Societies Community
The LIDA: Societies community seeks to strengthen connections between the social science and data science communities at Leeds, building capacity and collaboration in interdisciplinary research and impact that benefits society regionally, nationally and internationally.
Over the past 12 months Societies has supported a range of activities across a diverse array of subject areas and disciplines. In March, Societies was proud to support a joint initiative between The Alan Turing Institute and LIDA, co-hosting the AI Fringe event Connecting Data for Connected Public Services. This day-long event brought together researchers and practitioners from across the region to explore how smarter connected data tools and infrastructure can enable powerful new insights across health, education, social care, the economy, and criminal justice sectors.
In May Societies hosted the Language@Leeds university-wide interdisciplinary network for language research. The event pulled together researchers from across the university to discuss how complex inequalities could be better understood through language research. The following month we hosted researchers from the School of Law who presented groundbreaking research linking road network structure to community safety and crime patterns.
Societies also further reinforced its strong links to research, innovation and impact at Leeds. The ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre (co-hosted between Universities of Leeds and York) supporting six LIDA DSDP projects over the last year. Projects included collaborations with the Department for Education, Bradford’s Children’s Trust, and the NIHR Health Determinants Research Collaboration and were supervised by interdisciplinary teams including colleagues from Law, Psychology, and Geography.
The ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) also supported a further six DSDP projects, on topics relating to food insecurity and active travel. In addition, a collaboration with Office of National Statistics led to a DSDP project exploring the estimation of tourist behaviour from secondary data sources.
This term we plan to continue our program of research events highlighting high impact research at intersection of social and data science. In addition, to further bring the community together we will begin hosting monthly coffee mornings.
If you are interested in getting involved in any of these events, or proposing your own, then please get in touch!