students

Capturing OSINT flags with Cardiff’s Cybersoc

3rd May 2020 by Aidan O'Donnell

Cardiff University’s Cyber Society gave us all its Capture the Flag challenge earlier this year and now has over a thousand players on its leaderboard, many of them sitting on the maximum score 0f 15,000.

The challenges are organised into three streams: ten introductory questions to get you warmed up, 18 tasks for online intelligence gathering and finally a dozen challenges centred around some fictional characters and their online life.

There are no pre-requisites for attempting it — it starts with a “What is OSINT?” question, so beginners are welcome — but it should test most players’ “resilience” (i.e. can you keep playing even though you’ve run out of ideas, patience and any sense that you once knew anything about online intelligence gathering?). At least one of our Computational Journalism students has made it successfully through all the challenges.

The challenges were featured by We Are OSINTCurious on its webcast in March.

Election data — the UK’s December vote

13th December 2019 by Aidan O'Donnell

Elections are a special meeting of journalism and data. They generate lots of both! So the morning after the long night of vote counting, we got this year’s students working on the results for a full day. Four student groups were each given one of the four UK nations. Each group also got a Welsh constituency to analyse; after consulting with our pol corrs on the MA-News programme we decided the interesting Welsh battles would be in Cardiff North, Ceredigion, Caerphilly and Vale of Glamorgan.

The main difficulty with analysing the results was not having the XML feed from PA that UK news organisations had been relying on (and had been testing for weeks). We didn’t have the raw data flowing in as soon as a count was announced. But that’s where the BBC came in — they published results for each constituency in a standardised url, supplying 650 webpages for the UK’s 650 constituencies.

This meant that it was enough to draw up a few lines to grab each page and the corresponding batch of results. If only all large-scale scraping was as clean and consistent!

We were able to publish csv files with full results for the four nations by the end of the day. Now of course you can get them from lots of sources but right after the election, and with results still being declared throughout Friday, we were able to get started on analysing the results once we had these tables.

The people at Flourish provided very helpful templates ahead of the vote. So hex maps, animated bar charts and Sankey diagrams were all ready and waiting for numbers.

Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

7th June 2017 by Martin Chorley

The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.