Category: News

Strathmore Data Week is a grassroots training initative that provides an avenue for Data Science training, exposure, and mentorship to Data Science students, professionals, and researchers. This year’s Data Week theme was on cultivating Data Science research in Africa. The event provided a platform for PhD students and early career researchers in Data Science to interact and exchange ideas. The week also provided a spotlight for women academics, experts, researchers, and leaders in Data Science to present their research, share ideas and map a way forward for building Data Science research in Africa.

The Data Week provided the participants access to accessible training on advancements in data analytics through the research showcase, research, and grant writing sessions. The participants also benefited from networking opportunities with guests working in Data Science and potentially establishing future collaborations more specifically with organisations such as One Acre Fund, Microsoft Africa Research Institute, Development Initiatives, and the ONS Data Science Campus. The project PI who was in charge of the planning and organisation of the Data Week directly benefited from the award through gaining leadership and management skills, planning and preparing training workshops, and mentoring interns and junior members of the Data Science team.

Key outcomes from the funding include:

Women in Data Science

Almost half (40%) of the participants were women, showing uptake of Data Science interest among women researchers. The week provided a spotlight for women researchers to showcase their work and was one of our more successful events of the week. Hence, provides more evidence for the need for more women data science forums, which will bring together the participants and their networks to build on the discussion from the panel event and provide more opportunities to further skills and research in data science.

Data Science Content

Data Week generated needed Data Science content, stemming from the recorded panels, workshops, and data science research showcase sessions. This content will augment the existing @iLabAfrica Data Science online training and promote participation in future training events. We also developed an Ask for Analytics, a free service to support Strathmore University post-doctorates, researchers and staff with their analytics questions and training needs.

Data Science Collaborations

Various organisations come together to make the week successful. This opportunity further developed more collaboration opportunities between the organisations and @iLabAfrica. More specifically, Development Initiatives is seeking to engage us in more capacity building around Data Science skills and democratising data for evidence-based decision making, One Acre fund is hoping to partner to look at how data analytics can track farm inputs to every individual small-scale farmer, ONS Data Science Campus is hoping to have more collaboration around capacity building at the university level through organising datathon competitions for social good. The week also strengthened the collaborative ties between Strathmore and the University of Bristol’s Jean Golding Institute through the planning of the JGI International Women’s Day event, that took place during the week. Through these partnerships, we hope to apply for funding to work on various partner-led projects and hence create a hub where a number of postdocs will work on the projects and have the JGI team visit and support face-to-face programs.

The JGI and Strathmore University will continue to work on developing ideas for project funding, we are especially interested in applying for funding to support our work on developing digital technologies to support small farm practices. We have jointly applied for the AEDIB|NET Project for African Digital Innovation Hubs where we propose the development of responsible artificial intelligence in agriculture and food systems in Africa. We also aim to explore potential avenues to progress impact projects arising from this collaboration such as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Agriculture and Food Systems (AFS) Innovation Research Network in Africa project.

The feedback for Strathmore Data Week was good!…

The ONS Data Science Campus who support the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics who participated and supported the panel session on the Safe and Effective Data Use were happy to collaborate and support more events building capacity specifically around the use of national statistics.

The One Acre Fund representative who showcased their work on using data analytics to support small holder farmers were happy to take part and meet researchers who are using data science to provide innovations around climate smart agriculture.

An opportunity to showcase data visualisations from your research.

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Competition Details

The Jean Golding Institute would like to invite staff and students at the University to submit their data visualisations for this exciting competition to find the best University of Bristol data visualisation.  You can see the entries from past competitions on our Flickr page. 

This year the prize for the winner includes the opportunity to present at the JGI Data Visualisation Interest Group and accept their prize at the Bristol Data and AI Showcase taking place at the M Shed in June. The overall winner will receive a £100 gift voucher and the two runners up will each receive £50 gift vouchers

Competition Rules

• The competition opens on 25 April 2022 
• The competition is open to all staff and students at the University of Bristol 
• Entries will need to be submitted by 23 May 2022 
• All entries should be original and not infringe any copywriting laws 
• Files can be sent in the form of PDF, PPT, JPEG, MP4. Email your entries to jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk. 
• Please append a short summary (one paragraph) of the project, study, paper, or dataset that the visualisation represents and the name and affiliation of the person/team submitting the entry 
• The Jean Golding Institute would like to disseminate any entries in print and on the web with authors names and affiliation so entry into this competition confirms you are happy for us to use your entry to publicise the research work at University of Bristol. 

Evaluation and Prizes

• The entries will be evaluated by a panel convened by the JGI 
• The overall winner will receive a £100 gift voucher and the two runners up will each receive £50 gift vouchers 
• The winner and runners up will have the opportunity to present at the JGI Data Visualisation Interest Group and accept their prize at the Bristol Data and AI Showcase taking place at the M Shed in June. 

Entry

Please submit your entry to jgi-admin@bristol.ac.uk  

Timeline

Competition launch: 25 April 2022 

Deadline for entries: 23 May 2022 

Join us at the Bristol Data & AI Showcase on Tuesday 7 June 2022, for a chance to play with and find out more about visualising past and future climate change with a new 3D visualisation tool. Look back to your birth year, your parents’ birth years, or even as far back as the dinosaurs!

Hear from the creators, Sebastian Steinig, School of Geographical Sciences  (sebastian.steinig@bristol.ac.uk) and Tessa Alexander, Developer at the Research IT, in a short video about the project.

Sebastian notes that he hopes users will be able to “feel past and future climate change” to understand “how dynamic our Earth system was in the past”, but also to “see how alarming our current warming is in this context”.

Tessa notes that attendees of the Showcase may be interested in “moving the timeline back to when they were born” and “seeing how much the climate has changed within their own lifetime”.

Read more about the Climate Archive project blogpost and find out about previous JGI Seed Corn Funded Projects.

We plan to use the collaboration fund to support networks and public engagement events that will contribute to the aims of the Turing Institute and the University of Bristol, to utilise data science to change the world for the better.

Find out more about the funded projects:

Establishing a national vision for “Data-centric biological design”

This project will be led by Thomas Gorochowski (Bristol) and Diego Oyarzun (Edinburgh). The aim is to develop a white paper that will describe the vision for data-centric approaches that will transform Engineering Biology, which is one of the strategic priorities for UKRI. They plan to organise a workshop at Turing HQ, inviting leading figures in the field to work on the white paper. They will also create an application to become a Turing Special Interest Group to build longer term momentum.

Data competition with Ordnance Survey 

The JGI has developed this vehicle to develop links with external partners, providing, at the same time, an opportunity for early career researchers to be exposed to a variety of datasets and challenges. The JGI are in discussion with the Ordnance Survey, who are interested in being involved in the next data competition. They will provide an open dataset and a challenge, and the JGI will curate the dataset to make it fully accessible to those entering the data competition.

Bristol Science Film Festival (BSFF) competition and Data Week Live Event 

As part of Bristol Data Week 2022, and continuing our collaboration with BSFF, we will be hosting the JGI Data Science and AI Film Prize. The winners will be announced during Data Week (13-17 June), alongside a screening of their films. This year we plan to hold the event in person at The Watershed, inviting the JGI community to attend, including members of the general public, with an added social element. It’s important to us to continue supporting and celebrating this local festival and this arts and science collaboration.

The Jean Golding Institute Seed Corn Funding is a fantastic opportunity to develop multi and interdisciplinary ideas and promote collaboration in data science and AI.  We are delighted that a new cohort of interdisciplinary research has been supported through this funding.

Summaries of the selected projects: 

 

An AI-based app to recognise, gather data on and respond to children’s arrangements of wooden blocks in mathematical block play Alf Coles and Michael Rumbelow, School of Education in collaboration with software developer PySource, will develop an AI-based object recognition app, which allows them to provoke and gather data on children’s experiences at the interface of the digital and material in mathematics education.

Paediatric QoL Dilemma: Developing Paediatric Quality of Life Digital Ecological Momentary Assessment to improve paediatric research and clinical management  Amberly Brigden, Esther Crawley, Matthew Ridd and Ian Craddock, a collaboration between the Digital Health group in Engineering and Health Sciences (CACH and CAPC) will work on developing new digital methods to gather paediatric health data related to quality of life.

Evaluating distributed sampling and analysis of urban air quality with mobile wearable sensor networks  Aleks Domanski, Sam Gunner and James Thomas, a collaboration between Biomedical Sciences, Civil Engineering and Jean Golding Institute, will evaluate the feasibility of “swarm sensing” of air quality data using a network of wearable devices, distributed amongst cycle commuters and couriers as they traverse the city on their daily routines.

Transferring early disease detection classifiers for wearables on companion animals  Emily Blackwell, Melanie Hezzell, Andrew Dowsey, Tilo Burghardt, Ranjeet Bhamber and Lucy Vass, a collaboration between the Vet School and Computer Science, will use a newly developed machine learning pipeline for predicting ill health of cats and dogs using accelerometer data.

Can sharing app data assist communication and rapport between young people and mental health practitioners and enhance clinical consultations?  Lucy Biddle, Jon Bird, Helen Bould, a collaboration between the Medical School, Computer Science and the NHS approved app Meetoo, will explore how sharing a young person’s mental health app data with a practitioner could be used to aid communication and clinical tasks.

Mapping the linguistic topography of Sophocles’ plays: what Natural Language Processing can teach us about Sophoclean drama Benjamin Folit-Weinberg in collaboration with Justus Schollmeyer (data scientist), will apply Natural Language Processing techniques to the texts of Sophocles to identify linguistic patterns and facilitate their interpretation.

Data-Driven Aerospace Design through the Statistical Characterisation of the Search and Rescue Environment  Josh Hoole, Oliver Andrews, Steve Bullock, a collaboration between Aerospace Engineering and Geographical Sciences, will use new datasets to better characterise the round the clock Search and Rescue capability across land, sea and air

Brunel’s Network: Interactive  Maria Pregnolato, James Boyd, Christopher Woods, a collaboration between Civil Engineering, Brunel Institute and ACRC, will develop a data visualisation interactive and user-friendly exhibit to explore the history of technology and the industrial revolution.

Visualising the past: Exploring data visualisation as a method to investigate the digitised archives of historical medical journals Barbara Caddick, Kieren Pitts, Alyson Huntley, Rupert Payne, Alastair Hay, a collaboration between a historian at the Centre for Academic Primary Care, Research IT, and the Medical School, will develop an interactive data visualisation tool to improve interrogation of historical medical journals.

Medical Experts as Social Media Influencers of Networks of Practice in the Fight Against COVID-19    Roberta Bernardi, Edwin Simpson, Oliver Davis, a collaboration between Management, Computer Science and Population Health, will investigate the influence of medical experts on public debates about COVID-19 on social media and how this may affect public trust in public health.

Investigating biomarkers associated with Alzheimer Disease to boost multi-modality approach for early diagnosis  Zahraa Abdallah, Paul Yousefi, a collaboration between Engineering Mathematics and the Medical School, will use machine learning approaches to study genomic data to identify biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Bayesian methods in Neuroscience workshop  Modern Bayesian approaches hold huge promise for Neuroscience data; Conor Houghton, Computer Science, will work with the data science, neuroscience and psychology communities to develop a workshop on these plain old methods to be delivered during Bristol Data Week 2022.

Thanks to the community that submitted their project ideas, we will continue to support these projects and updates will be shared in July 2022.

Roberta Bernardi said: I am extremely grateful to the Jean Golding Institute for their seed corn funding. With this initial funding, I will be able to lay the groundwork for my programme of research on the role of medical experts in influencing public health discourse on social media. This funding offers me the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from computer science and population health and build a machine learning classifier for the automated content analysis of tweets. Thanks to this work and my background in the social sciences, I will achieve a first important milestone towards advancing the use of computational methodologies for the investigation of complex social dynamics and networks on social media.  

Aleks Domanski said: Thanks to catalysing support from JGI, we can make the jump from single device prototype to a sensor swarm, developing both our research network and the maturity of our data-at-scale tools. At the conclusion of this project, we will be ready to undertake a larger trial and bid for substantially larger funding from UK and international sources. 

Also, we want to announce that a new funding opportunity is available for Postgraduate Researchers, more information is available on the JGI website