Dr. Evangelos Pournaras will lead the 4th Empowering Data Citizens Workshop in London, December 7

This is the fourth of four workshops held for the AHRC-funded Empowering Data Citizens research project.

About the Talk

Evangelos Pournaras is a postdoctoral researcher at the prestigious ETH-Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) working on both the Nervousnet and SwarmPulse projects. He will both give a public lecture and lead a workshop discussion, focusing on two innovative digital research apps, Nervousnet and Swarm Pulse. See these links for more information and to download the apps.

• external pageGoogle Play: Nervousnet Appcall_made
• external pageGoogle Play: Swarm Pulse Appcall_made
• external pageSwarmPulse.netcall_made

Pournaras will discuss to innovative projects that contribute to the development of a citizen-led open data culture. He will present on the planetary nervous system,  a large-scale distributed research platform that provides real-time social sensing services as a public good. The Planetary Nervous System is an open, privacy-preserving and participatory platform designed to be collectively built by citizens and for citizens, in contrast to commercial systems which are closed, proprietary, privacy-intrusive and discriminatory.

He will introduce several universal state-of-the-art protocols and communication means from the system. Drawing on mobile phones and smart sensors, a novel social sensing paradigm shift is engineered. Users are provided with freedom and incentives to share, collect and, at the same time, protect data of their digital environment in real-time. In short,

the Planetary Nervous system enables new forms of participatory citizenship by making possible the collective sensing social activity.

About the Workshop

The SwarmPulse service allows for collective visualization and sharing of mobile sensor data, messages, media files and website links. The "SwarmPulse" service is built on top of the aforementioned Nervousnet research platform. Existing Big Data systems threaten social cohesion as they are designed to be closed, proprietary, privacy-intrusive and discriminatory. In contrast, the Planetary Nervous System is an open, privacy-preserving and participatory platform designed to be collectively built by citizens and for citizens.The SwarmPulse mobile app allows the user to share mobile sensor data and text messages from their mobile phone and to see a collective visualization on the SwarmPulse website (www.swarmpulse.net).

About Empowering Data Citizens

The Empowering Data Citizens is an AHRC-funded research project undertaken by Dr. Mark Coté (Principal Investigator), Dr. Tobias Blanke (Co-Investigator), Dr. Giles Greenway (Research Associate) and Dr. Tom Heath (Director of Research, Open Data Institute).

The project explores new forms of born-digital cultural material by focusing on the data we generate with our mobile devices. At question is how we might transform this data into open data, as a collective resource to empower the digital human and cultivate new data communities.

Through a techno-cultural interdisciplinary approach the project seeks to i) develop an open linked data framework to effectively embed anonymised born digital cultural data; and ii) theorise and explore the parameters and potential practices of open data cultures.

(Text from the materials of the organisers)