Web, Science and the Internet of Things

I attended the WebScience Trust event yesterday on Data Observatories, a very "Motley Crew" (As Dame Wendy Hall put it) of people who are active in the space of Web data analytics etc. It was a good session as it had represention from various academics studying the area from Oxford, Warwick, UCL, Cardiff Universities etc, a number of non-profits, research groups, and a few companies operating in the area (like us). I took copious notes which I am too lazy to write up but as a very good summary of the day is over here on the JISC blog why repeat the good work of others.

Apart from being fascinating to see how many ways so many other people are attacking this emerging and extremely varied area, my main takeaways of the day were:

1. The impact of the Internet of Things - Prof David de Roere of the Oxford e-Research Centre gave an interesting talk on current activity in the WebScience Trust, but one slide - a good old 2 x 2 so beloved of consultants like us (see above) - on the structure of the work caught my eye. After some discussion with David, I have helpfully (ahem) added another aspect we are looking at after eating too much Raspberry Pi, and (with apologies to David) have amended his slide above. It also allows us to re-introduce a long forgotten Broadstuff character, Mrs Fridge...

2. Who shall watch the watchers - a general issue around the binary nature of this emrgent technology. On the one hand is it's fascination and utility in so many spheres, and yet on the other its risks (privacy, snooping etc) was a theme throughout the day. There was a presentation by Edelman and the University of Southampton where they showed realtime network nail-ups for people re-tweeting on Twitter so you could see who were orginators, influencers, amplifiers etc. Another member of the audience asked the question that given one could do this sort of analysis, and given that sock-puppeting/astroturfing is rife, is this technology being used to to actively direct sock puppet activity. Now we've been pondering exactly this since last year, when we were asked if there were ways of looking at social media sites and see if "people" bad mouthing someone on these sites were sockpuppets or real, and thus were the sentiments genuine or contrived by competitors.

3. Shocked they were shocked - Switch Concepts Ltd told us that ‘Google has a file the size of an encyclopedia on everyone in this room', and went through what they can collect and how. That's not what shocked me, what shocked me was that quite a few people in the room - experts in this space all - did not know this. If some of these people don't know realise (i) what the big boys do and (ii) the scale they do it at, god help regulators, politicians and the like - never mind Joe Public!

One person suggested we needed to derive a "3 Laws of Robotics" for web data collection and analysis companies. Amen to that!

Also, it was interesting to see not just the mix of hard scientists and "soft" scientists, but the segue of hard scientists doing soft science, soft scientists doing hard science, etc - a Motley Crew indeed....