Year: 2017

JGI Seed corn winners 2018

Posted on by Jean Golding Institute

We were impressed with the amount of strong applications to our latest round of seed corn funding and are very pleased to announce this year’s JGI Seed corn fund winners:

  • Sarah Sullivan and Piotr Slowinski for their project ‘Social movement differences and risk of psychosis: Data-driven approaches for mental health diagnostics’
  • Agnieszka Bierzynska & Mark Rogers for their project ‘Developing computational tools for analysis of exome and genome data in highly phenotyped rare disease cohorts’
  • Dima Damen for her project ‘EPIC-KITCHENS 2018 Dataset – JGI Sponsorship for Large-Scale Dataset’
  • Andrew Dowsey, Andrew Davidson, Kate Heesom, David Matthews, Christoph Wuelfing & David Lee for their project ‘Enabling advanced analytics for all users of the proteomics facility’
  • Massimo Antognozzi & Matthew Avison for their project ‘Development of machine learning algorithms for antimicrobial resistance testing’
  • Fernando Sanchez-Vizcaino, Kristen Reyher, Andrew Dowsey and Jon Massey for their project ‘Fostering collaborations with UK livestock diagnostic laboratories to integrate data sources on antimicrobial resistance into a multi-use data resource’
  • Luke Western and Zhe Sha for their project ‘Exploiting big data for greenhouse gas emissions estimation using INLA’
  • Naoki Masuda and Mark Viney for their project ‘Immune response networks in wild mice’

Additionally, we have agreed to support the following workshops:

  • Kate Hendry and Martyn Tranter for a workshop on ‘Iso-Glace: Novel isotope studies in glaciated environments’
  • Song Liu for a workshop on ‘Structural change-point detection in high dimensional gene expression profiling sequence’

Work is beginning on the projects and progress will be presented at the JGI Showcase event on 3 July 2018.

 

Whose culture is it anyway? A data project aiming to measure the cultural engagement of BAME young people aged 16-25

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Piece written by Euella Jackson and Kamina Walton, October 2017.

Live documentation from the mapping activity held as part of Whose culture? workshop illustrated by Jasmine Thompson

As Zora Neale Hurston once wrote: ‘I feel most coloured when thrown against a sharp white background’. For young people of colour living in Bristol, and entering spaces that are overwhelmingly white or middle class, they often feel defined in terms of their ‘otherness’. Sometimes without even realising it, they bend and contort themselves to fit to the conventions of spaces to make them feel more ‘safe’. For reasons such as this, young people from BAME backgrounds find it difficult to be in and enjoy cultural spaces where they don’t see themselves represented.

“My culture is definitely online when it comes to culture in Bristol, I don’t feel part of it.”

Equality Trust’s research shows a direct correlation between inequality and lower levels of cultural activity. Despite Bristol’s thriving creative sector (contributing significantly to the economy,) the workforce remains disproportionately unrepresentative of the city’s cultural makeup, and there is very limited data about the cultural engagement of BAME communities as audience, staff, and producers. ‘Whose Culture? facilitated by Rising Arts Agency and supported by the Jean Golding Institute, is a creative data project aiming to measure the cultural engagement of BAME young people aged 16-25 through workshops, training, mentoring, and the development of a mobile app. The project’s intention is to create paid work opportunities and pathways into the creative sector for these young people – as well as involving other BAME artists, designers and mentors – as the first step to supporting increased diversification across the Arts.

“It’s not about the space, it’s about the audience. Building a community and audience who care and who will listen.”

The project’s starting point saw Rising’s Creative Director, Kamina Walton, and Creative Producer, Zahra Ash-Harper, working together to devise a pilot workshop. Funding from the Jean Golding Institute (JGI) enabled them to host the event bringing together young people of colour with staff from some of the city’s key cultural organisations in order to start a conversation around cultural engagement and begin to generate some data. Also, they collaborated with two researchers from the School of Education, Francis Giampapa and Cassie Earl, who supported the facilitation at the workshop.

The event was hosted in a prominent cultural institution in the city centre that has a predominantly white, middle-class audience. Holding the session in this space allowed for the young people to gain access to a cultural institution that they may not have felt comfortable in before and share their feelings towards the space during the session. The session, which lasted approximately three hours, facilitated a discussion with the group of young BAME people and staff from numerous cultural organisations in and around Bristol – enabling a conversation that would lead to the generation of data as to how we can work towards bridging the gap between cultural institutions and young people.

Young people’s mapping of their cultural engagement across the city
Cultural organisations’ mapping of their offers that include BAME young people

The three main activities of the session were chosen to facilitate fruitful discussions and the sharing of knowledge between the groups. For example, for the mapping exercise, the participants were divided into young people and cultural organisations. Both groups were given enlarged maps of Bristol and were given different briefs.

This exercise was useful in providing a visual representation of the disparity between the two groups and showing the importance of challenging cultural organisations on how they can be more inclusive.The structure of the session and this mixed-method approach of holding discussions, exercises and collaborative activities enabled us to start conversations and collect rich and meaningful data in a fresh, sincere and non-traditional way that illuminated potential blind-spots commonly associated with more structured and quantitative methods such as surveys and questionnaires.

Themes emerged such as the importance of online cultural spaces in addition to physical space, feeling like an outsider, imposter syndrome and the role of audiences in creating a feeling of inclusivity. These are the stories and themes that diversity initiatives don’t always see – they’re so focused on box-ticking and quotas that they fail to consider the lived experiences of those who enter these spaces. By looking at who enters a space and how they engage with it is an interesting way of seeing inclusion (and tokenism) through a new lens.

The session was concluded with an exercise where the workshop participants, both the young people and staff from the cultural institutions were asked to write their future hopes and fears around inclusive work within the sector. Many of the young people expressed fear of not being taken seriously, being tokenised or not seeing change happen, showing how sessions like this are so important.

“I hope that I will be part of ‘culture’ that goes beyond boundaries of place and space, and instead makes me feel included through creativity and the drive to create change.”

“That fairer opportunities are created – pay people, value opinions different to yours, be open and be responsible.”

“Be part of an industry diverse, inclusive and most importantly representative and be allowed to be that platform to create work people can actually relate to.”

Illustration by Jasmine Thompson

Building on this pilot, Whose Culture?’s impact will be to highlight how the cultural sector can be more relevant and accessible to young people of colour by modelling inclusive recruitment and increasing the visibility of BAME communities and their interests to cultural organisations. As representatives of Whose Culture?, young people steering the project will receive paid employment for the duration, leadership training, and sector-wide (and intra-community) prominence. They will also have access to professional networks through mentoring and project engagement.

For the cultural sector, the project will generate invaluable data that could have citywide and national implications in the name of increasing inclusivity and accessibility for all of Bristol’s diverse communities of young people. For Rising, we hope this project will raise its profile as a unique, bespoke agency supporting and nurturing diverse young talent in Bristol, positioning us as a key player in the city’s creative sector. 

“[My fear is that] too many people (one person is too many) don’t feel comfortable, don’t feel themselves, feel like an imposter- no one should be made to feel like that.”

Next Steps

Rising has submitted follow-on funding applications to Bristol City Council and the Nisbet Trust to continue this work, the outcome of these applications will be known in December 2017. The plan is to work with the young BAME steering group collecting data more widely across Bristol and to use this information to develop an app that would facilitate the communication between cultural organisations and young BAME people.  The Jean Golding Institute invited researchers from across the University to meet the members of the project team as a number of research questions has risen from the workshop and the aim is to facilitate further research collaborations.

We would like to thank the Jean Golding Institute for their belief in and support of the early stages of this project. If you would like to know more, or are interested in supporting the project’s development please contact Kamina Walton: Kamina@rising.org.uk

The Growing Ubiquity of Algorithms in Society

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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by algorithms, play an ever-increasing part in decision-making within our society. This was the context for “The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts, and innovations” – a discussion meeting held by the Royal Society on 30-31 October 2017.

Speakers from various backgrounds, ranging from law to computer science, economics to education, and graphic design to statistics, delivered a series of thought-provoking talks, followed by engaging discussions generated by questions from the audience.

In this blog I will highlight some pertinent points that emerged, but of course, many more interesting topics were discussed. For a detailed overview of all the speakers and their abstracts, see the event page on the Royal Society’s website.

Day 1 focused on the relationship of algorithms and the law, transparency and regulation, touching upon what the legal and regulatory implications of the use of algorithms in society are.

Many conversations on this day concerned potential issues surrounding the black box nature of (some) algorithms. Because of the growing complexity of machine learning and AI, it is often challenging, if not impossible, to reveal the underlying route that led to a decision an algorithm has made. How, then, can such a decision be scrutinised or tested against the law? The implications of this are quite substantial – consider for example a self-driving car that is involved in a fatal accident. Liability is hard to assign if it is unclear why the car drove the way it did. A key line uttered by one of the speakers this day was appropriately: “if something is not testable, can it be contestable?”

Day 2 started off on a positive note, focusing on what we can gain from algorithms in society, demonstrating use cases of algorithms with societal impact, before moving on to discussing the implications and potential of algorithms applied to studying human health.

We learned how UN Global Pulse is developing machine learning methods to obtain high quality information from humanitarian disaster areas – areas that are hard to reach in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, and therefore historically, information quality is notoriously low. Exciting applications that were demonstrated included using satellite imagery to identify human-built structures and communities, and releasing speech recognition and natural language processing tools on radio broadcasts to identify where events are occurring.

A key discussion on this day evolved around the implications of using data for human health, and the implications for privacy. To train good algorithms, much data is needed. In health, this will often involve sensitive personal data, such as one’s genome. Despite efforts of anonymisation, it has repeatedly been shown that with the right tools, individuals can often be re-identified from analysis outcomes. To alleviate such privacy concerns while still enabling data scientists to have access to the data they need, much innovation is happening. To give an idea of promising methods, speakers discussed techniques such as differential privacy, distorting data (k-anonymity), and methods where analysts do not need to have access to the underlying microdata (e.g. datashield).

Overall, perhaps the strongest point about this meeting was the broad variety of disciplines that was represented by the delegates and speakers, allowing for the complexity of the topic to be debated from many different angles, underlining that machine learning, artificial intelligence, and their implications for society aren’t a challenge tackled by a single discipline.

For further reading on this topic, the Royal Society has published some interesting materials on machine learning.

 

Blog post by Bobby Stuijfzand, Data Science Specialist at the Jean Golding Institute. Follow us on on Twitter @JGIBristol @BobbyGlennS

JGI Community News – October 2017

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News

Clifton Suspension Bridge Harp

The Clifton Suspension Bridge Harp event a great success on Friday at the Waterfront – lots of coverage via Points West, BBC Radio 4 Today programme and the Evening Post. Read more about the event and the project behind it here: Clifton Suspension Bridge Harp

Data visualisation challenge now open!

Exploring complex datasets using VR / 360 data visualisation. Expression of interest deadline 15 December 2017. Are you a researcher producing or have produced complex datasets and have interesting research questions that may be investigated or explained using data visualisation on 360 and/or VR? Or are you a professional in data visualisation, VR, AR, VFX, 360, a content developer, gaming developer or producer and are keen to work with researchers to develop a VR and/or 360 data visualisation to be showcased at the Bristol Data Dome? If so, get in touch or complete an expression of interest form now – see Data visualisation challenge for more details.

Training page now live on JGI website

For links to a variety of training courses available to people interested in the field of data science and beyond, please see our new pages on the JGI website. 

Why we need the Data Ethics Canvas

To mark the launch of the Open Data Institute‘s Data Ethics Canvas, Amanda Smith and Peter Wells write in this blog, sharing the thought behind it, why it is important and how they hope it will be used by organisations and sectors. Data is emerging as a vital and virtual form of infrastructure that we rely on. This creates the opportunity to build better societies but also the risk that we lose trust, not just in data or facts but also in businesses and governments. One of the ways that we can address this is to improve data ethics. The choices made about what data is collected and how it is used should not be unfair, discriminatory or deceptive. The new Open data Institute (ODI) paper and tool will help you learn how to do this.

Funding Opportunities

JGI Seed corn funding call now open! Closing date 17 November 2017

The JGI’s second round of research funding is now open to applicants. Please take a look at previous successfully funded projects – JGI funded projects. The primary aim of this scheme is to support activities that will foster interdisciplinary research in the area of data-intensive research and our priority work streams address these themes:

  • data driven solutions to societal challenges
  • data visualisation and materiality
  • developing communities through data
  • addressing data as a shared knowledge base (information commons).

More information and the application form can be found on the JGI Funding page.

GW4 Initiator and Accelerator Fund. Closing date 31 October 2017

Initiator fund up to £20K. Accelerator fund £20-75K. The panel wishes to particularly encourage applications with a focus on Global Challenges Research Fund ad Industrial Challenge Strategy Fund.

Policy Bristol – funding call for Support Scheme. Closing date 1 November 2017

Apply for funding to influence, inform and engage with policy. This scheme helps University of Bristol academics engage in activities with policy-making stakeholders. For more information please see intranet page – PolicyBristol Support Scheme 2017/2018

EPSRC UKRI Innovation Fellowships funding call. Closing date 9 November 2017

Up to £38.9 million is available for this call. EPSRC expects to fund 65-85 Fellows. Additional funding of up to £1.6 million from AHRC, a minimum of £1 million from BBSRC and up to £0.4 million from ESRC will be available for research at specified interfaces.

Tools and Resources Development Fund call. Closing date 5 December 2017

The aim of the call is to support the early-stage development of cutting edge, high-impact research technologies essential to sustaining the vibrancy of life sciences discovery research in the UK. The 2017 call specifically encourages proposals relevant to Technology Touching Life (TTL), a BBSRC, EPSRC and MRC joint initiative to foster interdisciplinary research into innovative and potentially disruptive technological capabilities that will drive world-leading basic discovery research in the life sciences (both biological and biomedical). Applications should be between six and eighteen months duration and are not expected to exceed £150,000 (£187,000 fEC).

More funding opportunities

A list of current funding opportunities is available on the Research Development website (University of Bristol people only)

Events

The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations 30 – 31 October 2017 The Royal Society, London

Scientific discussion meeting. The usage of algorithms and analytics in society is exploding: from machine learning recommender systems in commerce, to credit scoring methods outside of standard regulatory practice and self-driving cars. The rapid adoption of new technology has the potential to greatly improve citizens’ experiences, but also poses a number of new challenges. This meeting will highlight opportunities and challenges in this rapidly changing landscape, bringing legal and ethics experts together with technologists to discuss implications, impacts and innovations.

British Library Labs Symposium. 30 October 2017 @ 09.30 – 17.00. The British Library, London

The Symposium is an annual networking event and awards ceremony showcasing innovative projects which have used the British Library’s digital collections and data over the past year.

Start Something Tuesday 31 October @ 17.00 Unit DX

QTEC is running a series of 8 seminar and networking events called Start Something for postgraduates aimed at providing an overview of how to become an entrepreneur. The idea is to get people in a room who might be interested in getting something off the ground along with a mixture of experienced entrepreneurs, the professional and business community and people who will be able to help them. This first in the series will be a panel session entitled ‘Heart and Mind: Entrepreneurial Motivation’

Big data and the language industry workshop. 2 November 2017 @ 15.00 – 16.00 Room G108, 21 Woodland Road, University of Bristol

The application of big data in the language industry. For more information please see: Big Data Workshop 2 Nov 2017

UK-HDAN Workshop on health data analytics 3 November 2017 Alan Turing Institute, London

The UK Health Data Analytics Network (UK-HDAN) are hosting a one day participatory workshop at the Alan Turing Institute to bring together health informaticians and data science methodologists. The aim is to explore, in some depth, the methodological challenges posed by health data, building on the UK-HDAN Research Roadmap, a living document, which provides a framework of Healthcare Opportunities and Data Science Challenges. The intention is that, through sharing insights and experience, participants will identify new opportunities for research and collaboration. The meeting will also contribute to further development of the Roadmap.

Opportunity for dialogue with the Royal Statistical Society Friday 17 November 2017 @ 15.00 – 17.00, Room SM3, School of Mathematics, University Walk, Bristol

Presentation and discussion with Hetan Shah, CEO Royal Statistical Society (RSS). Hetan will give a short presentation that explains the varied work of the Royal Statistical Society. After the presentation the floor will be open and a discussion held about what people see at the key issues which they think that the RSS should be taking forward. Hetan is particularly interested to hear about the range of statistical work that is carried out in Bristol and views from the community about what the RSS should be doing. Members of the RSS are encourage to attend and participate and non-members, who are interested are more then welcome to attend.

Famous for 3 minutes Thursday 18 January 2018 @11.00 – 14.00 (lunch provided) Stephenson Room, Richmond Building, University of Bristol

Looking to meet academics from other fields of research, find out about their latest passions and discoveries and develop new research partnerships? ‘Famous for three minutes’ is a popular, fast-paced networking event for academics right across the University of Bristol. With just three minutes and one slide each to communicate their research, attendees get an opportunity to see a huge variety of ideas, models, theories and findings related to data science. Come and join us!

Changing perception: Hearing, psychoacoustics and ICT workshop 6 – 7 February 2018

EPSRC is holding a two day workshop to explore collaborative research opportunities between psychoacoustics, hearing and engineering (specifically within the information and communications technologies). EPSRC are including sound (including music, but also other sounds, natural and artificial) and the intersection of sound with computer science. This includes the development of algorithms, signal processing techniques, user interfaces or information systems to support music or sound based interactions between humans and computers, between performer and audience, as well as applications in healthcare (assistive technology) and robotics. EPSRC are also including basic studies of the biology and psychology of human hearing where the purpose of the research is to underpin design and implementation of human-computer interfaces and other aspects of ICT design.

The workshop will be multidisciplinary, bringing together researchers from varied domains, psychology to computer science. Please express your interest by 20 November 2017.

Famous for 3 minutes Wednesday 14 February 2018 @ 11.00 – 14.00 (lunch provided) Beacon House, University of Bristol

Our second networking event of 2018 – looking to meet academics from other fields of research, find out about their latest passions and discoveries and develop new research partnerships? ‘Famous for three minutes’ is a popular, fast-paced networking event for academics right across the University of Bristol. With just three minutes and one slide each to communicate their research, attendees get an opportunity to see a huge variety of ideas, models, theories and findings related to data science. Come and join us!

Jean Golding Institute Showcase 2018 Tuesday 3 July 2018 Wills Memorial Building

Please save the date for the JGI Showcase event. 

For up to the minute info about events please see the JGI Events page

Courses

Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation. Free course via Future Learn starts 13 November 2017

Get to grips with the General Data protection Regulation and take the first steps to ensuring that your organisation is compliant. Future Learn is offering a free course which covers general principles and basic concepts of the GDPR, key actors under the GDPR and their role, rights of data subjects, obligations of data controllers and processors and law compliance measures, enforcement and compliance mechanisms and liabilities and sanctions.

Public Engagement

Support sixth form students at the Extended Project Qualifications Mentoring Fair 15 November 13.45 – 15.00

The University supports local sixth form students (Age 16-18) completing the Extended Project Qualification, where students write a self-motivated research project around a topic of their choice. The mentoring fair is an opportunity for students to spend an hour discussing their projects and receiving advice from researchers who work in similar areas. We are looking for researchers of any career stage to be mentors for this one-off session. You will be matched with students according to topic and no previous experience of working with schools is needed. A training session will be provided with the public engagement team on Wednesday 1 November 2017 @ 15.00 – 16.30

For more information and to participate please get in touch with Public Engagement Associate ellie.cripps@bristol.ac.uk

Competitions

Data visualisation challenge now open! Expression of interest deadline 15 December 2017

Exploring complex datasets using VR / 360 data visualisation. Are you a researcher producing or have produced complex datasets and have interesting research questions that may be investigated or explained using data visualisation on 360 and/or VR? Or  are you a professional in data visualisation, VR, AR, VFX, 360, a content developer, gaming developer or producer and are keen to work with researchers to develop a VR and/or 360 data visualisation to be showcased at the Bristol Data Dome? If so, get in touch or complete an expression of interest form now – see Data visualisation challenge for more details.

JGI Community 

To ensure the JGI community is profiled on the JGI website and to build the profile of the JGI as a whole to benefit it’s members, please take a moment to:

  • email pure-support@bristol.ac.uk asking to be affiliated with the Jean Golding Institute
  • Add @JGIBristol on your twitter profile
  • Add ‘Jean Golding’ as a structured keyword on PURE for relevant publications to the data science and data-intensive research community (these publications will then appear on our Publications page for anyone interested in the field to explore and offer opportunities for collaboration with teams in other disciplines)

Keep in touch

We are always happy to hear from you!

Would you like your events publicised by the JGI? Do you have interesting datasets that you would like to share/promote? Have any queries or would like to get involved? Please contact us jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk

Follow us on Twitter @JGIBristol

Clifton Suspension Bridge Harp

Posted on by Jean Golding Institute

Digital Bristol Week

A harp has been created inspired by the Clifton Suspension Bridge and transforms data from the bridge into sound. The harp was displayed as part of Digital Bristol Week on 20 October 2017 at a public event in the Hub on Bristol’s Waterfront. The event was popular, drawing in people who were walking past and could hear the relaxing sounds of the harp, as well as members of the University of Bristol and other organisations and businesses in Bristol. The event was reported on Radio 4’s Today programme, across the BBC radio network, including the World Service, Points West, Bristol 24/7 and TechSpark. Even a radio station in Honolulu was interested and has broadcast a piece! Read what the University of Bristol News said about the event – Harp at ee!

During the event people had the opportunity to hear about the project and how it came about from the engineers, musicians and luthier and were able to view the harp and listen to the robotic arms strumming the harp, which reflected the data from the suspension bridge. It was fascinating to see the data being transmitted live from the bridge and hearing the resulting sounds from the cleverly constructed instrument. Here is a little more about why the harp was built and the engineering project behind it……..

Monitoring the impact of people, traffic and weather on the Clifton Suspension Bridge

Background to the project

The UK’s bridges are vitally important for the movement of people and freight. However, many bridges are old and carry far more traffic than they were designed to. It’s therefore very important to monitor these structures and understand how they move; a change to the movement profile might indicate ageing or fatigue.

Monitoring the bridge

The University of Bristol set out to develop a low cost, easy to install bridge monitoring dashboard. The first trial of the software was run on the Clifton Suspension Bridge earlier in 2017. The system uses off the shelf wireless technology and big-data management techniques to collect information about how the bridge is moving. The data is then displayed to users – structural engineers or bridge management personnel – in real-time anywhere in the world. Six sensors monitored the bridge for a month, allowing the team to learn a lot about how the bridge moves and the effect vehicles, pedestrians and the weather have on the iconic structure. Whilst six sensors were needed to monitor the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the technology can scale to measure vibrations and displacements on far larger bridges

Using the data

The data is being used at the University of Bristol, by Civil Engineering to improve its structural models of the bridge and Engineering Mathematics to design a system to classify vehicle traffic. Now proven, there are plans to use the dashboard to monitor the Clifton Suspension Bridge for a second time as well as other bridges in the future.

Innovative infrastructure

Currently bridge inspections are predominantly visual, with an engineer periodically visiting the bridge to look for signs of fatigue. By combining mathematical models with real-time structural data it will be possible to identify problems more quickly, or possibly prevent them altogether. How a bridge moves also reflects what kind of traffic is moving across it, so fitting this system to motorway bridges, for example, will help traffic managers to understand how busy the road is at any given time.

The sensor system designed by the University of Bristol is low cost because it uses open-source software to manage, store and visualise data. The use of wireless technology means it can be installed quickly, easily and in more challenging locations. These factors combined mean we can now gain knowledge of structures that were previously deemed impossible.

How data from an iconic bridge is transformed into a musical installation: The Clifton Suspension Bridge Harp

Creating the installation

Bristol-based musicians and sound artists Yas Clarke and Lorenzo Prati worked with the University of Bristol’s Jean Golding Institute and the Music and Engineering departments to create an installation which musically represents structural data from Bristol’s iconic Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The harp

The harp was designed and built by Bristol-based Luthier and guitar maker, Sean Clark. It has 82 strings and is tuned in relation to the bridge’s natural frequency of 12.9Hz. The unique installation takes the form of a two-course harp resembling the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The instrument is played by two robotic arms, each strumming the strings on different sides of the harp. One represents data collected on the north side of the bridge, the other on the south side.

Driven by data

The monitoring sensors placed on the Clifton Suspension Bridge by the University earlier in 2017 produced data which is now being fed into a musical model that controls the arms of the harp. Six streams of data – four vibration and two displacement measurements – were analysed, combined and used to extrapolate information about the activity on the bridge. This data is then fed into the harp, driving the robotic arms to reflect the activity on the bridge. The more traffic, the busier and more dynamic the music. When the bridge is quiet, so is the instrument.

New ways of experiencing data

This project was developed by the Jean Golding Institute (JGI) at the University of Bristol, which supports interdisciplinary research in the area of data science. One area of interest to the JGI is to investigate the physical manifestations of information and explore innovative ways to represent data that creates an impactful response.

Acknowledgements

The monitoring system was created by Sam Gunner, Professor Eddie Wilson, Dr John Macdonald, Dr Paul Vardanega and Dr Theo Tryfonas from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol. The project was funded through an EPSRC Institutional Sponsorship. Thanks also to Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust – especially Bridge Manager, Trish Johnson – and Andrew Ramage at Techni Measure, local supplier of the wireless component of the system. Yas Clarke and Lorenzo Prati were the musicians and sound artists, Sean Clark (Luthier and guitar maker) contructed the harp and Sion Hannuna provided the Clifton Suspension bridge images.