With the new term now well underway we have some exciting research seminars coming up soon to tell you about.
“Will implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) make use of available social and environmental science data?”
Dr Stephen Lintner & Dr Mark Mulligan, King’s College London
Wednesday 3rd February 16:30-18:00 hrs in the Pyramid Room (4th floor of King’s building, Strand campus)
Dr Lintner will review challenges faced during implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and explore the political, policy and operational context of the SDGs. He will examine the scope and aspirations of the SDGs and the potential issues that may be encountered in their realization. Dr Mulligan will examine demand for SDG metrics and the “big data” challenge in building accessible, reliable and meaningful SDG reporting metrics. He will examine the uncertainties around the datasets available for understanding sustainable development, from both a social and environmental perspective, at the local, national and global scales and some ways forward that might help countries better evaluate any progress being made.
“Why and how open data and an open API standard can improve research, with examples using the National River Flow Archive and the R language.”
Dr Claudia Vitolo, Brunel University London
Friday 12th February 17:15-18:15 in the Pyramid Room (4th floor of King’s building, Strand campus)
Dr Vitolo will discuss the use of data Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to open hydrological data. The seminar will be interactive with demos using the R language. Feel free to bring your own laptop to work along with the demos. You’ll need R (version >= 3.2.3) and RStudio Desktop (version >= 0.99.491) installed. To make things easier it will also be useful if you have the following R packages installed and up to date: XML2R, RCurl, zoo, rjson, rgdal, sp, stringr, rmarkdown
“Urban hierarchies and scaling laws”
Dr Elsa Arcaute, University College, London
Wednesday 23rd February 16:30-18:00 hrs in the Pyramid Room (4th floor of King’s building, Strand campus)
Dr Arcaute will discuss the issues with the way that we use data to define what a city actually is. Come and find out why this is nowhere near as easy or as straightforward as you think… You’ll find yourself using it to critique every city assessment you see from now on.
