Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He gained his PhD in economics at the ANU, focusing on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality. Robert has been studying online social and organizational networks since 2002 and he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Net­works (http://voson.anu.edu.au) in 2005. Robert established and teaches the Social Science of the Internet specialization of the ANU’s Master of Social Research, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in July 2013.

Personal webpage: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj

Lawrence Ampofo earned his PhD in social media, security, and online behaviour at the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2012. He is founder and director of Semantica Research, a company that provides social media analysis for public, voluntary, and private sector organizations.

Lawrence tweets as @lampofo.

Personal webpage: www.semanticaresearch.com

Bob Anderson is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Having retired as Pro Vice Chancellor and CEO of University Cam­pus Suffolk, Bob joined the Horizon Digital Research Institute in Nottingham. Bob taught for many years at Manchester Polytechnic (later Manchester Metro­politan University). Since 1988, he was taken up mostly with managerial roles, first as Director of the Xerox Research Laboratory in Cambridge, then as Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Business Development at Sheffield Hallam Univer­sity, and then at University Campus Suffolk.

When Bob was an active researcher, he, together with Wes Sharrock and John Hughes, undertook a number of what have become classic Ethnomethodological investigations in different settings. These included an entrepreneurial firm, the London Air Traffic Control Centre, and Xerox itself. These investigations were reported in a number of books, reports and papers. Whilst at Xerox, Bob was one of the leading proponents of the use of ethnographic approaches to data collection in the design and development of advanced systems.

Michael Batty is Professor of Spatial Analysis at University College London in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s and has published several books, such as Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, 2005), which won the Alonso Prize of the Regional Science Association in 2011, and most recently The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013). His blogs cover the science underpinning the technology of cities (www.complexcity.info as well as his posts and lectures on big data and smart cities (www.spatialcomplexity.info).

Personal webpage: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=JMBAT23

Mark Birkin is Professor of Spatial Analysis and Policy in the School of Geogra­phy at the University of Leeds. His major interests are in simulating social and demographic change within cities and regions, and in understanding the impact of these changes on the need for services like housing, roads and hospitals, using tech­niques of microsimulation, agent-based modelling and GIS. He is currently the pro­ject leader for TALISMAN – the spatial data analysis and simulation node of ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods.

Personal webpage: www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/m.birkin

William Browne is Professor of Statistics at the University of Bristol where he is director of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling. He is interested in making the statistical analysis of complex structured datasets available and accessible to applied researchers in all disciplines. He took up his chair in Bristol in the Vet­erinary Sciences department in 2007 but is currently in the process of moving to the Education department (GSOE). He has previously held academic posts in the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham and the Institute of Education, London. William’s research deals with statistical methodology, in par­ticular Monte Carlo Markov chain methods and multilevel modelling, statistical software development, and the application of statistics to disciplines, including veterinary science, animal behaviour, ecology, education and other social sci­ences. He is part of the development team of the MLwiN software package and directs the team that is currently developing the Stat-JR package. He has taught statistics to undergraduate and postgraduates in many disciplines and also regu­larly teaches advanced training workshops.

Personal webpage: http://seis.bris.ac.uk/~frwjb

Pat Brundell is a Research Fellow in the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Nottingham. His background is in experimental psychology, with a focus on the evaluation of interactive systems. Since joining the MRL in 2008 he has researched the technologies and methods to support the use of digital records for social science. Pat has also conducted numerous studies of the design process, imple­mentation and use of interactive systems to support entertainment and informal learning in public spaces.

Personal webpage: www.nottingham.ac.uk/computerscience/people/pat.brundell

Andrew Chadwick is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he founded the New Political Communication Unit in 2007. His books include the award-winning Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies (Oxford University Press) and the Handbook of Internet Politics (Routledge), which he co-edited with Philip N. Howard, and The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power (Oxford University Press). Andrew is the founding series editor of Oxford University Press’s book series Studies in Digital Politics.

Andrew tweets as @andrew_chadwick.

Personal webpage: www.andrewchadwick.com

Simon Collister is Senior Lecturer in Public Relations and Social Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. He is cur­rently conducting PhD research at Royal Holloway, University of London’s New Political Communication Unit on the mediation of power in networked commu­nication environments. Before entering academia, Simon worked for a number of global communications consultancies, planning and implementing research-led campaigns for a range of public, voluntary, and private sector organizations.

Simon tweets as @simoncollister.

Simon’s blog: www.simoncollister.com

Andy Crabtree is Associate Professor and Reader in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. He is an ethnographer who has conducted a broad range of ethnomethodological studies of work to inform the development of computing systems. Andy was co-director of the NCeSS DReSS Research Node, which developed the Digital Replay System (DRS).

Personal webpage: www.andy-crabtree.com

Mark Elliot joined the Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester in 1996 and was director from 2005–2008 and was pivotal in the develop­ment of the new discipline area of Social Statistics. He is a world leading researcher in the field of Statistical Disclosure, has frequent invitations to speak at international conferences on Confidentiality and Privacy and is consultant to many national statis­tical agencies including the Office for National Statistics in the UK, US bureau for the Census and the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics Singapore. Mark’s work on Data Intrusion Simulation and Special Uniqueness is regarded as seminal within the disclosure control field. Apart from confidentiality and privacy his main research interests are in data linkage, attitude theory and measurement and impact of attitudes on socio-economic outcomes.

Personal webpage: www.manchester.ac.uk/research/mark.elliot/research

Steven Gray is a Research Associate and spatial software researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, making the visualization of large complex datasets on maps easier for users and scientists alike. With over 10 years of professional software development under his belt, he has built multiple award winning systems and his work has been featured in various worldwide media outlets (CNN, BBC). In recent years he has specialized on building mobile applications that open up the world of data visualization, mining and analysis to the masses. Steven’s current research focuses on distributed high performance computing and analyzing large datasets in real-time (http://bigdatatoolkit.org).

Personal webpage: www.stevenjamesgray.com

Peter Halfpenny is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He was Executive Director of the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science from 2004 to 2010, responsible for the overall strategic management of the Centre’s programme of research, outreach and capacity-building. Peter’s own research interests are in the integration of computer tools and services into a comprehensive support environment for social science researcher practitioners, and the investigation of the adoption and adaptation of e-Science tools across the social research community. 

Andy Hudson-Smith is Reader in Digital Urban Systems at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He is Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet Journal, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Greater London Authority Smart London Board. His research is focused on location-based digital technologies and has been at the forefront of Web 2.0 technologies for communication, outreach and devel­oping a unique contribution to knowledge. Andy is author of the Digital Urban Blog (www.digitalurban.org). He works on the Internet of Things, smart cities, big data, digital geography, urban planning and the built environment.

Personal webpage: www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/people/?school=casa&upi=APSMI18

Marina Jirotka is Professor of Human Centred Computing in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Her research interests lie at the interface between the Computer and Social Sciences and focus on methodological innovations. She undertakes research into work practices drawing on ethnographic fieldwork often supplemented by video analysis. Marina has led and collaborated on a number of research projects related to ethical, legal and social issues in ICT. She is a Char­tered IT Professional of the BCS and sits on the ICT Ethics Specialist Group committee. She has published widely in international journals and conferences in e-Science, HCI, CSCW and Requirements Engineering.

Personal webpage: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/marina.jirotka

Dawn Knight is a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focuses on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexico-grammar, multimo­dality and the socio-linguistic contexts of communication. The main contribution of her work has been to pioneer the development of multimodal corpus-based discourse analysis. This has included the shaping a novel methodological approach through the co-development of the Digital Replay System to support the analysis of the relation­ship between language and gesture-in use based on large-scale real-life records of interaction.

Personal webpage: www.cf.ac.uk/encap/contactsandpeople/profiles/knight_dawn.html

Paul Lambert is Professor in Sociology in the School of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling. He held research posts at the Universities of Cardiff and Lan­caster prior to joining Stirling in 2003. His areas of expertise cover social science research methods, social statistics, and the sociological analysis of social stratifica­tion and inequality. His most recent research projects have been concerned with the measurement of social stratification and inequality using detailed occupational information; the analysis of social distance and social networks; and methodological research on statistical techniques, data management when using secondary survey data, and Digital Social Research. Paul teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on social research methods and social stratification, and has led a number of advanced training workshops on topics including secondary survey data analysis, data management, and statistical modelling.

Personal webpage: http://rms.stir.ac.uk/converis-stirling/person/10815

Nick Malleson is a lecturer in Geographical Information Systems and a member of the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy (CSAP) in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. His primary research interest is in developing spatial computer models of social phenomena with a particular focus on crime simulation. Other main research interests include looking at how the spatial analysis (such as clustering methods, spatial statistics) of new forms of social data can influence research.

Personal webpage: http://nickmalleson.co.uk

Danius Michaelides is a Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. His research interests are in distributed comput­ing, distributed information management and web-based tools and technologies, with a particular focus on their application in e-Science and Digital Social Research. Danius has experience working at the interface between Computer Science and Statistics with a PhD in exact tests and distributed computing. More recently, he has been involved in the development of the Stat-JR package.

Personal webpage: www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/dtm

Richard Milton is a Senior Research Associate at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) where he is the key developer of web-based mapping sys­tems, in particular the MapTube (www.maptube.org) website. He has worked on the Equator e-Science project in UCL Computer Science where he used GPS tracked sensors to measure environmental factors and display carbon monoxide levels on a 3D model of the city. Previously Richard has worked for a 3D games company writ­ing art tools and plugins for 3DStudio Max and also spent six years working for the UK Meteorological Office, where he developed weather visualization systems.

Richard’s blog: www.geotalisman.org/blog

Joe Murphy is a survey methodologist investigating the causes of and solutions to issues in survey quality and management. His research focuses on the implementation of new data collection processes, new data sources, and analytic techniques to maximize data quality, increase response, and reduce costs. Joe’s recent work has been centred on data sources and techniques such as Internet search patterns, social media data analysis (e.g., Twitter), data visualization, crowdsourcing, and social research in virtual worlds.

Joe’s blog: http://blogs.rti.org/surveypost

Oliver O’Brien is a Research Associate and software developer at UCL CASA. He investigates and implements new ways of visualizing spatial data, as part of the Big Open Data Mining and Synthesis (BODMAS) project led by Dr Cheshire, including mapping datasets from the census. His research interests include online web mapping, digital cartography, spatial analysis and data visualization, focusing particularly on transport data and London. Oliver’s Bike Share Map, a product of ongoing research into the field, shows a live map of bicycle sharing systems for around a hundred cities (http:// bikes.oobrien.com/). He co-authors the Mapping London website (http://mappinglondon. co.uk), which regularly features good examples of maps created of and for London, from CASA and from the online community in general.

Personal webpage: http://oobrien.com

Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is specialist advisor to the UK Parliament’s soft power committee. He is co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict. His last book was Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (Routledge, 2013). Ben has recently completed a study with the BBC on international audience responses to the 2012 London Olympics.

Ben tweets as @Ben_OLoughlin.

Kingsley Purdam is a lecturer in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. His main area of research is in equality issues, citizen engagement and policy making. Specific areas include: governance and human rights as well as research methods in consulting hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups. He is developing an international reputation for his work on helping behaviours and also on what is termed citizen social science. He is presently conducting a scoping study into food rights and food insecurity in the UK with the support of Manchester City Council. He is also using social media data to conduct research on the relation between politicians and the electorate. Kingsley recently completed an ESRC funded review of new data types and methods.

As applicant/co-applicant Kingsley has secured and delivered nearly £1.5 million of research funding across more than 50 challenging research projects, often for government departments. He teaches at postgraduate and undergraduate level on social statistics including using social media data in social research.

Personal webpage: www.manchester.ac.uk/research/kingsley.purdam

Rob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, where he is deputy head of department and research director of the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities (WISC), and Exchange Professor, NYU. Previously, he was research director of the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science, where he contributed to developing innovations in e-Infrastructure, tools and methods in the social sciences.

One focus of his current work is methodologies and tools for big social data analytics. Rob led a multidisciplinary team working with the Guardian/LSE on the ‘Reading the Riots’ project, analysing tweets sent during the August 2011 riots. This won the Data Visualization and Storytelling category of the 2012 Data Journalism Awards and the 2012 Online Media Award for the ‘Best use of Social Media’. He is also a co-founder of the Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (Cosmos), a multidisciplinary group of UK researchers building a platform for social data analytics. Rob is editor of the Health Informatics Journal and advisory board member, Big Data and Society Journal.

Rob tweets as @robnproctor

Personal webpage: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/rob_procter

Flora Roumpani is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and holds a diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Department of Archi­tecture in the University of Patras, and an MRes from UCL. During her studies, she worked as a researcher in the Laboratory of Urban and Regional Planning on research projects relating to urban analysis and visualization. For four years, Flora worked as an architect as part of the urban planning team in Doxiadis Associates in several pro­jects in Greece and abroad. Her research interests include issues concerning the future of the city, virtual environments and urban modelling and these are reflected in her blog (http://en-topia.blogspot.co.uk).

Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics where he is also Head of Department, having previously been a professor at the Univer­sities of Manchester and York. He has longstanding interests in the historical sociology of social class and stratification, where his recent books include Culture, Class, Distinction (co-authored) and where he has pioneered ‘cultural class analysis’. Mike’s concern to reflect on the methodological challenges to the social sciences is longstanding, and his book Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (2010) offers an historical perspective on this point. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been a visiting professor in Paris, Bergen, and North Carolina.

Personal webpage: www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/whoswho/academic/savage.aspx

Paul Tennent is a Research Associate in the Mixed Reality Laboratory and Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the application and interpretation of sensor-based data in real world set­tings, and he has worked extensively on creating software frameworks to support the qualitative analysis of complex multimodal data. Paul was the principal developer of the Digital Replay System (DRS).

Personal webpage: https://paultennent.wordpress.com

Jonathan J.H. Zhu (PhD, Indiana University, 1990) is a professor and Founding Director of the Web Mining Lab (http://weblab.com.cityu.edu.hk) in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches new media theory, quantitative research methods, and social network analysis. Jonathan’s current research focuses on the structure, content, use, and impact of the Internet, with results published in Communication Research, Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, Information, Communication, and Society, Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics, and elsewhere.

Personal webpage: http://weblab.com.cityu.edu.hk/blog/jzhu