Robyn Naisbitt

On Monday 6 July and Tuesday 7 July 2015, CDRC’s UCL Director Professor Paul Longley and Research Associate Oliver O’Brien participated in the International Summer Program on Geographical Big Data Analysis and Applications, hosted by Fuzhou University, China.

The focus of the event was to discuss new technologies and illustrative applications of big data and data analysis/mining for geographical knowledge services. Paul and Oliver’s full-day session was entitled ‘Big Data analytics and the global geography of family names’.

Paul also gave a keynote talk on ‘Spatial Data Mining of Consumer and Social Media Data’ at the subsequent 2nd IEEE International Conference on Spatial Data Mining and Geographical Knowledge Services, ICSDM2015, also hosted by Fuzhou University between 8-10 July, and presented a student ‘best paper’ prize at the closing ceremony of the conference.

Oliver has written a blog about his first time attending Fuzhou University and the conference. This can be found here. 

As part of CDRC’s capacity building activity, the Centre offered bursaries to support the costs of two academics in attending the University of Oxford’s annual Retail Location Analysis programme, held in April 2015. This is the first time the CDRC has offered support in this way. The recipients for 2015 were:

Brian Chiang, Doctoral Researcher, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Heli Marjanen, Professor of Retailing, Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku (Finland)

Retail Location Analysis (RLA) is an annual executive education programme run by the Oxford Institute of Retail Management within the Said Business School’s programme portfolio, now in its 29^th year. It is designed for retail managers with oversight of or day-to-day responsibility for location planning and development and has become an important date in retailers’ diaries.

For the first time, the Institute has made presentations from two of the contributors available on line. Oxford’s Jonathan Reynolds, Programme Director, talks about ‘Retail 2030: New Challenges for Location Analysis’ whilst Professor Alex Singleton, from Liverpool University, discusses his work on ‘Developments in Spatial Data Visualisation’. Both Jonathan and Alex are directors of the ESRC’s Consumer Data Research Centre.

For the first time in 2015, two CDRC bursaries were made available to support the costs of attending the programme for academics from the UK (University of Cambridge) and internationally (Finland, Turku School of Economics).

At the beginning of May, the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, based at the Saïd Business School, brought together 35 academics and retail practitioners in an inaugural workshop to discuss how data can be better used and modelled to deliver insight into shopping behaviour and to develop thinking on a collaborative research agenda. The workshop was sponsored by the ESRC’s Consumer Data Research Centre, of which the Institute is a founding partner, and by the Local Data Company. The workshop was an opportunity to showcase the results of work taking place between LDC and the Universities of Liverpool, Loughborough, Oxford, Stirling, Henley Business School and UCL.

Presentations ranged from ’Understanding retail places’ and ’Understanding the customer experience’ to ’Modelling catchments & decision-making’.

Read more about the event in the following blogs:

‘What can combining the brains and experience of 35 academics and business leaders for one day achieve? Matthew Hopkinson (CEO, Local Data Company)

‘Retail Thought Leadership’, Leigh Sparks (Professor, University of Stirling)

 ‘Not Lost in Translation’, Jonathan Reynolds (Academic Director, OXIRM)