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Another big delivery for me within the Manchester Science Festival was the Drone Expo at the Museum of Science and Industry, which took place over the opening weekend of the festival. It was produced in association with my Josh Award for Science Communication and we created a large flying space at MOSI with professional pilots and STEM volunteers to show the public what's happening with this amazing techology.
My slides from the 7th International Olympic Committee Athletes' Forum, which focused on the use of media to empower and enable people. Also, here is the programme from the event.
My first contribution to the Manchester Science Festival is this amazing screening of Back to the Future 2, a trilogy that was certainly defining of my teenage years. I'm so excited to have been able to produce this with #MSF15 and that Gorilla in Manchester is screening. Here is my presentation from the night.
As part of the Digital R&D for the Arts funding stream overseen by Nesta, they put together a programme of presentations as a final showcase. I was asked by their new Director for Digital, Tim Plyming, to make a contribution to the final session of the day, looking at future directions. It was a really fun panel with Freya Murray, Director, Stamp House; Anthony Lilley OBE, Interim CEO and Creative Director, The Space and CEO, Magic Lantern Productions; David Watson, Head of Digital, Hull UK City of Culture 2017.
As part of my involvement with the amazing 2020 Health project, I was asked to take part in a Conservative Party fringe event, exmaining how digital technologies can transform the health care system. It was a pretty far reaching discussion and my central concern was around data ownership, mobility, and expansion. More to come on that.
Chaired by: Dame Helena Shovelton DBE, Chair, 2020health
With guest speakers:
Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair, Science & Technology Select Committee (Invited)
Paul Burstow, Independent Health Consultant
Dr David Lee, Medical Director, Computer Sciences Corporation
Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
Talk today for Salford University CPD conference.
AND festival went to Grizedale forest this year, a return after 5 years. We delivered a number of drone activities over the weekend, including a networking event for drone enthusiasts and some flying experiences for beginners and experts. We were incredibly lucky with the weather and had some great people come along and learn.
This week, I was privileged to speak at the University of Salford's London meet up. It was a unique event for me and incredibly humbling to see and speak to so many remarkable people who have come through the university, including a Lord who was involved with writing the House of Lords report on drones - the subject of my talk! It was a great way to conclude an extraordinary first academic year at the university.
University of Salford 087e1
This week, I took part in a Battle of Ideas debate at the UK Space Conference in Liverpool exploring the Internet of Things and its transformative potential. It was a pretty far reaching debate, but my main argument focused on the need to step back and imagine a world where the IoT is not imagined as something in the service of humanity, but something which may serve a wider notion of ecosystem well being. This doesn't mean ignoring the desires and needs of humans, but instead trying to come to terms with what might be afforded by this technology if we adopted a wider perspective. I went on to advocate the need to think about an 'Interstellarnet of Things', which takes us beyond the confines of our planet in imagining the potential of this technology, along with the importance of thinking about some of the consequences of artificial general intelligence and the possibility that objects becoming sentient. In this regard, the idea of an Internet of Things at all misses the point - they will not be things, but beings, entities which may have a certain moral status by virtue of its capacity for volition or self-actualization.
Finally, I talked about the importance of the open data initiative and the need to overhaul some of the conventions operating around digital platforms which restrict our freedom to roam by precluding us from exporting our data into some universal language.
2015.07-UKSpaceConf
My first #SciFoo (Science Friends Of O'Reilly Media) event just came to a close and it was a marathon of crazy conversations with people doing remarkable things in science, art, and technology. Some of my highlights were a conversation with a paleontologist about using a probablistic approach to explaining why mammoths became extinct, chatting with the Pope's astronomer, and running two sessions in the programme, one on Drones, the other on Google Glass. Here's a glimpse from start to finish...
#Scifoo about to kick off here at @google in Mountain view! Excited! @makingscience@TechMoonshotspic.twitter.com/qKxLcHRQ3N
— Georgia Dienst (@georgiadienst) June 26, 2015
at the Google holodeck for #scifoopic.twitter.com/MgieukSU1s — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
googling #scifoo (@ Googleplex - @google in Mountain View, CA) https://t.co/drwfXkOuh5pic.twitter.com/HJIU981h4g
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
Google's driverless car shown at #scifoopic.twitter.com/fpqzbxNgJ6 — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
check out this 360 filming @GoPro rig at Googleplex #scifoopic.twitter.com/YXzpm4aRfU
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
Google glass session. main room at tent, in 5. #scifoopic.twitter.com/xIzzHk1kBY — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
Video essay, from my talk at #YorkFoi York's Festival of Ideas.
This week, I took part in a panel at the Cheltenham Science Festival focused on the use of drones in every day life. I talked a lot about Project Daedalus and some new innovations, particularly high authority autonomous systems - essentially completely intelligent drones - while Gerry Corbert from the Civil Aviation Authority gave a run down of the rules and regulations surrounding application. He was quick to point out that the guidelines that surround UAVs were never designed for the very small UAVs which can now be picked up in toy stores or even the Apple store, but there were some key issues that seem unresolved. One of them relates to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkZ4FONiiw
This example of a form of augmented reality glasses being used to give FPV perspective of the drone's camera is provocative because the CAA guidelines stipulate that flying with FPV goggles is actually not legal, since the pilot must always have visual line of sight (VLOS). However, these glasses offer transparency which permits VLOS, while locating the drone's camera feed within the glasses as well. So the question is, 'is this legal?'
This seems one of the future directions around the use of augmented reality devices with drones, making even more complicated the way in which the rules operate.
In the first of our Project Daedalus events with arts organizations, we all went over to the Pleasance in London to offer some demos, talks, and sandpit style discussion, thinking about how to use drones in creative contexts. Attendees had a chance to fly some micro drones and a Parrot Bebop using the iPad control interface, while also hearing about 360 degree film making, design for virtual reality interfaces, including Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear, and generally think about how to interate a range of digital technologies around drones, to create immersive, compelling, and different audience experiences.
Project Daedalus is a Digital R&D for the Arts project, funded by Nesta, Arts Council England, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It was born from a collaboraiton between myself, Abandon Normal Devices, and Marshmallow Laser Feast.
The second of three social media talks in a week, this one at the London School of Economics, focused on the early career researcher and how they can use social media to get their ideas out there quicker and make social media part of their research discovery process. When I was a PhD student, all we had to think about in terms of software was which bibliographic package we use.
Now, there are endless applications and key places where academics need to be, so that their work is discovered. Some of the key ones are ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but there are many more tools available that can help make our work more efficient, more accessible, and more engaging.
One of my key messages is that ignoring social media is like ignoring email in the 1990s. The question is not whether we do it, but how we do it well.
This week, I gave a talk at Kent Business School focused on the use of social media to generate research impact. It was a staggering sell out event with around 1/4 of the total academic staff of University of Kent in attendance.
One of the key things I covered in my talk was the range of socil media platforms that are out there, evidenced by my A to Z of social media for academia, which was first published in 2012. It has since been shared in countless places and the list keeps growing.
The platform I like most at the moment is Journal Map, makes me wish I was an environmental scientist. Maybe in a few years ;) Here are my slides from the talk...
This week, I took part in a dinner debate about media, ethics, and dementia. The conversation was run by the Dementia Festival of ideas, a year-long programme of events designed to interrogate key issues in dementia studies and research, along with an exploration of how to create novel forms of public engagement and public responsibility around the subjects. The debate took place with a range of experts fom different areas of interest, from journalism to medical ethics and was a really far reaching discussion. What struck me is how much has yet to be done, to ensure that care is adequate, and that social stigma around dementia is challenged.
Some possible interventions will follow from this event, including finding a way to empower families of suffers to take more decisive action to influence best practice and care within hospitals, along with developing a university alliance that can take strategic action in influencing policy, agenda setting, and generating research funds.
Wearable Technology, Augmented Reality, & Drone Cameras
Today's talk at #SportAccord went really well. It was the first time I'd used flight within a lecture and fortunately nobody got hurt. In actual fact, it was all very safe and I think it made much more real the way in which drone technology is becoming a part of the fabric of our lives.
Here are the slides from the talk
and finally, the lecture itself
Yesterday, I took part in a panel debate about what cities will look like in the future, what they need to do to deliver effective and compelling sports events, and how new forms of technological culture are changing audience expectations of urban life. My contribution focused on the Internet of Things, the role of Big Data, and the opportunities to nurture cultural change through technology.
Having been to 9 Olympic Games, I have seen a lot of change around how cities operate and yet there is still so much that can be done to use mega events as a catalyst for developing more digitally engaged legacies. I have yet to see a city that does this effectively and I think it has partly to do with the limited capacity of a city's people to own their digital legacy.
Consequently, my advocacy on this topic focuses on the need to create opportunities for data to empower people, rather than subject them to commercial exploitation. Sports have a key role to play given the growing economic impact around mobile health experiences.
Photo by Ksusha Kompan Photography
My first talk for the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, Manchester ;)
This week, I was in Seoul presenting at the Global Education Dialogue run by the British Council and co-hosted by hte Korean Council for University Education. The conference focused on the role of technology in the race for global talent and my talk developed the idea of 'intelligent learning systems' that can enable universities to get to a point where their staff student ratio is 1 to 1. Here's the @prezi
