Making data mobilising data Lancaster University Home Page

22 January 2014, Seminar, LUMS, LT4 14.00-19.00
 
23 January 2014, Workshop, InfoLab21 c60 b/c, 9.30-13.00

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Position Statements & Abstracts

Unassailable Math and Contested Outcomes: Negotiating the Meaning of Data Analytics

Jeanette Blomberg, Program manager for practice-based service innovation, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA 
The business press summons organizations to manage their ‘data’ as a strategic resource, guiding such decisions as how best to market to customers, adjust inventory, or balance skills portfolios. The promises of (big) data analytics are vast and are presented as an imperative for those organizations (including civic and not-for-profit) who don’t want to get left behind. In this presentation I will explore some of the challenges facing those who desire to drive organizational decision-making based on the analysis of organizational data. Examples from ongoing research projects will focus on both the production of organizational data and the interpretation of data analytics by organizational actors. I will discuss how the different knowledge traditions and practical concerns of the variously positioned corporate actors shape the meaning of the data analytics and influence the ways in which the analyses are acted upon. I’ll conclude with a discussion of issues raised by these examples for data analytics as a resource for personal and community betterment.

 

Agile, Mobile, Public: Communities in Crises

Monika Buscher & Michael Liegl, mobilities.lab, Lancaster University
Almost every post-disaster report highlights a need for better integration of affected communities in emergency management (EM). Natural or manmade crises (e.g. floods, riots) can be addressed better with a ‘Whole Community’ approach, where “officials can collectively understand and assess the needs of their respective communities” and communities play an active part in planning and response (FEMA 2011). Social innovation has made social media (SM) an important force in this (see #SMEM), allowing more agile response, flexible mobilisation of local resources and knowledge, and public-minded community efforts. But SMEM and ‘crisis informatics’ (Palen 2007) also generate challenges for communities and statutory responders, ranging from misinformation to vigilante justice. In this paper we explore challenges and opportunities for better integration of civic action via SM into EM. How do grassroots crowdsourcing and human intelligence efforts in crises sit with ‘whole community security’ concepts and official emergency response protocols?

Making Data Infrastructures in Cities

Markus Bylund, SICS Swedish ICT
The vision of big data and how it can empower citizens in their everyday lives is grand. There are many proposals of how big data, by providing nearly complete maps of people’s life, can assist in shaping more sustainable, healthy, and joyful behavior. In practice, there are many challenges that must be overcome in order to produce this grand dataset, and even more so in order to achieve the envisioned behavioral effects, in particular if the aim is to make data useful for communities and the inhabitants of neighborhoods. In the project Smart ICT for living and working in Stockholm Royal Seaport, we detail a generic ICT infrastructure for a new city district under development in Stockholm. The project engages more than a dozen small and large companies from the telecom sector, construction companies, and the City of Stockholm. The mission of the project is to develop enablers for a generic ICT infrastructure that assists in reducing investment, climate and environmental costs while supporting the diversity of people living in a city in their daily life. In this project, we adopt a more horizontally oriented infrastructure perspective on IT for sustainable cities, as compared to maintaining separate and isolated perspectives based on individual industrial and service sectors. This opens for a better understanding of both opportunities and costs for the environment, climate, economy, and for social life.

Mining Empathy: Real-time Crowdsourcing of Social Support through Biometric Data

Franco Curmi, Computing, Lancaster University
Mining empathy: real-time crowdsourcing of social support through biometric data broadcast Franco Curmi, Lancaster University, UK The number of mobile applications that share personal data is constantly growing and the nature of the data shared is becoming increasingly personal. Existing freely available mobile applications like Runkeeper, Azumio and Nike+ allow users to share data as personal as biometric data, like heart rate, over social networks. With the technology behind the capturing of biometric data becoming more unobtrusive, this type of data sharing is likely to increase. To analyze the effects and possibilities that this data can have on communities, we developed HeartLink. HeartLink is a system that autonomously broadcasts personal data such as heart rate and tasks’ completion rate on behalf of the user that is conducting a challenging task. We describe how the system was deployed and pilot-tested during sport events. As the athletes carry out their tasks, online viewers not only engage with them by tracking their progress and monitor their effort, but can also provide support and boost their motivation by cheering them remotely.

Community Data Explorer - Bridging the Dada Divide

Daniel Heery, Cybermore
The community data explorer responds to 3 major issues: - Cutbacks to the delivery of services by local authorities - A drive for communities to deliver their own services and design how services are delivered - Increasing volumes of open data Working with the community of Alston Moor in Cumbria, we are:
1) Identifying relevant and interesting local data sets for the community
2) Coming up with new means of visualising this data
3) Measuring the impact of improved access to data on the community

Engaging Citizens to Make Big Data

Suvodeep Mazumdar, Sheffield University
Citizen observatories are increasingly popular as means to establish interaction and co-participation between citizens and authorities. WeSenseIt is an EU FP7 project that aims at developing citizen observatories of water and flooding, which will allow citizens and communities to take on a new role in the information chain: a shift from the traditional one-way communication paradigm towards a two-way communication model in which citizens become active stakeholders in creating Situation Awareness. Int his talk we will present how WeSenseIt leverages different levels of citizens participation using custom mobile and web applications and innovative sensors to collect big data for sensitive areas. A combination of crowdsourcing and custom applications is adopted to empower and foster participation with the objective of creating an enriched knowledge base to foster decision making during emergencies while creating the basis for collaboration, trust and accountability of actions.

Mobile Communities and the Design and Production of Data Solutions

Shaun Perng, Programmable City Project, NUI Maynooth, Ireland
Big data sets are enabling new waves of city analytics to pursue smarter cities: cities that are effectively monitored, regulated and connected, as well as driving towards greater efficiency, sustainability, transparency and openness. Governmental, commercial or research partnerships have developed various strategies of making data, but a critical aspect that remains to be carefully examined concerns the tools, social relations, dynamics and politics revolving around making data useful.This paper presents an early exploration of how various ‘mobile’ communities incorporate programming and coding practices to promote dialogues between data and urban lives by using Dublin as an example. Events and initiatives such as open data movement, hackathons, app competitions, research partnerships or self-organised regular meetings of coders and programmers have mobilised citizens in and around Dublin to engage in uncovering existing historical and (near) real-time data about the city. These events and initiatives provide a way to see how data can be made to understand and organise urban lives. More crucially, they foreground the importance of rethinking the process of designing and producing data solutions, in terms of the plans and actions around data solutions; the social, collaborative and embodied space of the process; their financial, technical (software) and collaborative sustainability; and the membership and politics of care and design.

Lived Informatics

John Rooksby, Computer Science, Glasgow University
Mobile technologies for health and wellbeing range from free-to-download mobile apps such as My Fitness Pal and Map My Run, to premium hardware devices such as the Nike Fuelband and Jawbone UP. Although personal tracking is not new, it is now possible to automate much tracking and it is relatively simple to transfer and combine data between devices and to visualise and analyse it over the long term. Indeed, many companies are pursuing business models based upon the large scale collection of this data. In this talk I will point out that personal tracking is not necessarily akin to data science; people are not simply engaging in long-term, dispassionate, and individualistic data collection and analysis, but are 'dwelling in data'.  I will discuss, using Ingold’s terms, what it is to 'be alive' with data (i.e. what it is to look forward with data): to train for a marathon, to try to lose or maintain weight, or to try to get better sleep. I will argue that the design challenges in this area are not limited to the collection of accurate and comprehensive information, and that good design may sometimes be contrary to this. 

Up My Street: Data and its street life

Alex Taylor, Microsoft Cambridge, UK
[Big] Data is everywhere, and much of it says a lot about who we are. Everything from census data, and local statistics on crime and education to our shopping habits, and tweets and facebook likes are out there. Altogether, these data give others access to stuff that says a lot about who we are as both individuals and communities. Collected and aggregated, as big data, they offer a way of looking in from above or outside. What happens, though, when big data gets personal (and local)? How do those of us at ‘street level’ make sense of our own data, and what do we want to do with it? Does the data available online mean anything to us? Do we want to say something about ourselves and the places we live in using this data? Indeed, do we want to change how we present ourselves using data?
Up My Street, data and its street life is a project in the making in which we hope to investigate the relationships between people, their communities and data. By building and deploying a number of prototype data devices, our plan is to investigate how people and communities think and act with their data and what questions they have about it. In effect, we want to see what happens to big data when it becomes something we (at street level) can see, handle and work with. At the workshop I’ll report on where we are with this project, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the ways that we are struggling through.

 

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