giCentre News

City University hosts Geomob

2010-01-25

On 21 Jan 2010 Jonathan Raper and David Mountain played host to Geomob - the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group - at City University.
Speakers included Andrew Eland of Google UK's Mobile Team, Julianne Pearce of Blast Theory, Laurence Penney discussing SnapMap and Andy Walker of Public Earth.
The final talk was given by Mikel Maron discussing OpenStreetMap's Response to the Haiti Earthquake.

giCentre staff win a university prize for research

2010-01-20

Jo Wood, Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsby's research has been recognised in the university's annual Staff Research Prize scheme. They received a "commendation" for their novel approaches to information visualisation, their engagement with data users and their research outputs over the past year which include best paper (GISRUK), honorable mention (IEEE InfoVis), visual analytics prize (VAST) and "KML in research" prize (Google).

London Datastore Launch

2010-01-15

Jonathan Raper chaired the launch of the London Datastore through which huge quantities of previously unavailable data about London is being made available to the public.
A number of high profile speakers contributed to the event at City Hall including Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) and Aneesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer of the United States).

jisc vre rapid innovation funding

2009-12-23

The giCentre team has been awarded funding by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under their VRE Rapid Innovation (VRERI) Grant scheme.
In the 'vizTweets' project we'll be developing the HiVE language in the context of various applications areas. We will also produce clients that can generate and interpret HiVE. Doing so will help researchers save and share visualization.
We will develop a means of communicating this information that draws upon and utilises existing microblogging infrastructures to develop a Virtual Research Environment.

visualization pioneers?

2009-12-15

Our work with Leicestershire County Council featured in issue 32 of 'E-Government Bulletin' under the title "Leicestershire Pioneers ‘Data Visualisation’ For Service Improvement".
The piece describes our 'vizLib' and ongoing 'Timely Information Pilots' projects with LCC. As Rob Radburn says: "How do you go about looking through 450,000 records?" Well - we developed some innovative and informed approaches with LCC analysts.

welcome lian-chee koh

2009-12-01

Lian-Chee Koh has joined the Department of Information Science as a research candidate.
She will be working in the giCentre with Aidan Slingsby and Jason Dykes in a project that applies user-centred design to develop data visualization methods and software.
Lian-Chee is based in Singapore where she is an instructor at the Singapore Management University and will be using the Singapore property market as a case study in the planned research.

giCentre presented with the AGI Best of GISRUK Paper award

2009-11-28

Jo Wood and Aidan Slingsby attended the AGI annual Awards Dinner and were presented with the AGI Best of GISRUK Paper award for their paper with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn on OD Maps. The paper was presented by Jo last April at GISRUK09 in Durham and they have just submitted a full paper based on this work that is now under review.

PhD Studentships Available at City

2009-11-24

City University is currently offering 35 studentships for PhD research starting in October 2010.
We’d like strong applicants to apply to work with us in the giCentre.
The competitive application process requires the production of a short research proposal including objectives, likely methods and an indication of the contribution the work will make to the academic discipline.
If you are interested please contact us and we can discuss research ideas and help develop strong and coherent proposals.

Urban Happiness at City

2009-11-16

Anna Broberg is visiting the giCentre from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (YTK) at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK).
Anna is working on the Urban Happiness project, in which the eco-social sustainability of the urban environment is being determined by collecting and analysing experiential localized knowledge of the residents of six Finnish cities. These data are being generated online by city residents using softGIS methods.
Colleagues in the giCentre are working with Anna and her data on innovative ways of visually analysing the kinds of data generated through the softGIS approach.

Digimap vizLegends project complete

2009-11-11

giCentre researchers recently completed the vizLegends consultancy with EDINA - the JISC national academic data centre in Edinburgh. Five 'digital wireframes' have been produced to explore a number of themes that relate to the use of visualization in re-thinking approaches to map legends.
Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby and Jo Wood delivered a seminar on the project and current hot topics in Information Visualization to EDINA at the finale project meeting.
The vizLegends digital wireframes are likely to be evaluated by the EDINA user community and will feed into requirements for future EDINA Digimap products.