New projects launched in Hilary 2018
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Though it is by now conventional wisdom that politics is increasingly unstable and unpredictable, we lack systematic evidence that modern politics has become more volatile. This project will address this gap by analysing public opinion and media data over the last 25 years in the United Kingdom and Germany, looking for ways to reduce uncertainty in the policy landscape.
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This project seeks to utilise newly available data to help urban policy makers improve transport infrastructure to cope with growing and increasingly mobile populations.Using a variety of data sources, the team hopes to improve modelling and prediction tasks, as well as create innovate in ways to visualise and analyse this data quickly, extending our work on generating tile maps algorithmically.
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The Fairworks Foundation project aims to set up a long-term structure that will be committed to highlighting best and worst practices in the emerging platform economy. Much like the Fairtrade Foundation has been able to certify the production chains of commodities like coffee and chocolate, the Fairwork Foundation will certify the production networks of the platform economy and increase job quality for workers.
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Despite the rapid growth of online platform labour, little is known about how crowdworkers acquire and develop their skills. This project seeks to address this important gap in our knowledge. The team will interview 80 crowdworkers, conduct surveys, and interview other stakeholders to shed light on crowdworkers’ skill development practices and on how platforms match skills with demand, which will then be used to assess possible policy implications.
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Despite scientific consensus, a vocal group of think tanks and advocacy groups continue to produce discourse designed to sow doubt about climate change. Using administrative and digital trace data, alongside new methods for network and text analysis, this project aims to uncover how think tanks garner attention around their contrarian climate change discourse on social media.
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In collaboration with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Oxford Martin School, this project will examine the interplay between systematic misinformation campaigns, news coverage, and social media platforms for public understanding of science and technological innovation. Professor Phil Howard of the OII will be the lead researcher on the project.
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Awards and recognition
Since our last newsletter, the OII and its faculty members have been honoured with a number of awards and forms of recognition for our work.
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Political Turbulance, authored by the OII's Helen Margetts, Scott Hale, Taha Yasseri and UCL's Peter John, was presented with the W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize from the Political Studies Association at a ceremony in Westminster in December 2017.
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The Computational Propaganda project was the winner of the 2017 Democracy Award given by the National Democratic Institute. Project leader Phil Howard collected the award at the annual Democracy Award Dinner in Washington, D.C. in November 2017.
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The OII's Dr. Thomas King has been announced as the recipient of the 2018 Herbert Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy by the International Association for Computing And Philosophy.
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Dr. Vyacheslav Polonski, a DPhil student at the OII, was recently named one of European Forbes' 30 Under 30 for his work in political analytics. He is the co-founder and CEO of Avantgarde Analytics, a political data analysis firm.
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Upcoming events
- 3 May 2018: Privacy literacy, consent and vulnerable users: children and the General Data Protection Regulation, with Professor Sonia Livingstone (registration will open in April 2018)
- 7 June 2018: Personal data echosystem: privacy, utility and efficiency challenges, with Dr Hamed Haddadi (registration will open in April 2018)
Find out more about OII events on our Events webpage. |
From the OII bookshelf
Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's latest book, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, was released on 22 February, celebrated with book launch events in Oxford and London. Already ranked #1 in Free Entreprise on Amazon USA, Reinventing Capitalism has received outstanding reviews from Science, Forbes, Booklist, and The Economist. Congratulations, Viktor!
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In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. Data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. This is the dawn of the era of data capitalism. Will it be an age of prosperity or of calamity?
Available on Amazon and Waterstones.
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In the news
The OII has been all over the media in the last few months. Highlights include coverage of Computational Propaganda's latest research findings have dominated headlines around the world. Additionally, The New Statesman is featuring an ongoing series of OII-authored opinion pieces on everything from the planetary labour market to open science.
For more media highlights, visit our News section of the OII website.
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The Conversation, 8 March 2018
Dr. Grant Blank and OII alumni Elizabeth Dubois share their recent research on how echo chambers influence political decisions.
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Wired, 1 February 2018
Professor Andy Przybylski talks to Wired in order to dispel myths about tech addiction.
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HBR, 7 February 2018
Professor Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger questions whether data, rather than human ideas, are the bedrock of innovation.
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New Statesman, 24 January 2018
An opinion piece by Dr. Victoria Nash questions how best to govern the platform society to ensure a better future for us all.
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New faculty
We are joined by five new members of faculty this term, who will be working on projects ranging from climate change deniers to political propaganda. Welcome to the OII!
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Cohen is a sociologist specialising in the quantitative study of human social networks (both online and offline), with a particular interest in the determinants of network formation. An alumni from the OII MSc programme, Cohen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
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Brent is a philosopher specialising in data ethics in relation to algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, Big Data, and medical expert systems. He is a British Academy Research Fellow and a Turing Fellow.
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Jamie is a sociologist of work, focusing on digital labour, the gig economy and resistence. His current research involves developing this method in co-research projects with Deliveroo drivers and other digital workers in the gig economy.
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Mimie is a researcher on the Computation Propaganda project. She holds a PhD in Computer Science, and focuses her research on developing computational models for understanding behaviour in online social interactions.
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Vidya recently joined the Oxford Internet Institute as a post doctoral researcher in the Computational Propaganda Project. With a PhD in Computer Science and an MSc in Industrial Engineering, she has several years of experience working as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, with groups at both universities and in commercial environments.
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