Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Reprised my role as very-stressed-person and just about pulled off another successful week with around 100 students including (!!) business and design students; smartdatahack.org.
smart data hack (7 out of 7)
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience. Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education... And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better. But that aside.
- Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online.
- Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch. This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants.
- Best for travel
- Best for health and wellbeing
- Best for communities
- Best visualisation or UI
- (First year prize for) Best data mashup
- Tom Armitage and Stuart MacDonald, for handling geolocated resources.
- Philip Roberts, for data visualisation with d3.js.
- Oli Kingshott, for an introduction to version control, and HTML5 for beginners.
Smart Data Hack
☑ Attending!
I'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
RSVP
Smart Data HackI'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Tried backing away for this year's SDH; co-opted some undergrad minions to delegate to, and handed off the website to CompSoc. Still ended up doing quite a lot, but managed to salvage enough time to also write a paper in the run-up, so delegation: successful.
The Smart Data Hack #ilwhack
In reply to: http://smartdatahack.org
I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events. At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time.
The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February.
The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects. This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well.
I knocked up a website with two primary functions.
We anticipated about 50 students, and invited them to form teams of up to 5.
In parallel with gathering sponsorship, we came up with five prize categories of equal merit:
We hoped to encourage students to make whatever they wanted, using whatever technologies they wanted, with use of open (or specially provided) data being favourably looked upon.
Skyscanner were the first main sponsor on board, pledging prizes for two categories and some massive datasets that aren't usually public and access to internal APIs, as well as engineers to mentor.
We partnered with ALISS to encourage use of their local health and wellbeing data API; ALISS also sponsored in part a prize category.
The City of Edinburgh Council were on board with some never-before-seen downloadable datasets (still online!), a bunch of pre-approved API keys and refreshingly open minds and supportive attitudes.
CompSoc heroically sponsored an entire prize category and promoted the event to its members.
Open Innovation sponsored a prize category too, and the School of Informatics contributed towards prizes and catering.
Greener Leith proposed a challenge and sponsored a special Mosque Kitchen lunch for everyone after the mid-point presentations on Wednesday.
We were able to hold some terrific practical workshops, thanks to:
We also recruited mentors from UG4 and PhD students, as well as industry professionals, who were consistently present in the hacking space all week or available by Twitter, email and IRC.
We marketed the event in the couple of weeks prior (though we were organising up to the very last minute) through shout outs in lectures, posters around the Informatics department, emails to many university mailing lists and word of mouth.
As a result, we overshot our expected numbers, with well over 100 sign-ups by the start of the week. This was good news and bad news at the time, as we had to scramble around to make sure we had enough sponsorship to feed everyone and whatnot.
By the end of the week, there were around 80 students still actively participating, across about 25 teams. Pretty good! Most of them were Informatics undergraduates as expected, but we had a handful of postgraduates and students from the ECA as well.
And the outcome?
Some amazing projects and really positive feedback from participants and supporters alike.
Naturally only a couple of days passed before somebody noticed that I hadn't sanitized input fields on the website for HTML and CSS input, so they made the projects page spin and play the Harlem Shake before I sorted that out, having been alerted at around midnight. /grumble. Should have seen that coming, of course.
In the end we gave away £1500 in Amazon vouchers, five Nexus 7s and ten Kindle Fires. Skyscanner even upped their sponsorship to three prizes because they were so spoilt for choice.
You can read about the projects, teams and see some demos here.
It was a really exciting and inspiring week for everyone involved. Many of the students are taking their projects further (which is probably the most important outcome) and are in discussions with relevant parties to do so.
You can see photos and see other peoples' write-ups about the event here.
Will we do it again next year? From the feedback gathered, the response has been a resounding yes!
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Week(s) in review: ILWhack and JoinUpEd
11th to 24th February
I went to the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop; read about it.
I helped organise and run the Innovative Learning Week Smart Data Hack (18th - 22nd), and Edinburgh's version of International Open Data Day (23rd). Both were successful.
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Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack
University of Edinburgh
Dropped the ball on my PhD for months to wrangle sponsors, set up the website, recruit participants and generally get shit together. It went well, with feedback from students like "easily the most useful and fun week I've had since I started uni".
Week in review: Planning trips!
4th - 10th February
When helping to organise an event, it's impressive how much time sending emails, updating websites and spreadsheets, having meetings and generally coordinating things can take up. So that's a lot of what I've done this week. Not PhD, but related enough to be excusable... sort of... (Smart Data Hack and Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh)
I have finally booked plane tickets to Serbia for Resonate new media festival, at which I'm hoping to make useful contacts with independent digital media producers, learn some stuff about big data visualisation at the workshops (my places at the ones I've applied to haven't been confirmed yet though), and generally learn more about the digital art scene (and figure out ways SW technologies can benefit people who are part of it). And also to enjoy Belgrade, as I'll have a spare couple of days either side of the festival. Because the flights were cheaper then! Honest! I actually lost an entire afternoon hunting for cheapest flights on websites that weren't obviously scams (Cheap-o-Airlines? Really?? Ultimately booking through JAT directly was the best option), then negotiating cheapest trains to London in order to catch flights, then sending CouchSurfing requests, because why spend money on a hostel when you can meet wonderful new people and get tourist advice for free?
I also applied for a place at the Semantic Web Summer School in Spain in July. It looks fantastic and educational and stuff. And I applied for funding to help cover then 900EUR entry cost (a whole week, accommodation and meals included), and SICSA are providing £500, yay!
Two thirds of Ontologies with a View met this week, and we discussed BBC use of Linked Data. I only managed to skim the paper, but knew the general principles from articles I'd read about their work before... I will read it properly at some point, though I think a more technical discussion of what they did might be useful.
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