[eas_cs_seminars] 5th December 2017

[Luca Rossi]

Hi all,

Next Tuesday (05/12) Prof. Alan Dix (http://alandix.com/academic/)
will give a talk titled "Open Data Islands and Communities" in MB373
from 2pm to 3pm. For more details on the talk, see below.

Best,
Luca

Abstract:
How do we make digital technology serve those at physical and social
margins of society? Digital technology, not least the internet, has
transformed many aspects of our lives. Crucially, in many countries
access to digital technology has become an essential part of the
nature of modern citizenry for commercial services; for access to
access to government, and for participation in democratic processes,
for example much of the UK Brexit and US Presidential campaigns were
fought on Facebook. However, the ability take advantage of digital
technology is not uniform, those at the margins typically have
disproportionately poor access, both in terms of physical connectivity
and skills. There is a danger that digital technology can deepen the
existing divides in our world. In this talk I will look at these
issues and most importantly ways we can, as researchers and
practitioners, seek to create technologies that serve all communities.
I will focus particularly on open data, how we can devise ways to make
it more easily found, accessed, and visualised by small communities at
the edges, and moreover how they can become active creators of
information: producers not merely subjects of data. I will draw on
experience in a number of projects on the small Scottish island of
Tiree and also my 1000 mile walk around the edges of Wales.

Bio:
Alan Dix is a part-time Professor in the HCI Centre at the University
of Birmingham and part-time independent consultant, researcher and
educator.  He has worked in human–computer interaction research since
the mid 1980s, and is the author of one of the major international
textbooks on HCI as well as of over 450 research publications covering
topics from formal methods to creativity including some of the
earliest papers in HCI on topics including privacy and mobile
interaction. In 2013 he produced an HCI MOOC that is now hosted at
InteractionDesign.org and in the same year he walked 1000 miles round
the coast of Wales. The data from the latter is available in the
public domain as an ‘open science’ resource. Many recent projects have
a data theme including an analysis of the UK REF public domain data
and working with musicologists on re-imagining digital archives for
the humanities. He organises a twice yearly workshop, Tiree Tech Wave,
on the small Scottish island where he lives, and where he has been
engaged in a number of projects relating to heritage , communications,
energy use and open data.