Using open data sources

Using open data sources

Date: Friday 24 June 2022, 10.00AM
Location: Seminar Room 6, Life Sciences Building, University of Liverpool
Seminar Room 6, Life Sciences Building at the University of Liverpool (building 215 in square F8: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/files/docs/maps/liverpool-university-campus-map.pdf)
Local Group Meeting


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This event will focus on interfacing with open data sources and will feature three talks on the benefits of using open data with some fascinating examples, followed by a short panel discussion, plus a hands-on workshop where you’ll have the chance to try accessing and using real open source geographic data in Python for yourself. This event is primarily aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in reproducibility and furthering their data handling skills, though university staff and members of the public are welcome.

Our speakers will include:
Joseph Allen (N Brown PLC) – “Working with Twitter data”

Dr Joshua Longbottom (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) - “Open data & vector-borne disease modelling – leveraging remotely sensed data”

Prof. Dani Arribas-Bel (University of Liverpool) - “Open by default - Developing reproducible, computational research”
 
Every minute, there is more open data available than ever before in history. Governments and other public organisations now offer large data on everything from social media use to disease outbreaks. But what are the most effective ways of accessing and filtering them? What is an API? And how can we use them responsibly and reproducibly?
 
This event will focus on interfacing with open data sources and will feature three talks on the benefits of using open data with some fascinating examples, followed by a short panel discussion, plus a hands-on workshop where you’ll have the chance to try accessing and using real open source geographic data in Python for yourself. You can submit any questions you’d like to see discussed in our panel at https://sli.do/623, but otherwise, there will be the opportunity to ask questions during the event. This event is primarily aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in reproducibility and furthering their data handling skills, though university staff and members of the public are welcome.

Refreshments for in-person attendees will be provided and available 30 minutes before the start of the event. A recording will be uploaded to our YouTube channel afterwards (https://tinyurl.com/rssmerseyside) for those unable to attend in-person.

This event is a joint event between the RSS Merseyside Local Group and HiPyLiv. HiPy was started in July 2016 by a group of researchers within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at University of Liverpool. Our mission is simple: build an open, welcome community for anyone who wants to learn coding skills in Python. All of our events are free and everybody is welcome. Come All. Learn Python.
 
Joseph Allen – “Working with Twitter data”
 
Twitter data has fantastic potential. Never before have individuals been able to so trivially access historic opinions and visualize their change over time. In this talk, we will explore flu-like symptoms expressed on Twitter and see if we could have predicted the holiday surge in coronavirus cases, make word clouds and beyond!
 
Joseph Allen is a Front-End Developer at N Brown PLC, with a history of bouncing around various web and data roles.

 
Dr Joshua Longbottom “Open data & vector-borne disease modelling – leveraging remotely sensed data”
 
In the era of ‘Big Data’, precision public health has bloomed. Satellite sensors have advanced, resulting in open data now available at a high spatial and temporal resolution. Alongside publicly available data detailing disease and vector occurrence, such remotely sensed data can be utilised within geostatistical models to provide high-resolution estimates of health metrics, a process termed ‘precision public health’. Within this talk I will introduce the concept of geospatial modelling and detail some open datasets and software which facilitate estimating vector-borne disease risk.
 
Joshua Longbottom is a post-doctoral researcher based at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. His current work involves predicting mosquito distribution and abundance within Tanzania to inform models of Rift Valley Fever Virus risk.
 
Prof. Dani Arribas-Bel (University of Liverpool) – “Open by default - Developing reproducible, computational research”
 
Dani Arribas-Bel is interested in computers, cities, and data. He is Professor in Geographic Data Science at the the University of Liverpool, and Deputy Programme Director for Urban Analytics at the Alan Turing Institute, where he is also an ESRC Fellow.
 
Liam Brierley (RSS Merseyside Local Group)
Robert Treharne (HiPyLiv; https://twitter.com/hipyliv/)