What is Leeds Data Thing, and what happened at our Big Data Week 2013

1. The Big Data Challenge
#bdw13
@m_barrett

2. “Encouraging like-
minded people to talk
data over a pint in
Leeds since January
2013”
What is Leeds Data Thing?
www.leedsdatathing.co.uk

3. Data Scientist
Digital manager
Marketing expert
Geo-spatial expert
Market researcher
Data Analyst
@systemspeter
@becs_edwards @GrahamHyde
@JenGarrick @Andy_Tweets
@m_barrett
Who are We?

4. @systemspeter
@becs_edwards @GrahamHyde
@JenGarrick @Andy_Tweets
@m_barrett
What are the group aims?
• To explore open data
• To learn from other industries
• To learn from each other
• To highlight good work
• To put Leeds on the map

5. Web developers,
designers, analysts,
professors, students,
artists, bloggers,
marketers, open data
enthusiasts, and lots
inbetween.
Who attends?

6. Our first event
Tim Waters on the evolution of
OpenStreetMap, other Geo
Visualisations and Analytics
Andy Bolton on the demographic
mapping of Leeds and visualising
child poverty in the city
Mark Barrett on how to be creative,
and the importance of using Open
Data to build things that people can
understand
Speakers3

7. The Big Data Week
“Calling all data lovers, researchers, statisticians,
academics, marketers, librarians, designers,
developers and people who just LOVE to make and
discover stuff – it’s time to get your Big Data Week
2013 hat on!
For the first time in the history of Big Data
Week, Leeds is a host city for the global festival that
focuses on the social, political, technological and
commercial impacts of Big Data. Taking place from
the 22nd- 28th April 2013, Leeds is one of over 20
cities across the world who is working to bring
together a community of people who are passionate
about asking questions and making things from data.”

8. Launch night
http://fettl.es/16xDHqt
@RobWebster_LCH
was kind enough to
launch the Big Data
Week for us here in
Leeds and spoke
about what Open
Data means to him

9. • The Big Data challenges facing the academic publishing
community
• Leeds’ role in the data revolution
• What data can do for the second largest council in the UK
• How data is changing the community we live and work in
• Why numbers are confusing sometimes
• Turning big data into something understandable at a local
level
• Using data at the largest interdiscilinary centre for water
research in the UK
• How well curated data, easily available analytical tools and
good data communication can aid wildlife conservation
• Data collection and insight with a fascinating project about
fashion bloggers
• Using big data to solve crimes
Data in a day - blog posts
http://fettl.es/18IM95s

10. Bring your own data
Karrie Liu - why ethnicity information is important to
health analysis
Elly Snare - Collecting data from fashion blogging
Christopher Hassall - collection, storage, visualisation and
analysis of wildlife data
Malachi Rangecroft - The leeds observatory - spanning
data from spanning from economic to crime, education to
health
Sohail Rashid - the power that data and social media has
to transform the property industry
Daniel Prendergast - getting to grips with data for
publishing
Russel Brown - “counting is hard”
http://fettl.es/YTLxbx

11. The Big Data Challenge
@garrycoleman @grahamhyde

12. The Big Data Challenge

13. Leeds entries - Sportitude
http://fettl.es/17gFIHH
1.How sporty are different UK regions?
2.Does being sporty mean being healthy?
3.What helps or hinders a sporty place?
Aggregating and mapping all the data:
•Data about athletes from DBPedia
•Map regions from Ordnance Survey
•Regional population data from the 2011
Census
•Aggregated Health data from the Guardian
Data Blog

14. Leeds entries - Leeds is covered
http://fettl.es/15BeJqR
“What caught my eye was the dataset listing the names of the doctors
surgeries, practices, medical centres. If I think about my neighbourhood I
can pass about half a dozen doctors in a very small area. Leeds is well
covered (or perhaps just my area is!) . I was reminded of James Joyce’s
quote about being unable to cross Dublin without passing a pub. Perhaps
the same can be said for Leeds and doctors! The names of the surgeries
were also interesting. Names such as:
Chapeloak Surgery
The Avenue Surgery
Dr Ca Hicks’ Practice
The Dekeyser Group Practice
The Highfield Medical Centre
Chapeltown Family Surgery
Wonder if the more “leafy” the name, the more “leafy” the neighbourhood
it was in? Perhaps the more grandiose sounding practices had more
patients? Perhaps the smaller sounding ones had better patient
satisfaction reviews?
Decided to go with the concept of “Leeds is covered” and wanted
something showing the labels of the practices over the areas where they
were. Filling out the map, so to speak.”

15. Leeds entries - how healthy is your area?
http://fettl.es/15KgbY0
Scraping twitter data to show real
time conversations, with health
data overlayed onto a map of
England

16. The problem – The NHS possess huge volumes of flat,
poorly
utilised data
The solution – To derive information (actionable
intelligence?) from datasets put into the public
domain by the NHS
The goal – To find patterns in quality of care and
chronic health problems across the UK and present
them accessibly
http://fettl.es/17gFPTv
Leeds entries - visualising NHS data

17. Leeds entries - Leeds health visualised
http://fettl.es/10jxp9y
•Is 'healthy' a 'long life with high fertility?'
•Longer lives, Birth control & War are seen in the
Global data
•> $500 per capita doesn't affect life expectancy
•In Leeds, income drives health factors across its
wards.
•The NHSIC data tells us: Leeds was a bit glum
'yesterday' with less children & shorter lives.
•Leeds Health hotspots by GP: Diabetes outliers

18. International entries - bigdataforhealth
A Health Crisis
We have a health epidemic in the United States today.
As this visualization reveals, a number of factors combine to the
entrench the problem.
We know that obesity leads to diabetes, but as this scatter plot
makes quite clear, income is also an important factor.
Those with more advantages have more choices in life as to the
food they eat, and more leisure time to exercise and take care of
their bodies.
Meanwhile the working poor and others in less advantaged
positions not only suffer from worse living conditions but poorer
health and wellness.
http://fettl.es/YTMHUp

19. International entries - neofonie
21,613,546,189
words contained in 56,800,000 german-language
news articles of the years 2008 to 2013 were mined.
323,860,101
times were the german cities Berlin, Hamburg,
Stuttgart, Dortmund, Frankfurt, and Leipzig
mentioned in those articles.
376,595
disease-related words were found in the textual
vicinity of those cities.
For each city the three most significant disease
related terms were analysed further. We manually
selected catchwords that occurred frequently in the
surroundings of the diseases.
http://bdw.neofonie.de

20. International entries - Berlinr
What is this app all about?
How are Berliners feeling today? Are they in a
good or in a bad mood? The chart represents
quantifies the sentiment of Berlin's population.
It is based on Berlin-related news stories in
online newspapers (which you can see and filter
by in the donut chart) and updates daily. As we
were prototyping our model we realised that we
were producing a lot of interesting output and
that it would be shame to condense that in a
simple 'yes, we're feeling great today' or 'no,
we're in a bad mood'. Life is more than black and
white. Which is how we came up with the two-
dimensional chart above. The X-axis represents
negative sentiment, the Y-axis positive
sentiment with each dot representing individual
news stories.
http://wellberlin.herokuapp.com

21. Antonio Acuna / @diabulos
Head of data.gov.uk at the UK Cabinet Office
Dr Mark Davies / @markpricedavies
Strategy Director - HSCIC
Dr Geraint Lewis / @GeraintLewis
Chief Data Officer - NHS England
Professor Des Higham / @DesHigham
Mathematics at University of Strathclyde
The results

22. What happened on Social media?

23. What happened on Social media?

24. Lessons learned
What worked well?
High profile judges gave gravitas to the event
International entries brought further insight
Social media spread the world well
Events building up to the main event build
momentum and noise
Loading datasets onto a central sql Server
meant teams could work together and work
remotely
Having HSCIC support on hand really helped
What could we improve
Inviting a bank of public health registrars to
serve as a resource for all teams, to help with
issues such as association versus causation;
confidence intervals; axes; confounding;risk
adjustment; age and sex standardisation
Inviting a bank of interested parties to suggest
some problems/issues that the teams could
tackle

25. helps us understand how
developers use data
helps find gaps of understanding
about what data is available
helps to understand what data is
needed but isn’t available
helps to understand the
granularity that developers
expect to get from the data
helps understanding about how
developers want data presented
helps to understand what
systems developers need - 2* /
3* / 4* / 5* data
Why does engagement matter?

26. A Leeds Data Thing event every 6
weeks(ish)
Another data challenge in
Autumn 2013
Engaging with more groups
within the city
Put Leeds on the map as the
leading city for data
Highlight the careers available to
data analysts after study
Use resources available within
the city
Make more data understandable
to a wide range of people within
Leeds
What next...

27. Questions...
? #bdw13
@m_barrett