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Focus on: Research Associate Guy Lansley

Guy Lansley is an academic based at the UCL branch of the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC). He first joined UCL in 2012 as a Teaching Fellow in Population Geography before joining the CDRC as a Research Associate in 2014. Guy’s research is primarily focused on understanding areas and activities from big datasets.

His first area of research explored the utility of geo-tagged social media posts for urban analytics and utilised novel text mining techniques to quantify how the nature of posts vary by space, time and between users. His current research explores consumer and administrative datasets. Recent publications have included research on modelling the demographic characteristics of forenames using market data and examining variations in car ownership using registration records provided by the DVLA.

Guy also manages the CDRC Masters Research Dissertation Programme. Each year the initiative offers a number of opportunities for Masters students to undertake consumer data focused dissertations with the support of a large company. Since 2012 24 companies have contributed research projects within the programme. These companies have included large retailers such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Argos; utilities providers such as British Gas and E.On; and retail consultancies such as CACI UK and Local Data Company.

Each of the projects are unique and offer the opportunity to tackle real world problems. This year 15 students are participating programme and summaries of their findings will be published on the CDRC website in October. Details can be found at: https://www.cdrc.ac.uk/retail-masters/.