DISA

Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications

Workshop “Critical perspectives on cultural heritage: Re-visiting digitisation” 26 October, 9-12hrs

2021-09-28

Organizers: The workshop is co-organized by Linnaeus University (Centre for Applied Heritage and iInstitute) and Swedish National Heritage Board

Website: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2021/critical-perspectives-on-cultural-heritage-re-visiting-digitisation/

About: Today, the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data are creating new value for the descriptive information in the cultural heritage sector. Libraries, museums, heritage management and archives are seeing new possibilities in sharing by turning their catalogues into open datasets that can be directly accessed, allowing cultural heritage data to be circulated, navigated, analyzed and re-arranged at unprecedented levels. This is supported by research funding bodies, governments and EU policies and numerous political interests, resulting in enormous investment in digitization projects which make cultural heritage information openly available and machine readable. But before deploying this data, one must ask: is this data fit for deployment?

Libraries, museums, heritage management and archives have long histories. Both the collections they house and the language they use(d) to describe said collections are products of that historical legacy, shaped by, amongst others, institutionalized colonialism, racism and patriarchy. Yet descriptive information is now being digitized and shared as if that legacy is not inherent to the collections. Instead, existing units of information are being distributed through new Web 3.0 technologies, bringing with it an outdated knowledge-base. Besides the risk of progressive techniques being applied to regressive content, we may also sacrifice the development of new knowledge in libraries, museums, heritage management and archives aimed at facilitating socially sustainable futures, remediating exploitative historical legacies.

For this workshop, we have invited researchers and practitioners to discuss ways in which digitisation approaches may be set up to change the nature and legacy of cultural collection prior to digital dissemination.

Welcome!

DISA Seminar October 4th on Aggregation as Unsupervised Learning and some of its Applications

2021-09-24

  • When? October 4th 12-13
  • Where? Online – the link will be sent to those who sign up
  • Registration? Sign up via this link no later than October 3rd.

This seminar will be presented by the DISTA research group within DISA, you will meet and listen to Welf Löwe, Maria Ulan, Morgan Ericsson, Anna Wingkvist

Aggregation combines several independent variables to a dependent variable. The independent variables are different, possible mutually dependent observations of a real world. The dependent variable should preserve properties of the independent variables, e.g., the ranking or relative distance of the independent variable tuples, and ultimately the properties of the real world. However, while there usually exist large amounts independent variable tuples, there is no ground truth data available mapping these tuples to the corresponding dependent variable values. This makes aggregation an unsupervised machine learning problem, as opposed to, e.g., regression where data comprises independent variable tuples and the corresponding dependent variable values.

Instances of the problem frequently occur in software engineering, e.g., when trying to assess the quality of software by metrics. Metrics (independent variables) can easily be measured for a lot of software artifacts, but it is hard to measure quality (dependent variable). Instances also occur in many other assessment situations including, but not limited to the assessment of project proposals, financial investments, and human movements.

In our talk, we present
1) aggregation as unsupervised learning including unweighted and weighted approaches
2) ways to evaluate and compare different aggregation approaches including an evaluation of the approaches introduced in 1)
3) applications to software engineering problems applying the evaluation introduce in 2)

The recording of this session and previous recordings will be available at the following link

NEW DISA Seminar Series starting September 6th 12-13

2021-09-02

We are now finally starting a new Seminar series within DISA, even if you are not affiliated with DISA you are welcome to attend.

Aim with the seminar series:
Our research centre now have some 10 different research groups, each comprising a trending research topic. In order to make those different subjects of expertize more known outside of the own group and more accessible to PhD students we now launch a research seminar series.

Out first lunch seminar series will be on Monday September 6th 12-13 with Thomas Holgersson
Link to the seminar: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/63536937748 (no sign up needed)

Titel: Matrices in different dimensions: high, low and in between
Abstract: I will survey some common methods for statistical analysis of random matrices in fixed and in increasing dimensions. The geometry of high-dimensional objects will discussed from a data-analytic perspective. I will also cover some different modes of asymptotics, with particular focus on scalability.
Keywords: Wishart ensambles, geometry of high-dimensional objects, spectral analysis, Mahalanobis distance, modes of convergence.

Kind regards,
Thomas and Diana