The 22nd International Conference on Recent Advances in Retailing and Consumer Services Science was held on July 27-30 at Montreal, Canada.
CRDC’s Research Associate, Les Dolega, presented at the event on the ‘E-Resilience of UK retail centres’.
The talk was received well by all participants. To access the presentation click on ‘E-Resilience’.
CDRC’s UCL Director Professor Paul Longley was invited to participate in the 4th International Conference on Data Management Technologies and Applications (DATA 2015) as a key note speaker.
The event, hosted from 20-22 July in Colmar, France, bought together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in various aspects of data and information systems and technology.
Paul’s keynote talk focused upon ‘The Provenance of Consumer and Social Media Data’.
On Thursday 23 July 2015 Deputy Director of the Consumer Data Research Centre, Dr James Cheshire, was invited to the Sky News studio to be interviewed live on the channel’s flagship evening programme Sky News Tonight.
His expertise was required to discuss the novel methods – such as horse-drawn sledges, barges and local trekkers – Google have deployed to bring Street View to the more inaccessible parts of the world. James was also asked to comment on the value and utility of so-called “traditional” printed maps in an era of digital mapping.
A new institute set up to help public and private sector organisations meet the challenges and opportunities of the Big Data revolution opened its doors on Friday 10 July.
The Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) is home to two centres of research, the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (Leeds) and the MRC Centre for Medical Bioinformatics. The Institute offers state-of-the-art facilities in data analytics and will partner with researchers and organisations to help them make the most of the rapidly growing fields of consumer and medical data analysis.
Cllr James Lewis, Deputy Leader and Executive Member for Strategy and Resources at Leeds City Council, said: “Cities around the world are benefitting from new ways to capture, analyse and process data. Valuable real-world applications of this range from the intelligent routing of vehicles and design of energy efficient communities to optimising the provision of health and social care services.
“This is a key priority for the city as Leeds aims to maintain its position at the forefront of the Smart Cities revolution. We are recognised as a Pioneer in our approach to health and social care, and we lead the field in developing a single integrated social care record. The LIDA provides a unique opportunity for the city to bring together existing expertise and data from across a range of organisations to solve real problems for people and communities.
“Our partnership with the University is an important relationship for us – we congratulate the team on bringing this fantastic asset to fruition and look forward to working with it to secure a real and lasting impact in promoting a thriving third sector, vibrant economy and healthy communities.”
Sir Alan Langlands, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, added: “LIDA brings together applied research groups and data scientists from mathematics and computer science, opening up new opportunities to understand health and human behaviour and to inform the action required to tackle a wide range of social and environmental problems.
“The new facilities are purpose built for handling data securely. Our researchers are highly trained to operate safe systems for managing and linking data and to observe the highest international standards of governance, professional practice and public engagement.”
For further information, please contact lida@leeds.ac.uk
On Thursday 25 June 2015, CDRC’s Research Associate, Guy Lansley, based at University College London (UCL), was invited to attend a Geography Day Conference; the event was organised by the London Student Conferences for A Level students.
Held to promote the use of quantitative analysis in Geography, Guy’s talk focused upon ‘Geodemographics and Big Data’ and covered the importance of reliable small area population statistics to businesses, government institutions and researchers alike.
The talk also gave insight into the value of research conducted into geo-temporal demographics which go beyond traditional residential location based statistics, as exemplified through Guy’s own research into georeferenced Twitter data.
Guy’s talk was received extremely well, with over 100 students in attendance.
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 29th 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)
