Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently spoke out against UK government plans to monitor citizen’s internet use, Ian Katz reports. Katz writes, “The government’s controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state’s surveillance powers would be a ‘destruction of human rights’ and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials.” Read more

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Jeni Tennison recently discussed the United Kingdom’s current open standards consultation, calling UK citizens to action. She writes, “Over the last few months, the UK Government has been running a consultation on its Open Standards policy. The outcome of this consultation is incredibly important not only for organisations and individuals who want to work with government but also because of its potential knock-on effects on the publication of Open Data and the use of Open Source software within public sector organisations. Read more

A new article reports that the Cabinet Office “has chosen a proprietary software system to implement the keystone of its policy to create a level playing field for open source. Under pressure to fulfill the government’s election promise to eradicate systemic bias against open source software, the Cabinet Office rushed through a procurement for an asset register last month. But it raised hackles among open source suppliers it invited to bid. They discovered the same problems that inspired Cabinet Office open source policy hindered their bidding for its own work.” Read more

A new London-based semantic start-up by the name of State is looking for a Big Data and Machine Learning Engineer. According to the post, “We’re building an ambitious big new site in the social web area, with plenty of technology challenges at the core. We need a software engineer who can work on the machine learning, data mining and recommendation aspects particularly. You’ll need a healthy mix of academic smarts and pragmatic software engineering experience. You’d be joining a young team at the early stages of growth, so there is a massive opportunity to influence the product direction and break new ground.” Read more

Talis is looking for a Senior Technical Lead for their education department in Birmingham, UK, “who will not only provide hands on leadership to the development team, but make a significant contribution to the development and evolution of the business as a whole. This role will have full technical responsibility for the entire division – including the offshore team in India – and would suit an already experienced technical lead looking to step up to a more strategic role over the medium term.” Read more

The Guardian.co.uk Data Blog has released an array of data regarding the riots in London and around London in the hopes that socially aware developers will use the data to create helpful visualizations, mashups, apps, and the like. The article states, “The riots that started in London have spread across England, to Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham. [Tuesday] night incidents were reported from a variety of places such West Bromwich, Birkenhead, Salford and Gloucester. Fewer incidents were noted in the capital city as police deployed 16,000 officers onto the streets and many shops and offices closed early. It was a different story in the West Midlands which has now arrested 300 people since the beginning of the riots. The country has seemingly changed overnight. [Tuesday] it was announced that Parliament would be recalled and discussions about policing strategy continue. But what exactly has happened where?” Read more

A new article comments on the recent announcement by UK Prime Minister David Cameron regarding “the broadening of the publicly available government data with the publishing of key data on the National Health Service, schools, criminal courts and transport. The background to the announcement was a celebration of the preceding year of activity in the areas of transparency and open data, with many core government data sets being published. Too many to list here, but the 7,200+ listed on data.gov.uk gives you an insight. The political guide to this is undeniable, as Mr. Cameron makes clear in his YouTube speech for the announcement (below) ‘Information is power because it allows people to hold the powerful to account.’” Read more

Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS) recently announced that they have been awarded a contract from the UK Ministry of Defence “for software that will use predictive reasoning and pattern-analysis to improve situational awareness for British warfighters in a number of locations around the world. Under terms of the contract, ISS will provide analytics software to review large amounts of intelligence information to help determine the level of risk for various missions. The software will enhance situational awareness and facilitate communication and sharing of data across multiple systems.” Read more

A recent article discusses some of the ways in which open data is being utilized by higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom. The writer begins, “One of the Good Things about open data is that with the data being open, there’s less pressure to lock down or restrict access to any of the apps that might build on top it. Whilst some open data initiatives are based around dumping partial, broken or unmaintained datasets ‘just because’, other open data initiatives are actually using open data as part of a workflow, where the publication of the open data can be seen as opening up a window onto, and tap into, a working data pipeline… A couple of recent announcements show how universities are start to actually put their open data to work through location based services. Yesterday saw the appearance of the Southampton OpenData map, as developed by postgrad Colin William et al.” Read more

80 Legs is looking for a Systems Operations Engineer and a Data Engineer in Houston, TX. A qualified candidates for the Systems Operations Engineer position “Takes on the challenge of understanding and monitoring a complex, high-performance back-end infrastructure. Is constantly looking for ways to improve the performance of back-end operations and make monitoring those systems more efficient. Has a combination of development and systems experience.” The Data Engineer candidate “Understands and has experience with big data technologies (e.g., NoSQL, Hadoop). Has a solid understanding of data structures. Gets excited when working with unfathomably large data sets and computational challenges they present.” Read more