Data Journalism Award

Alex Voss and researchers from Manchester, Leicester and the Guardian Newspaper were awarded first place in the Data Visualisation and Storytelling category at the Global Editors Networks World News summit in Paris yesterday. Riot Rumours featured in the Reading the Riots study published by the Guardian newspaper last December. More information in the University News and our previous blog post. Congratulations to all concerned.

Brazilian “Science without Borders” studentships

The Brazilian Government has decided to support a programme of scholarships to promote the consolidation and expansion of science, technology and innovation in Brazil through ‘Science without Borders’. Science and technology scholarships will be made available to support tuition fees, travel and living costs.

Background information and programme details can be located at Brazil Science Without Borders and includes a list of project areas relating to Computer Science.

Honourable mentions for two ACM research papers

Per Ola Kristensson has two recent papers published in top ACM conferences that have received honourable mentions:

Best student poster award at IWSOS

Congratulations to Lei Fang, one of our SICSA postgrads, on winning the best student poster award at the recent International Workshop on Self-Organising Systems (IWSOS) in Delft NL.

The poster (PDF), entitled “Towards self-management in WSNs by exploiting a spatio-temporal model”, presents early work on using statistical methods to find and exploit correlations between the observations made by nodes in a wireless sensor network. The aim is to use these correlations to detect errors, improve calibration and reduce data traffic.

Crowdsourcing research featured in the New Scientist

The latest issue of the New Scientist magazine writes about Per Ola Kristensson‘s work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices: Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting.

The research paper was published in the Association for Computational Linguistics’  2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. It is published using the open access model and can be read  here. The language models are publicly released and can be found here.