Birkbeck on Automated Machine Learning

Project Title: Discovering the way: Automated Machine Learning improvement of Ordnance Survey path network data Host institutions: University of Leicester, Leicester, UK, co-hosted at Birkbeck, University of London and Ordnance Survey Funding: Full scholarship for UK/EU students by Ordnance Survey Application deadline: 9 August 2020 Start date: September 2020 Application link: https://le.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/funded-opportunities/gge-de-sabbata-os-2020 Supervisory Team Principal Supervisor: … Continue reading PhD Studentship at Uni. of Leicester / Ordnance Survey / Birkbeck on Automated Machine Learning →

GISRUK 2020 online • 21-23 July

GISRUK 2020 free and open online conference at University College London / Birkbeck After some hard work with my UCL colleague James Haworth, the programme for this edition of GISRUK is out: http://london.gisruk.org/programme.php GISRUK is the largest academic conference in Geographic Information Science in the UK. Since 1993, GISRUK has attracted international researchers and practitioners … Continue reading GISRUK 2020 online • 21-23 July →

Urban Intersections webinar: digital extremism and the city – 14 July 2020, 5pm

On 14 July 2020, 5pm, Scott Rodgers will be chairing a webinar on Digital Extremism and the City with Bharath Ganesh and Robert Topinka, who will discuss the digitalised tropes, affects and infrastructures of the far right in, through and in relation to the city. This is part of a new ‘Urban Intersections’ series that I am organising with Mara Nogueira and Scott Rodgers. … Continue reading Urban Intersections webinar: digital extremism and the city – 14 July 2020, 5pm →

[R tool] Google Places API

While doing research on points of interest, I coded a new R tool to retrieve research data from Google Maps. Google Maps is a great source of points of interest data, but it heavily limits the number of results. This R script recursively generates sub-queries, until all POIs have been retrieved. The results are generated … Continue reading [R tool] Google Places API →

Windows and its discontents

I generally try not to write about things I dislike, but this time I will make an exception. This post acts as an outlet to vent my immense frustration with the infamous Microsoft OS on a less transient medium than Twitter. Important qualifications to my rant: No operating system is perfect. Mac, Linux, iOS, and … Continue reading Windows and its discontents →

Research project: Localizing Content Governance

This project is led by Dr Scott Rodgers (PI) in collaboration with Dr Susan Moore (Co-I) and Dr Andrea Ballatore (Co-I), funded by a grant from Facebook Research (USD 70,000). Localizing Content Governance in Place-named Facebook Groups (2020/21) is a systematic study into how Administrators and Moderators govern contributions in Facebook Groups relating to named … Continue reading Research project: Localizing Content Governance →

Research project: Searching for Unique Places

PI: Andrea Ballatore, Birkbeck, University of London, funded by Ordnance Survey (£40,000), 2019-20 Summary. This project will develop a framework for the search and recommendation of places. Unlike entities with clear boundaries, places such as neighbourhoods and towns are configurations of geo-located objects with fuzzy and arbitrary borders. Existing similarity search approaches have been optimised … Continue reading Research project: Searching for Unique Places →

Web scraping is legal (for UK researchers)

TL;DR: In the UK, it is mostly legal to scrape data for non-commercial research. Great for doing research from home. Much research data nowadays is sourced directly from the Web, either from traditional websites or from social media platforms. Economists, sociologists, and geographers often rely on web scraping to collect large datasets about the behaviour … Continue reading Web scraping is legal (for UK researchers) →