It’s often said that we know more about space than Earth’s oceans. How then, are marine scientists using new technologies, data science and open data to deepen our understanding of the seas? Adam Leadbetter is a professional marine data & semantic web geek at British Oceanographic Data Centre - a national facility for preserving and distributing oceanographic and marine data. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/227194800/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Oceans-of-data-...
May 30, 2014•29 min
With over 5000 community energy groups in the UK, the big question is, what innovative role could open data play in supporting their work? The Open Data Challenge Series is focused on generating innovative and sustainable open data solutions to address the social issues that these community groups are facing. Hearing from Nick Katz (Locatable), Gerd Kortuem (Energy Schools) and Briony Phillips (ODI) on the journeys that they have taken in the ODCS energy and environment challenges, and the proje...
May 23, 2014•33 min
With UK tenants facing soaring rents, poor conditions, a lack of security and unfair practices from landlords and letting agents - the private rented sector is high on the public and political agenda. The Government says it wants to fix this yet it doesn’t even know how many landlords there are in the country. Alex Hilton, Director of housing organisation Generation Rent, makes a plea for open data that can inform policy, drive up standards and help renters to get a better deal.
May 09, 2014•22 min
In three years, OpenCorporates has built the largest openly licensed database of companies in the world, growing from 3 million companies at launch to listing over 60 million today. The service is regularly used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, civil society, banks, financial institutions and governments. Co-founder, Chris Taggart, discussed the process of building such a database and his journey in understanding the networked corporate world.
May 02, 2014•32 min
The ODI’s Data as Culture art programme aims to engage diverse audiences with artists and works that use data as an art material. The 2014 commission explores our relationship with surveillance, privacy, and personal data, taking a critical and sometimes comedic look at the power of open data. Works include pneumatic contraptions, satellite imagery, data collection performances, and knitted data discrepancies. Art curator Shiri Shalmy talked to Open Data institute’s Art Associate Julie Freeman a...
Apr 11, 2014•29 min
The extension of the open data programme to personal data such as medical records was based on the hope that personal data could be anonymised. This is turning into a slow-motion political train wreck, with the care.data scandal and the revelation that the hospital episode statistics data sold to numerous companies contained patient postcodes and dates of birth, so the anonymity claims were simply false. Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, asks: what’s going on?
Apr 04, 2014•30 min
In 2010, David Cameron described how he expected an army of concerned citizen to become “effective armchair auditors” and use open data to “look over the books, denounce waste, the expensive vanity projects and pointless schemes that we’ve had in the past”. Gianfranco Cecconi shared how, on a dull December afternoon in 2013, he rolled up his sleeves and sat in his armchair… to build a map of UK oil and gas licensing. The map shows existing and potential areas where shale gas extraction could tak...
Mar 21, 2014•23 min
Ian Holt, Head of Developer Outreach at Ordnance Survey, explained and demonstrated what difference the addition of linked data sets has made to the organisation’s open map data. Using examples and case studies, he showed what linked data makes possible for publishers and app developers, and what it might mean for those of us who use maps every day.
Mar 07, 2014•15 min
For our 14th February, 2014 lecture… Climate change is global, yet solving the challenges are often local and bound up in policy making, industrial, organisational and personal decision making. Co-founder of Cleanweb UK and entrepreneur Chris Adams explained the role can open data play in ensuring a cleaner world, and what data sets still need to be opened up.
Feb 14, 2014•19 min
At the January 31st lunchtime lecture, Alan Patrick, co-founder of Broadsight, examined what lessons can be learnt from past technologies such as search, and the most likely safeguards required over the next few years. How do prevent abuse of open data by those with ill-intent, or is this a pipe dream? Open data is expounded as a force for good but is there a risk of glossing over its potential for harm?
Jan 31, 2014•24 min
Ian Makgill of SpendNetwork, examined government procurement. Can open data be used to protect public investments and deliver an IT project on time and within budget. SpendNetwork believe that government shouldn’t have to pay for spend analysis, as long as the data is open, and that suppliers need better data on government opportunities.
Jan 24, 2014•24 min
What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.
Jan 17, 2014•21 min
What does it take to be legally open? Amanda Brock, Director, Origin International Technology Law and Dr Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London, walked us through how to use the law with attitude - Examining the key role of licences and contracts in achieving open software, data, medicine and hardware.
Jan 17, 2014•17 min
Founded in the UK in 2004, inspired by the success of Wikipedia and crowd sourcing information, OpenStreetMap aims to map the world as open data. The project came into it's own during the 2010 Haiti earthquake where volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, to create the most complete digital map of Haiti. Harry Wood, developer at transportAPI.com, and on the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, introduc...
Jan 10, 2014•18 min
Patrick Hussey, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas, by introducing his new startup "DataMartyr", Snowden for the Soul. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
Dec 20, 2013•6 min
Dr David Tarrant, outlines his version of an Open Data Christmas. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
Dec 20, 2013•11 min
Jeni Tennison OBE, CTO of the ODI, outlines her version of an Open Data Christmas, by reading her letter to Santa. For the end of 2013, we asked three Friday lunchtime lecturers - David Tarrant, Jeni Tennison and Patrick Hussey - to return and tell us their version or vision of an Open Data Christmas.
Dec 20, 2013•6 min
ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 13 December 2013. In a decade of running data-heavy civic tech sites such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and Mapumental, mySociety has learned a lot about how to gather, display, and archive data - and we have the yarns to prove it. mySociety's senior consultant, Mike Thompson, talked through, amongst other things, why one of their sites breaks on an almost daily basis, how they combined open data sources and a routing algorithm to evaluate the accessibility of Wel...
Dec 15, 2013•23 min
ODI Fridays lunchtime lecture, 6 December 2013. Since March 2012 Land Registry has been releasing free datasets to support the UK government’s economic growth, open data and transparency agendas. Understand the data journey of the authoritative source for land and property data and where it’s ambition lies with the Land Registry’s Andrew Trigg, George Davies and Ben White.
Dec 06, 2013•36 min
Open data from arts and cultural organisations won’t help you choose a school or a hospital or make a financial decision, but it could create new ways of understanding history, experiencing great art and literature, and - fundamentally - help us to understand more about ourselves. Ahead of the launch of the Culture Hack Open Data Repository, Rachel Coldicutt and Kim Plowright gave an overview of the arts open-data landscape and discussed the importance of making some of our greatest assets open ...
Nov 29, 2013•26 min
Nearly 70 years of computers, and most of us still just use them as a fast version of paper. What is code? What is data? Teaching everyone to program, restructuring organisations … artificial intelligence. What will it take to make “data” ten times better? Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, will take us through examples from working with international agencies and businesses, with a shot of Stafford Beer and a soupçon of PDFs. Francis spoke on Friday the 22nd of November at the Open Data Instit...
Nov 25, 2013•23 min
Politicians are often criticised for their liberal use of statistics and data, and 2013 has been no exception. Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, examined how politicians lie with data and what we can do about it.
Nov 15, 2013•21 min
The first of two lectures examining opening up financial data. The financial sector is a notoriously closed and opaque system, with barriers to entry at many different levels. What elements, technologies and players are required to open it up, and what would the result look like? Brett Scott, author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money sketches out some ideas from the cutting edge of open source finance.
Oct 14, 2013•22 min
What if we could play back all the CCTV ever recorded of us? Film maker Manu Luksch did just that with her sci-fi fairy tale film ‘FACELESS.' Our lives are being captured in a multitude of ways: across social media, mobile and telephone communications, on the street. In the light what’s been reported this summer about the NSA, GCHQ and other governments, Manu’s film is particularly timely. Using CCTV footage of herself requested via the Data Protection Act and blocking out the faces of anyone el...
Sep 27, 2013•23 min
A lunchtime lecture delivered by Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birbeck college, on the 20/09/2013. Since 2010 local authorities have been required to publish their spending data across England. The promise - that this would create greater accountability and induce a transparency revolution. Ben Worthy, lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, University of London will examine the impact of this policy. Who has been using the information, what impact has it had on the public and politician...
Sep 20, 2013•24 min
With the development of new hardware devices, personal health apps and the ability to process large amounts of data sets, we now have unprecedented means to improve and personalise health care for all. Yet such a proliferation of data, across many providers, often utilising always-on devices, raises questions such as - who does the data belong to, how should this data be managed, should patients have the right to access the many readings taken of them within a hospital to manage their own overal...
Sep 13, 2013•12 min
A lunchtime lecture delivered by Jenni Allen of @WhichUK, on the 19/07/2013. What to study, where to go, and how to get there? It's an expensive decision and each year prospective undergraduate students have to decide with little objective information. Jenni Allen of Which? will guide us through how the publication of the Key Information Set has created an open data source that is beginning to help solve this annual, and very personal question. Jenni will examine the applications and limitations...
Jul 19, 2013•34 min
A Friday lunchtime lecture, delivered on the 12/07/2013, by the ODI's very own James Smith & Sam Pikesley. At the Open Data Institute, we build all our technology in the open. This may seem terrifying, but it's probably one of the most powerful things we do. By using open tools and practices, we communicate better as a team, engage with our community, avoid cutting corners, and at the end of the day, produce better results. The ODI's James Smith and Sam Pikesley will share how we're working ...
Jul 12, 2013•25 min
Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 5 July, 2013 In the age of machine readable data a kind of omniscience is possible for the first time in history. We can know all things at all times and this knowledge is even being used to make predictions not just for the destiny of individuals but for society itself. Technology is often compared to magic but the divine is increasingly become the more apt description. Justice, the crunching of souls, predestination. Writer and journalist Pa...
Jul 05, 2013•35 min
Friday lunchtime lectures at the Open Data Institute 28 June, 2013 Finnish democracy activist Aleksi Rossi discusses the big ambition and practical challenge of creating Open Ministry, an online tool for crowdsourced legislation and participative democracy.
Jun 28, 2013•37 min
