Jon Reades

Belfast 2026 Conference Information 52nd ANNUAL CONFERENCE Belfast, Northern Ireland ​ 13 and 14 May, 2026

At each annual conference we have an early career plenary lecture and in Belfast this May that lecture will be given by Dr Ruth Neville @ruthneville20.bsky.social a research fellow in computational social science at @casaucl.bsky.social. Abstract submission deadline is Friday tinyurl.com/9szbc49y

A new paper on student housing, thinking through impacts of regulation on how much space students have to live in! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

An illustration of the benefits university campuses can have in local economies, but the risks of the model too, as I discussed in my blog last year: www.centreforcities.org/blog/branchi...

CASA Profs Max Nathan and Neave O'Clery, PhD student Bohao Su and Research Fellow Laura Mazzarino were at the recent Geography of Innovation conference in Budapest.

The team presented work on migration, global supply chains, innovation networks and models for industrial diversification.

💯 agree linking ‘application layer’ was largely MIA between 80s and Johnson gov’t. Would seem to call for systems for leveraging *additional* gov’t+private sector £££ in key areas, not cutting deeper in areas that are world-leading but not ‘prestigious’ (from digital humanities to sports medicine).

I support industrial policy, but this seems to justify cutting funding to other areas (eg. SHAPE/soc sci) on the basis of a conflation between innovation and commercialisation.

Sorry, but I disagree with this. The industries of the future aren’t here because we don’t have a system to scale them so they were all sold off to American VCs. We also don’t have an approach that rewards risk on the same scale, so if you want to be ‘big’ you move. 1/2

‘Ideally’ doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s either “I need it by midnight or I don’t get the job” (in which case I’d expect some pretty abject pleading and stonkingly-big excuses) or “I should get this in by end of week so please don’t forget about it and I know that I should have asked sooner”.

I too can no longer recall the time(s) I received £75k from overseas.

Physics is under the cosh, Astronomy and Chemistry in peril, Geography is losing territory, English, Modern Languages and History are among the many shrinking UK disciplines.

Surely it's time to have a concerted, structured conversation about universities and the national research base.

Heh, for a much funnier write up than I’d ever manage, here’s someone who took the hit so that you don’t have to: bsky.app/profile/kole... TL;DR: about what you’d expect given it’s been rushed out and involves the usual batch of consultancies.

As in, am discussing a business opportunity around how LLMs can help end-users search for something complex more naturally, but this didn’t come out of an AI skills class, it came out of related research and ppl with deep knowledge of several domains.

Think I need more ☕️ — struggling to articulate

I can see why if your business needs customer support then this is transformative (even if you end up annoying a % customers with bs answers). But what exactly are you training the rest of the population for in this model? Maybe I missed a key point as only caught the tail end of piece on radio.

In Weak Job Market, Middle Managers Increasingly Forced to Feign AI Success Amid all the hype, companies need human-centered AI that helps workers. Policymakers must protect labor at every level, writes Diana Enriquez.

Read alongside this: www.techpolicy.press/in-weak-job-... I can’t help thinking that this is an AI training solution in search of a problem. There is some really interesting stuff going on with, eg, agentic AI. I find LLMs useful for finding right track when I’m doing obscure work in LaTeX/pandoc.

AI Skills for Life and Work: summary report

The report notes that: “Business leaders face challenges identifying viable AI use cases…” but then plows on with therefore ‘we need AI skills’ and ‘women are less confident than men in judging AI output so they must be under-trained’. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Funding cuts undermining creative sector growth, say art schools Exclusions from government funding pots exacerbating a challenging financial climate for creative institutions, which say talent pipeline for Labour’s priority sector at risk of being jeopardised

Specialist higher education institutions have accused the government of undermining its own mission to grow the UK’s creative industries by cutting funding for arts courses and excluding non-STEM students from grants www.timeshighereducation.com/news/funding... via @helenpacker.bsky.social

CASA's Ruth Neville has been announced as one of ten 2026 UCL Policy Fellows, co‑delivering projects for local needs. Ruth is among six Local Authority Policy Fellows, supporting policy development at Newham Council through population trend analysis.

Find out more: https://tinyurl.com/cj7aenwa

Very swish visual from @centreforcities.bsky.social showing the income distributions of different neighbourhoods within our big towns and cities

Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal Guardian found OpenAI’s platform cited Grokipedia on topics including Iran and Holocaust deniers

So glad this is being used in schools and universities.

Feeling pleased I’ve shown to my satisfaction that a widely used data set contains about 6% errors. Not throwing shade—creators did amazing work + were first to share openly + has been v. valuable—but I couldn’t replicate and couldn’t understand why. Checking with them to confirm & talk next steps.

Seems to me that the implication still stands that agreeing between a group of universities which HEI will _not_ shutter a particular type of programme (eg. Languages) could still be treated as collusion and anti-competitive.

Bradford flats plan raises concerns over housing standards Officers say Bradford Council approves plans for small flats as long as they meet space standards.

More concern among councillors that too much new housing is at the minimum space standard and we're creating 'ghettos' of small flats for single occupiers, this time in Bradford www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

My working hypothesis is that the Home Office has data issues and simply doesn’t know/can’t count when students leave the UK or convert to another visa. It would be so easy to argue that students are not immigrants (‘just’ free-spending tourists) until they get a visa to stay on. So if they don’t…

This is quite a post

www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/reality-is...

International Fellowships 2026 The International Fellowships Programme enables researchers to work for two years at a UK institution with the aim of building a globally connected, mobile research and innovation workforce. Funding status Open for applications Career stage Early-career

Please help spread the word on this, especially to those who may be feeling cold winds towards their research.

We’ve opened the call for our International Fellowships, enabling early career researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Significant spatial variation though so not sure this stat is hugely helpful for policy. Some Outer East London areas seem to have very little/no excess capacity. Presumably housing affordability for families a big factor in local demand for places. So could be challenges ahead beyond West LDN?

🌍✨
Our next seminar in February is with
@ruthneville20.bsky.social
who is Research Fellow at CASA, UCL.

"From boom to bust:
Two decades of international student mobility"

Date: Tues 3rd Feb 2026 @ 2pm UK time (online)

Register here: tinyurl.com/3zuw6tcn
✨🌍

I wonder what Londoners know that the rest of the country don’t?

news from PySAL world: we have a new package in the ecosystem(!) As of today, `gwlearn` is available in package managers. It provides a suite of tools for geographically weighted machine learning using a sklearn API.

pysal.org/gwlearn/v0.1...

great work by lead author @martinfleischmann.net

It’s as if they don’t know that: 1) NI increases are the entire fee increase; and b) to my knowledge no one has yet confirmed universities are allowed to coordinate to avoid cold sorts without competition law issues; and c) foreign student numbers (and x-subsidy) are crashing b/c visa changes.