) about the source of the data that powers the app, even if it about them. Many will, and trust must be built for people see the value that such apps could bring to their day to day lives. Ideally, releasing a dataset would be part of an ecosystem, rather than a one-time thing. Data providers should value consumer feedback, and commit to good quality, up-to-date data. Rufus Pollock wonders why every dataset doesn't have a public issue tracker, and notes that poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hack events [4].
A successful Open Data world needs partnership between the public, media and organisations. All of these parties need educating on appropriate combinations of the realistic potential of Open Data, and the technicalities of releasing and using it. Michael Hörz [6] discussed the journalist perspective on Open Data; they're desperate for data about everything, and often manage to get hold of it. But they find themselves begging for spreadsheets or CSV files, because what they get given are PDFs. Eugh! Yet they're not asking for Linked Data formats? Which means, presumably, that after they've been through the trouble of extracting data from PDFs, they're putting it in a spreadsheet or something, and there's still a whole level of usefulness missing. And I assume that's because they don't know otherwise, or perhaps don't have the resources to learn even if they're aware of the possibilities. Similar sorts of reasons that they're being given PDFs by organisations in the first place.
So awareness, and easily digestable educational resources (how about SchoolOfData.org) need to be promoted.
Now then, about those success stories... This list includes data publishing projects, groups and apps that have been built on Open Data.
- The Berlin Open Data Portal (100 datasets)
- Open Cities EU (various OD working groups)
- EuroCities (OD working group)
- OKFN OD working group
- Czech Republic Open Data Portal (171 datasets)
- Amsterdam Open Data Portal (137 datasets)
- Adopt A Hydrant (public upkeep of local area)
- Slovakia Open Data Portal (~52 datasets)
- Other version of Slovakia Open Data Portal.. (45 datasets)
- zNasichDani (links between businesses and Slovakia government)
- Cena Statu (Slovakia governement spending visualisations)
- OtvorenéZmluvy (Slovakia state profitability)
- Restart Slovensko (OD hack competition)
- Open Trip Planner (journey planning platform, deployed across 12 countries)
- FairPhone (pushing for ethically sourced smartphones)
- Locatable (where to live in London)
- Placr.mobi (public transport and venues in London)
- Mastodon C (green cloud computing)
- Apps for Amsterdam (OD hack competition)
- Apps For Democracy (Amsterdam gov't focussed OD hack)
- Kenya Open Data Portal (531 datasets(!))
- Farm Subsidy (EU spending on farm subsidies)
- Gapminder (Global data trends visalised)
- Europe Open Data Portal (>800 datasets)
That'll do for now. Lots of the portals and competitions have links to app examples etc. There's lots to explore.
Finally, I highlighted in my notes quite a lot of things that I need to find out more about. A lot of them are technology or platforms for publishing or sharing Open Data, and various standards or studies I need to read in more detail.
I have a couple of questions to ponder on, too:
There's a massive focus around hacks (more often than not one off events) as a way of using and promoting Open Data. What other ways are there? What will the path to a deeper integration of Open Data in society look like?
There are lots of datasets and vocabularies about public services and society, as well as science and education. What arts, culture and media datasets are out there? (And what has been done with them?) Ooh, or online social interactions? Maybe I'll do a survey.
[1] Prof. Dr. Felix Sasaki, keynote: "Linked Open Data @ W3C-Vocabularies, Working Groups, Usage Scenarios."
[2] Prof. Dr. Simon M. Onywere, talk: "The Kenya Open Data Incubator Project – Outreach to Research Community."
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/midata-2012-review-and-consultation via Nigel Shadbolt
[4] Dr. Rufus Pollock, keynote: "Open Data, Building the Ecosystem"
[5] Peter Hanečák, talk: "Open Data and Open Government Partnership in Slovakia."
[6] Michael Hörz, talk: "Open Data in Local Journalism: An Excel file?"
[Notes] 1st International Open Data Dialogue (Day two)
December 6th, 2012.
Notes as I scrawled them. Read a proper review. Purple is calls to action for myself.
Rufus Pollock - Open Data, Building the Ecosystem
Open API is a contradiction.
An API is not open (though still valuable) but not the same as bulk open data.
Should we open governments? So much is hidden.
Ultimately a lot of it is about in/justice (debts paid off by younger generations).
Open spending
- only 30% of departments are up to date - can keep checking who's updating their stuff.
- but sometimes more up to date that government's own records - they use it themselves.
Getting the data is only the beginning. Need a platform.
Getting citizens, journalists and government to work together.
Why doesn't every dataset have a public issue tracker? This is what he'd like to see most.
The process is important.
Digital doesn't run out. That's why open makes so much sense.
FourSquare uses OSM.
Average consumers won't see raw open data - but via products and services.
Next? Building communities. Takes time to nurture. publicdata.eu.
We'll go from hackdays to deep integration. Toy vs. core datasets.
Geodata is mature.
SchoolOfData.org. Data analysis, programming, training.
- Teachathons better than hackathons.
Should have access to all our own data - travel (Oyster), shopping (loyalty cards), social.
- Would like to control who uses it.
- Compare with others (aggregate). Only companies can do that.
- Some people will choose to publish/open their own data. Even if it's a few people, still lots of data.
Open Data = Platform; !Commodity
- Build on it rather than sell it (and let others build on it)
- Already seeing people building companies/making money on this principle.
Ecosystem. Need feedback. Poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hacks.
Datagov census dashboard - who has what out.
There's no gov. data that's come back cleaned up from the community (even though people are almost certainly cleaning this data up).
Be patient. Needed to wait for pressure to build up (why it's happening now). Low investment.
Way to fund production of gov. data (or combination of):
- Charge users
- Taxpayer revenue
- Charge creators (most attractive)
eg. Companies Register data; more efficient to charge people registering companies a bit extra, people won't be deterred from registering a company because of this. Basically, add to existing fees for things people will pay anyway.
Open data saves lives! Heart surgery data caused improvements.
MiData (more from Nigel)
Supermarkets not very good, but some big companies involved.
Notes as I scrawled them. Read a proper review. Purple is calls to action for myself.
Rufus Pollock - Open Data, Building the Ecosystem
Open API is a contradiction.
An API is not open (though still valuable) but not the same as bulk open data.
Should we open governments? So much is hidden.
Ultimately a lot of it is about in/justice (debts paid off by younger generations).
Open spending
- only 30% of departments are up to date - can keep checking who's updating their stuff.
- but sometimes more up to date that government's own records - they use it themselves.
Getting the data is only the beginning. Need a platform.
Getting citizens, journalists and government to work together.
Why doesn't every dataset have a public issue tracker? This is what he'd like to see most.
The process is important.
Digital doesn't run out. That's why open makes so much sense.
FourSquare uses OSM.
Average consumers won't see raw open data - but via products and services.
Next? Building communities. Takes time to nurture. publicdata.eu.
We'll go from hackdays to deep integration. Toy vs. core datasets.
Geodata is mature.
SchoolOfData.org. Data analysis, programming, training.
- Teachathons better than hackathons.
Should have access to all our own data - travel (Oyster), shopping (loyalty cards), social.
- Would like to control who uses it.
- Compare with others (aggregate). Only companies can do that.
- Some people will choose to publish/open their own data. Even if it's a few people, still lots of data.
Open Data = Platform; !Commodity
- Build on it rather than sell it (and let others build on it)
- Already seeing people building companies/making money on this principle.
Ecosystem. Need feedback. Poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hacks.
Datagov census dashboard - who has what out.
There's no gov. data that's come back cleaned up from the community (even though people are almost certainly cleaning this data up).
Be patient. Needed to wait for pressure to build up (why it's happening now). Low investment.
Way to fund production of gov. data (or combination of):
- Charge users
- Taxpayer revenue
- Charge creators (most attractive)
eg. Companies Register data; more efficient to charge people registering companies a bit extra, people won't be deterred from registering a company because of this. Basically, add to existing fees for things people will pay anyway.
Open data saves lives! Heart surgery data caused improvements.
MiData (more from Nigel)
Supermarkets not very good, but some big companies involved.
Prof. Esteve Almirall - Reinveting Cities - Open Innovation in the Public Sector
Competition now is about innovation, not money.
Adopt a Hydrant (Boston)
Peter Hanecak - Open Data in Slovakia
2012 govt signed open government partnership.
Laws already align with Open Data principles.
Everything must be public, unless stated otherwise (eg. according to a specific law, like army secrets. Must be clearly defined, no rubbish excuses for not publishing something).
Open licences (GPL, CC) are not recognised, because there's no signed paper. Currently they're campaigning to fix this.
Existing laws do not fully apply to regional governments, only to state government.
Data that is available isn't in great formats. Lots of things are ignored or misunderstood.
Achievements so far: - Datastores and apps. Datanest.fair-play.sk, znasichdani.sk, cenastau.sme.sk, otvorenezmluvy.sk, data.gov.sk. - app competitions, conferences. Restart Slovensko.
Future
- Spread the word
- Advance principles on regional levels
- Major release of OD by gov
- develop OS publication platform for OD
- incorporate results into other projects
They have a standard published for state government.
Ivonne Jansen-Dings - Code4EU and Apps for Amsterdam
Technology is a key component, but impact on citizens is central.
Taking linked OD out of academia and applying it to 'real life'.
Tourist one. FairPhone.
Collaboration between government, coders and citizens. Can't do this top down. Creating something together, that has to evolve naturally. There isn't a formula.
apps for Amsterdam is a platform for people to talk about OD; creating it and working with it.
- Lots of reasons why coders participate.
- Hobbies
- Solve local problems
- Network, get new business
- Ideas start during hack events/workshops.
- Past two years gone from 22 - 130+ datasets.
- Quality of data is essential for good apps.
- Mostly about getting the government to see the necessity of open data.
- All sorts of working groups arising with municipalities to solve specific regional issues using OD.
- Helping people who have made/are making apps, to help them move forward.
- Lots of people are stuck because they need certain data.
- Creating ideas for apps is a good place to start with deciding which data to open up.
- Essential for app developers is also getting paid. Necessary to help people evolve apps. So a4A helps to connect developers to companies, NGOs, etc. for whom the app is relevant, so they can work out a way to work together.
- They don't have much government data about spending and stuff, working on that.
Apps for Democracy (Apps Voor Democratie)
- Can see which parties and people collaborated with each other on getting motions put in and passed etc. Now integrated into actual parliament website.
- PolitFutures. Stock exchange around politicians.
Code4EU
- Currently hiring developers to create solutions for problems they see within municipalities.
- Changing government from within. Civic innovators.
- Lots of people come with problems, not ideas for apps.
Not about the apps, about the social change.
Local issues can have solutions that have global value.
Lena-Sophie Mueller - Open Government is more than Open Data
Stuttgart local people had issues with train station and there was a huge protest. Planning happened in a black box, people didn't understand why decisions had been made.
(Ed trams)
Same as ACTA. People negotiated about it for 7 years, but it was not transparent.
Need transparency to face obstacles of 21st century.
IT-Planungsrat say open govt needs to be a focus point, but will focus on open data first.
- Open goverment though, is more than just open data.
- It's hard to keep information secret now. Things get leaked. To counter leaks, they put it online too, so it's a trusted source. Can publish accurate new versions.
- What's needed is a Diff, so information needs to be in machine-readable formats so documents can be compared.
- Then politicians can be asked specific questions about changes.
Open gov means taking contribution of people as valuable.
- US crowdsourcing patent information for making decisions about patents.
- Open Budgets - people participate in deciding how budget is spent.
- Governments and administrations collaborate.
- barnet.gov.uk. PledgeBank ("a site to get things done")
Lots of administrative workers aren't used to working with data.
- Need help with extracting data and organisation and processes and technology.
- Change management.
- It's going to take some time, but it's worth making the journey.
Convince organisations that it's okay to open data (sans personal information).
- Lots is digitalised already, and expensive to digitse paper.
- Smaller municipalities are mostly paper.
- eGovernment projects are important for open data.
Status of open government in a country? The thing Rufus mentioned.
Initatives that measure freedom of information laws, but it's very difficult to measure openness. Need to develop a measurement that could be used internationally (big complicated project).
Web Foundation published an index a few months ago.
What does she use? Usually use CKAN.
Christoph Lutz - Open Data and Social Media
Social medai readiness in Hamburg.
Many insights from social media can be transferred to open data.
Social media adoption and readiness can take place on several levels
- organisational level
- individual level
- societal level
This project looks mainly at organisational and individual.
Organisational:
- different agencies, like culture and financial services; regional agencies.
- structure, leadership and culture
Individual:
- drivers and barriers to social media adoption: cognitive (know how) or affective (acceptingness of technology, concerns)
Some agencies in Hamburg have started intiatives (like fb, twitter). Some were recalled, but in general there is political support and Hamburg is more advanced than other cities.
Their research project:
- conduct interviews with employees who had contact with social media.
- 8 people
- analaysed successful vs unsuccessful social media use
- different levels of responsibility, and different agencies
- case studies
- soon a big quantative survey
Organisational factors:
- political support (crucial)
- leadership support (some people high up in hierarchy aren't familiar with technologies)
- autonomy and trust (people can experiment, be proactive)
- structures of organisations (complicated, different motives and experiences in different departments, hard to coordinate)
- processes (hierarchy and bureaucracy; you need fast feedback for social media, which contrasts with usual way of work)
- resource (stressed most in interviews; employees don't have time at work to administer social media accounts, sometimes IT resources)
Individual factors:
- age (younger people more interested)
- affinity (how much people enjoy working with IT; intrinsic motivation)
- experience
- social capital
- concerns (privacy, security, technostress)
Identifiable strategies:
- avoid resistance (make projects appear small, non-invasive, simple)
- externalise project (work with other organisations, avoid bureaucracy)
Engage people in open data via social media.
Objective of Hamburg project? Mainly about representing administration to the citizens, and providing feedback to people. Later about engaging people in conversations and participation.
How to make use of social media in administration? How to get public offices to produce open data? The quantitative questionnaire will help show how open people are to social media.
Simon M. Onywere - Outcome of the Kenya Open Data Consultative Forum - Kenya’s Strategy to Make Government Data available to Communities
Increase transparency and accountability of government.
Help people make decisions.
Support economic development in the country.
Supported by World Bank.
In Kenyan Bill of Rights, citizens have a right to the data held by the government.
opendata.gov.ke
Media plays a very important role.
KODI - Code4Kenya:
- Lack of certain data
- lack of metadata
- limited search
- data duplication.
- Need for better analysis and visualisation tools.
These observations allowed holding a stackeholders forum.
- People interested in solving problems that face the country.
- (MANY issues; things Europe was facing 100+ years ago, but no data about what's going wrong, what the impacts are likely to be).
- Interested in building a platform, but the content is important, and what is it supposed to help us do?
- Issues about data collection.
- In the forum, ended up talking about issues that face the country, rather than the data.
Challenges:
- data hugging syndrome: 'this data is mine'
- Lack of Freedom of Information Act
- Slow digitization
- Lack of trust and low culture of openness
Demand for open repository of all Kenyan PhD and Masters theses. Needs metadata, and needs to be widely accessible. Will help with research, and help people understand research that has been done that might be able to solve problems. Help avoid double research.
Not really free information, because most public sectors spend money to get information.
Project requires various degrees of collaboration. Countries in Europe that are one or two steps ahead. Need training for socio-economic transformation.
Are the licensing issues being sorted out? There's a comprehensive statement on the website (so a custom license?).
Citizens will hold government accountable for information provided, so they (gov) are worried about data being inaccurate.
Letting research community use the data can help get useful feedback about what is wrong - you don't know if things are wrong until you try to use the data.
Up to people to give the government the correct situation on the ground, because gov't is not always right.
Nigel Shadbolt - Finding the Value in Open Data
Local data matters.
Open Data Institute - build economic value in a serious way.
2005 AKTive PSI was early beginnings with getting various bodies imagining opening their data. Nobody would really give them the data at that point, but were curious about what could happen.
Reported to parliament in 2007 - said it was exciting and had great promise, but nothing else.
Activism, top-level political will and committed individuals needed to move things on.
Two years is not a long time for really disruptive movements like open data. Natural lifecycle to processes.
Early enthusiasm, but wall of people who question impact, value, if it's worth the effort. We can see now that it's always worth the effort, and doesn't cost much.
Government is becoming more comfortable with this stuff.
"Can we put a government website up that says 'beta' in the right hand corner, and not be ridiculed?"
Gov't got used to the idea of agile web development; of not knowing how the system would be finished when it's started.
Suddenly, applications appear. Many unexpected.
Gov't efforts would be more expensive and less effective.
Virtuous cycle: open licences - open standards - open source - open data - open participation.
CC isn't for everyone... companies worried about giving rights away. In the UK there's an open government license, developed by government lawyers (to make officials feel more comfortable, and understand conditions).
Open Data market needs a steady stream of successes. Always have a story the person in charge can understand.
OD is abstract principle.
He uses MRSA. They began to publish infection rates in hospitals. Two years later, it's down by 85%. Worst hospitals can look at ones that are doing better. People started to ask questions; simple procedures implemented (sunlight, disinfectant).
We have to understand that companies are in the business of making money, and public services are in the business of providing efficient services.
Transport... Companies think it's more valuable to keep hold of the data than to have people on the transport - lolwat?
Visualising data highlights issues.
Quality over quantity.
Routine to publish certain sorts of information, but there's other stuff that's really important.
Needs to be found easily.
Data portal needs lots of metadata (quality of content, what kind of links, how much).
Every public data should rate itself on the 5* score card.
Open Data business models:
It isn't enough just to publish.
Need to build demand for data that you're supplying.
If the data is poor or gets turned off, people will let you know.
Data Marketplace.
OD Apps (people think this naturally).
Innovate - economic benefits for host, sponsor and developers.
Developers innovate on behalf of companies.
Build and maintain trust.
Prove that you're doing good things, eg. where materials come from, or effects on environment. Various different kinds of open APIs.
Open Data needs a balanced and broad ecosystem.
Complex.
Not just gov'ts. Businesses are beginning to, citizens might eventually (think about social networks).
Lots of varieties of open data AND closed data (some just cannot be released). Or personal data that only the owner can/should have access to.
It's much richer than just "everything's open and we need to work out a way to monetise it".
midata:
We will increasingly become aware that we can collect our own data.
So why can't we get the data that other people collect about us? Why don't you have access electronically to every receipt - and what would that world look like? Switching suppliers, teaming up with neighbors for shopping.
Energy providers in the UK (three of them, other three will do soon) give access to all their raw data.
It's hard to get data out of companies, but those who do see real benefits. Telephone companies in the UK are seeing increasing data exchange between them and consumers.
Products and processes that we'll see emerge from this are exciting.
What's the mix between open data and personal data (midata)?
Government midata. Most people don't claim cold weather allowance. Costs a lot to get credits moved around. Open data meeting midata would benefit this. Same in health area.
Open Data Institude - theodi.org
Leading the creation of the open data ecosystem.
Trying to improve public supply.
Training people to produce and publish open data.
Incubating companies.
Work with public bodies, big corporates, small startups, trying to find values in datasets.
After 8 weeks, 4 companies working in their space.
Locatable
placr.mobi is a transport API provider. High quality access to all open transport data.
Mastodon - green cloud computing options.
It isn't all sweetness and light. Have to demonstrate tangiable benefits to keep progress going. Have to give company/politicians good reasons why this is better.
Huge amount of capital value is based on "I know something you don't know".
As information becomes abundant, the landscape will be changed. You can't rely on knowing something any more, you have to provide something extra quality.
Drive innovation and improvement in service delivery.
With heavy investment in acquiring certain information, why should they share it?
Evolutionary arms race means that someone else will find a way to collect that data more cheaply. How long can they sit on their monopoly?
Governments are not here to become revenue generating businesses, but to provide public services.
In the UK, the office of national statistics gross value added figures are from 2010.
Hasn't seen any examples yet that cost more than the benefit that's gained.
Hospitals, traffic data. These studies need doing more carefully than they have.
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