Information School News

The Information School’s Chemoinformatics Research Group has released a paper which will help the European Medicines Agency to decide whether new orphan drugs should be granted licences.   Evaluation and supervision of medicines throughout the European Union is the responsibility of the European Medicines Agency.   One particular activity which the Agency is involved in is the licensing of orphan drugs – medicines which are designed to treat people with rare diseases.   This activity is currently carried out by a panel of human experts.   However the Chemoinformatics Research Group’s paper outlines computer techniques that could be used to help the panel in deciding whether or not a new orphan drug should be granted a licence.   The paper (Franco, P., Porta, N., Holliday, J. D. & Willett, P. “The use of 2D fingerprint methods to support the assessment of structural similarity in orphan drug legislation” Journal of Cheminformatics , 6:5, 2014) can be found on the Journa

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School will be attending the 2014 Mobile World Congress  in Barcelona between 24 and 27 February. The Congress is set to be attended by leaders from the IT field including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Ginni Rometty of IBM. At the Congress, Alex will announce the results of the Smart Cities Index Project with the GSMA.   

The World Economic Forum has recognised the contribution of Dr Farida Vis to its flagship Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 publication. The report highlights Farida's research into the spread of rumours on Twitter during the London riots.

Pam McKinney, Coordinator of the School's undergraduate Business Intelligence module, has secured arrangements with four local businesses to bring real-life issues to the lecture room for students to address. The Undergraduates will work in small groups to investigate the issues, and then present solutions which the businesses can put into practice. This year's partners are: Regather Airy Fairy Emmaus Aspire  As in previous years, these links have been forged in collaboration with the experts at University of Sheffield Enterprise .