The Revd. Bartlett (1788 – 1841), Rector of Swanage - biography and autograph manuscript

from Thos. Bartlett's anthology

William Tilney, Walsingham biography and manuscript extract

from William Tilney's anthology

WAIS seminar: Linked Cultural Media

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Speaker(s): Guus Schreiber Time: 09/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 546Mb Abstract In this talk I will discuss linked data for museums, archives and libraries. This area is known for its knowledge-rich and heterogeneous data landscape. The objects in this field range from old manuscripts to recent TV programs. Challenges in this field include common metadata schema's, inter-linking of the omnipresent vocabularies, cross-collection search strategies, user-generated annotations and object-centric versus event-centric views of data. This work can be seen as part of the rapidly evolving field of digital humanities. Speaker Biography Guus Schreiber Guus is a professor of Intelligent Information Systems at the Department of Computer Science at VU University Amsterdam. Guus’ research interests are mainly in knowledge and ontology engineering with a special interest for applications in the field of cultural heritage. He was one of the key developers of the CommonKADS methodology. Guus acts as chair of W3C groups for Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL, SKOS and REFa. His research group is involved in a wide range of national and international research projects. He is now project coordinator of the EU Integrated project No Tube concerned with integration of Web and TV data with the help of semantics and was previously Scientific Director of the EU Network of Excellence “Knowledge Web”.

Big Data: Wrongs and Rights by Andrew Cormack (WAIS Seminar)

Abstract: Big Data has been characterised as a great economic opportunity and a massive threat to privacy. Both may be correct: the same technology can indeed be used in ways that are highly beneficial and those that are ethically intolerable, maybe even simultaneously. Using examples of how Big Data might be used in education - normally referred to as "learning analytics" - the seminar will discuss possible ethical and legal frameworks for Big Data, and how these might guide the development of technologies, processes and policies that can deliver the benefits of Big Data without the nightmares. Speaker Biography: Andrew Cormack is Chief Regulatory Adviser, Jisc Technologies. He joined the company in 1999 as head of the JANET-CERT and EuroCERT incident response teams. In his current role he concentrates on the security, policy and regulatory issues around the network and services that Janet provides to its customer universities and colleges. Previously he worked for Cardiff University running web and email services, and for NERC's Shipboard Computer Group. He has degrees in Mathematics, Humanities and Law.

On lions, impala, and bigraphs: modelling interactions in Ubiquitous Computing

As ubiquitous systems have moved out of the lab and into the world the need to think more systematically about how there are realised has grown. This talk will present intradisciplinary work I have been engaged in with other computing colleagues on how we might develop more formal models and understanding of ubiquitous computing systems. The formal modelling of computing systems has proved valuable in areas as diverse as reliability, security and robustness. However, the emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for formal modelling due to their contextual nature and dependence on unreliable sensing systems. In this work we undertook an exploration of modelling an example ubiquitous system called the Savannah game using the approach of bigraphical rewriting systems. This required an unusual intra-disciplinary dialogue between formal computing and human- computer interaction researchers to model systematically four perspectives on Savannah: computational, physical, human and technical. Each perspective in turn drew upon a range of different modelling traditions. For example, the human perspective built upon previous work on proxemics, which uses physical distance as a means to understand interaction. In this talk I hope to show how our model explains observed inconsistencies in Savannah and ex- tend it to resolve these. I will then reflect on the need for intradisciplinary work of this form and the importance of the bigraph diagrammatic form to support this form of engagement. Speaker Biography Tom Rodden Tom Rodden (rodden.info) is a Professor of Interactive Computing at the University of Nottingham. His research brings together a range of human and technical disciplines, technologies and techniques to tackle the human, social, ethical and technical challenges involved in ubiquitous computing and the increasing used of personal data. He leads the Mixed Reality Laboratory (www.mrl.nott.ac.uk) an interdisciplinary research facility that is home of a team of over 40 researchers. He founded and currently co-directs the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (www.horizon.ac.uk), a university wide interdisciplinary research centre focusing on ethical use of our growing digital footprint. He has previously directed the EPSRC Equator IRC (www.equator.ac.uk) a national interdisciplinary research collaboration exploring the place of digital interaction in our everyday world. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society and the ACM and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2009 (http://www.sigchi.org/about/awards/).

Big Data or Right Data?

Abstract Big data nowadays is a fashionable topic, independently of what people mean when they use this term. But being big is just a matter of volume, although there is no clear agreement in the size threshold. On the other hand, it is easy to capture large amounts of data using a brute force approach. So the real goal should not be big data but to ask ourselves, for a given problem, what is the right data and how much of it is needed. For some problems this would imply big data, but for the majority of the problems much less data will and is needed. In this talk we explore the trade-offs involved and the main problems that come with big data using the Web as case study: scalability, redundancy, bias, noise, spam, and privacy. Speaker Biography Ricardo Baeza-Yates Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Research for Yahoo Labs leading teams in United States, Europe and Latin America since 2006 and based in Sunnyvale, California, since August 2014. During this time he has lead the labs in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile. Between 2008 and 2012 he also oversaw the Haifa lab. He is also part time Professor at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain. During 2005 he was an ICREA research professor at the same university. Until 2004 he was Professor and before founder and Director of the Center for Web Research at the Dept. of Computing Science of the University of Chile (in leave of absence until today). He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. Before he obtained two masters (M.Sc. CS & M.Eng. EE) and the electronics engineer degree from the University of Chile in Santiago. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley with a second enlarged edition in 2011, that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. He is also co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 500 other publications. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society and in 2012 he was elected for the ACM Council. He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993), the Graham Medal for innovation in computing given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni (2007), the CLEI Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region (2009), and the National Award of the Chilean Association of Engineers (2010), among other distinctions. In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences and since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow.

The Open Web of Things as a means to unlock the potential of the IoT

Abstract: There is a lot of hype around the Internet of Things along with talk about 100 billion devices within 10 years time. The promise of innovative new services and efficiency savings is fueling interest in a wide range of potential applications across many sectors including smart homes, healthcare, smart grids, smart cities, retail, and smart industry. However, the current reality is one of fragmentation and data silos. W3C is seeking to fix that by exposing IoT platforms through the Web with shared semantics and data formats as the basis for interoperability. This talk will address the abstractions needed to move from a Web of pages to a Web of things, and introduce the work that is being done on standards and on open source projects for a new breed of Web servers on microcontrollers to cloud based server farms. Speaker Biography -Dave Raggett : Dave has been involved at the heart of web standards since 1992, and part of the W3C Team since 1995. As well as working on standards, he likes to dabble with software, and more recently with IoT hardware. He has participated in a wide range of European research projects on behalf of W3C/ERCIM. He currently focuses on Web payments, and realising the potential for the Web of Things as an evolution from the Web of pages. Dave has a doctorate from the University of Oxford. He is a visiting professor at the University of the West of England, and lives in the UK in a small town near to Bath.

Bias in the Social Web

Abstract A frequent assumption in Social Media is that its open nature leads to a representative view of the world. In this talk we want to consider bias occurring in the Social Web. We will consider a case study of liquid feedback, a direct democracy platform of the German pirate party as well as models of (non-)discriminating systems. As a conclusion of this talk we stipulate the need of Social Media systems to bias their working according to social norms and to publish the bias they introduce. Speaker Biography: Prof Steffen Staab Steffen studied in Erlangen (Germany), Philadelphia (USA) and Freiburg (Germany) computer science and computational linguistics. Afterwards he worked as researcher at Uni. Stuttgart/Fraunhofer and Univ. Karlsruhe, before he became professor in Koblenz (Germany). Since March 2015 he also holds a chair for Web and Computer Science at Univ. of Southampton sharing his time between here and Koblenz. In his research career he has managed to avoid almost all good advice that he now gives to his team members. Such advise includes focusing on research (vs. company) or concentrating on only one or two research areas (vs. considering ontologies, semantic web, social web, data engineering, text mining, peer-to-peer, multimedia, HCI, services, software modelling and programming and some more). Though, actually, improving how we understand and use text and data is a good common denominator for a lot of Steffen's professional activities.