computational social sciences | The Programmable City

We are delighted to welcome Rami Albatal and Cathal Gurrin to Maynooth on Wednesday 27th May at 4pm, Iontas Building room 2.31 for the third of our Programmable City seminars this semester. Dr. Rami Albatal is the lead postdoctoral researcher of the Lifelogging team at Insight Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision in 2010 from Grenoble University, France. His research focuses on three main areas: Lifelogging, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Currently he is working on new generation of Quantified-Self technologies that employ contextual data gathering and analytics, in the goal of building advanced data-driven decision-making, planning and recommendation platforms. Cathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics where he leads a research group of 10 people. He is also a visiting scientist at the University of Tromso, Norway. His research interest is personal analytics and lifelogging (a search engine for the self). He has gathered a digital memory since 2006 (including over 15 million wearable camera images) and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. He is the founder of the world’s first dedicated lifelog meetup group.

The session will introduce the topic lifelogging, explore the current state-of-the-art technology and look forward to a future in which lifelog archives may become commonplace. The current approaches to semantic enrichment will be explored, along with applications and user interfaces. In an era of personal data, Facebook, Twitter, digital photos and many other activities all leave significant trails of personal data. One aspect of personal data gathering that is receiving increasing attention is the concept of lifelogging. Lifelogging is concerned with utilising sensors to create a large archives of personal data, or a surrogate memory for the individual. Applying semantic enrichment and organisational software over this data results in the creation of a lifelog for the individual. Lifelogging has been described as an inevitability and is expected to change life experience for all. Finally, lifelogging raises many societal issues, among them privacy and data security, which will be explored and solutions proposed. This session should be of interest to a wide range of academics and interested parties.

Rob Kitchin’s paper ‘Big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts’ has been published in the first edition of a new journal, Big Data and Society, published by Sage. The paper is open access and can be downloaded by clicking here. A video abstract is below. The paper is also accompanied by a blog post ‘Is big data going to radically transform how knowledge is produced across all disciplines of the academy?’ on the Big Data and Society blog.

Abstract

This article examines how the availability of Big Data, coupled with new data analytics, challenges established epistemologies across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and assesses the extent to which they are engendering paradigm shifts across multiple disciplines. In particular, it critically explores new forms of empiricism that declare ‘the end of theory’, the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven science, and the development of digital humanities and computational social sciences that propose radically different ways to make sense of culture, history, economy and society. It is argued that: (1) Big Data and new data analytics are disruptive innovations which are reconfiguring in many instances how research is conducted; and (2) there is an urgent need for wider critical reflection within the academy on the epistemological implications of the unfolding data revolution, a task that has barely begun to be tackled despite the rapid changes in research practices presently taking place. After critically reviewing emerging epistemological positions, it is contended that a potentially fruitful approach would be the development of a situated, reflexive and contextually nuanced epistemology.