social media

SICSA DEMOfest 2012

The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance in association with ScotlandIS hosted their 5th annual DEMOfest, a technology showcase of Scottish Universities Informatics and Computer Science on the 6th November.

The school had three posters at the DEMOfest. Derek and Gordon were promoting their work on the SFC funded Horizon Project “Services to the Cloud”, Masih’s poster was “On The Propagation of Network State Knowledge In Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks”, which forms part of his PhD, and Chris was talking about the work he’s been doing with Alex Voss on “Analysing Social Media”.

In addition, for the first time, workshops were included as part of the DemoFest. Gordon organised the first of these on the topic of Cloud Computing. The lunchtime workshop was aimed at software developers who are considering moving their product to the cloud, and comprised three invited speakers and an open panel Q&A/discussion session.
It was attended by 37 people from industry and academia, and is the first in a series of dissemination workshops being organised as part of the Services to the Cloud project.

Twitter Innocent in English riots

Alex Voss was part of the team investigating the role of social media during the English Riots. The study was highlighted in the University news today, and the Guardian this morning.

Update

The results of the study will also be presented at the Reading the Riots conference,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-conference-live-blog
which also features a range of other speakers including Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, Theresa May,
the home secretary and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary.

The study was led by Professor Rob Procter, of the University of Manchester, and funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).