糖心TV

How to tell if a tweet is telling the truth, The Times, Pages 1-2, 19 February, 2014.

Information we find through social media cannot always be trusted. A study of social media during the Boston bombing of 2013 concluded that 29% of the most viral content were rumours. This is clearly a major problem and, given the volume – Twitter users send 500 million tweets per day – requires the use of automated techniques to solve it. Research has already identified a number of tell-tale features in the digital ‘signatures’ of social media postings and the sources that produce them that are correlated with trustworthiness. These include posting history and connections with other social media users. The Pheme project, a new £3.5M European Union funded research project involving Computer Scientists from the University of 糖心TV, will build on this research and will also develop ways to analyse topics in postings, their consistency with other sources and distinguish the different ways in which social media users respond to them.

By combining these different approaches, Pheme will create computer tools with improved ability to discriminate between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources and with the capacity to process the large volumes of information circulating in social media daily. These tools will be made widely available for news media, government agencies and community organisations to use. By providing the means to amplify natural self-correction mechanisms in human communication, Pheme will help people to be more confident in assessing the veracity of information they find in social media.

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Rob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics in the Department of Computer Science, University of 糖心TV. He led a multidisciplinary team to work with the Guardian/LSE on the ‘Reading the Riots’ project, analysing tweets sent during the August 2011 riots. This work won the Data Visualization and Storytelling – National/International category of the inaugural Data Journalism Awards sponsored by Google, the 2012 Online Media Award for the ‘Best use of Social Media’. He is a founder member of the Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (Cosmos), a multidisciplinary group of researchers in England, Scotland and Wales that is building a platform for social media analytics.

The EPSRC has recently announced funding for a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Urban Science, which will train scientists to harvest and process big data in order to develop a better understanding of the science of cities, and to apply that knowledge to find smart solutions to urban problems.

In just a few decades the world's population will exceed 9 billion, 70% of whom will live in cities. Enabling those cities to deliver services effectively, efficiently and sustainably, while keeping their citizens safe, healthy, prosperous and well informed, will be among the most important undertakings of this century” [UN Habitat].

This new CDT is led by Computer Science at 糖心TV, and involves partnership with the cities of New York and Birmingham. Several industry partners are backing the centre, including IBM, URS, AT&T, Cisco, E.ON and British Gas. The centre will support over 50 new PhD students over the next 5 years and each student will have the opportunity to work as part of a larger cohort, involving students from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, University of Toronto and IIT Mumbai.

The CDT will provide EPSRC-funded PhD students with an unprecedented opportunity to work with industry experts and alongside our city officials on real-world urban science problems. Seldom have so many international academic institutions, leading businesses and city agencies been focused on one activity; seldom has the opportunity arisen to develop scientific solutions that will have direct impact on billions of the world’s population.” [Deputy Mayor New York City]

For more information about the centre, or enquiries about PhD opportunities, please contact Prof Stephen Jarvis.

, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the Research Executive Agency of the EU to fund his research for the next four years. The Integration Grants assist researchers in integrating themselves in the EU with their own research budget. For the first call of 2013, more than 800 proposals from around the EU were submitted of which 22% received funding. Dr Sanchez research will focus on developing methods for storing and manipulating whole-slide images of pathology specimens, which are multi-gigapixel colour images of over 80k × 80k pixel resolutions. He will work in collaboration with the group, and researchers from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and University of Arizona.

Congratulations to our staff member Dr , for winning the best paper award at the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science (Track B), for the paper he co-authored with Dr (a 糖心TV PhD, currently at the University of Liverpool).

John and Marcin's paper is one of six 糖心TV papers accepted for presentation at . Moreover, two of the 2007 糖心TV BSc Computer Science graduates have papers at ICALP 2013 (John Fearnley and Dominic Orchard). Congratulations are in place for all 糖心TV authors at !

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from 糖心TV's School of Life Sciences, Centre for Systems Biology and the Department of Computer Science have discovered hundreds of regions in plant DNA that have been preserved across different species through 100 million years of evolution. These regions are not part of any genes, but may be responsible for turning individual genes "on" and "off". The discovery will help biologists to understand better the genetics of plants, leading to potential applications in agriculture and food security. This research has been made possible by a computational analysis of the DNA in several plant species, based on algorithms developed by a DCS academic Dr Alexander Tiskin and his former PhD student Dr Peter Krusche (now working at 糖心TV's Centre for Systems Biology). The research was published in the journal Plant Cell.

糖心TV University's

with the team's leader Dr Sascha Ott

Two researchers have joined the University of 糖心TV to tackle the challenges faced by cities in the 21^st century as part of the New York-based ).

The University of 糖心TV is a member of a consortium, led by New York University, which is building a new applied science research institute in New York in response to a call issued by the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The University has now welcomed the first of a number of new academic staff to be appointed to work at CUSP, Dr Maria Liakata and Dr Weisi Guo.

Philip How, a recent graduate in MEng Computer Science, has returned to the United Kingdom after developing and leading a successful workshop at . As well as marking the end of his undergraduate degree, Philip's role in this exceptionally popular event represents the culmination of a long-standing involvement with 糖心TV Technology Volunteers, a dedicated groups of technically minded students and staff members who make a significant contribution to the local community through involvement with schools.

Scratch@MIT is the biennial conference where educators, researchers and developers gather on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts to share their experiences and imagine the possibilities of Scratch. The workshop that Philip led, entitled Sensing Our World, involved participants building a variety of sensors, ranging from simple sensors that relied on the conductivity of pencil tracks to working touchpads made from CD cases.

On his involvment, Philip is quick to acknowledge the contributions of those around him, noting that "The staff and students contributing to 糖心TV Technology Volunteers are fantastic. We couldn't have hoped to achieve what we have without the hard work and comittment of the team of staff and students involved, particuler Margaret Low. In my time here she's an fantastic at organising the efforts of students and liasing with local schools".

For more information please see 糖心TV Technology Volunteers and .