News stories from The Times Higher Education Supplement
The Times Higher Education Supplement, July
20th, 2001, page 13.
Bright sparks
noted by RCA
Sharon Ann
Holgate
Karaoke in
the shower and texting for the elderly are among the technological
advances being proposed by Royal College of Art graduates.
Student
Cristian Norlin said: "I think as a designer dealing with powerful
technologies, you have a responsibility to do something worthy."
Mr Norlin's
Real Virtual Pets concept, which was among the projects on display at
The Show 2001 at the RCA
in London, would allow people to sponsor and monitor the progress
of animals that have been electronically tagged as part of conservation
projects.
As well as
being relayed via satellites to researchers, the data from tagged
animals such as the sea turtles tracked by conservation organisation
oneocean.org, which assisted Mr Norlin with his project, would be
sent to the mobile phones of adoptive parents.
Philip Phelan
won first prize in the older generation category of the Design for Our
Future Selves Awards, run concurrently with The Show by the RCA's Helen
Hamlyn Research Centre, which specialises in socially inclusive design.
He was inspired by seeing his 81-year-old neighbour struggle to send
text messages from a mobile phone, but operate her TV and video with
ease.
Mr Phelan's
prototype Textbox houses a mobile phone and routes the text messages
from it onto a users' TV screen.
"It's good to
feed extra functionality into devices that older people are
already familiar with," Mr Phelan said.
Both the
elderly and the hearing impaired could benefit from Chatter, a
table created by Anna Hiltunen that lights up in response to noise. A
microphone under the resin table is connected to a frequency analyser,
which separates different sounds from a noisy background, then sends
signals to switch on groups of LEDs embedded in the table.
Although the prototype reacts to ambient noise, it can be programmed to
recognise sounds such as the doorbell, Ms Hiltunen said.
Priya
Prakash's Showeraoke system, which won second prize in the work-life
balance section, allows crooners to select from a range of bar-coded
song labels
— printed
out from the showeraoke website and hung in clear pockets in the shower
curtain
—
using a bar-code scanner built into the shower head. The internet
connection is hidden inside the shower rail. As the music plays, the
words appear on a waterproof screen.
And for those
who would like their rubber duck to quack along too, bath toys with
bar-codes would also be available.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, July 6th,
2001, page 17.
Council spurs
industry focus
Sharon Ann
Holgate
The
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is re-focusing its
funding strategy to help tailor courses to meet the needs of industry
more closely.
“Our new
masters training packages should help universities provide the kind of
training and courses that employers want,” said Alasdair Rose, the
EPSRC's mathematics programme manager.
The EPSRC
also intends to increase its support for courses that cover emerging
subjects such as those at the interface between disciplines.
“There are
huge amounts of computer-generated data being produced by life
scientists and a shortage of people with the skills to analyse them,”
Dr Rose said.
“The funding
packages are flexible. They could provide for the development of
modular courses, or for development of distance-learning techniques
including e-learning,” he said.
Mike Smith,
reader at the University of York's mathematics department, said
that the EPSRC development money had been “absolutely critical” for the
development of the institution's MSc in data analysis, networks and
nonlinear dynamics.
This branch
of mathematics analyses and attempts to control processes and systems
in which several features can vary simultaneously and interact
with one another. The idea for the course came from collaborations
between York's maths department and industrial partners, including
telecoms company Nortel Networks.
“We were both
doing research into the control of manufacturing processes,” Nortel's
Philip Hargrave said. “We then looked to see whether these nonlinear
techniques could predict how internet traffic might vary so we could
design appropriate networks.”
Dr Smith
hopes that outside collaborators will send their employees on the
course. “If they take people on placements and see these students have
the right sorts of skills, we'd encourage that,” he said.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 29th,
2001, page 15.
Judges bowled
over by a squashy utensil
Sharon Ann
Holgate
A plastic bowl that can be
squashed up for storage and will not hurt when junior throws it at you
is the kitchen accessory of the future, according to the judges of the
Students' Plastics Design Competition.
The annual
contest, run by the Institute of Materials and plastics trade guild The
Worshipful Company of Horners, required entrants to design a
plastic kitchen product that would appeal to young families.
Six finalists
were assigned a mentor from the plastics industry who helped them
develop the product into something with commercial potential.
Winner Rob
Thompson, a second-year product design student at Central Saint Martins
College of Art and Design, said: “What's been really good about the
competition is that it made me take a project right through to
prototyping, which we don’t normally have time to do.”
Mr Thompson,
who designed his “button bowl” as part of a potential range of flexible
crockery for children, used the industrial contacts his mentor provided
when he needed to get production costs.
“It brings
about a sense of reality,” said Alan Baker, a senior lecturer in
the school of graphic and industrial design at Saint Martins. “It
also builds a connection between companies, colleges and students,
which is obviously
important for students as
they have to find employment
once they
graduate.”
However, the
entrants are not the only ones to benefit.
Martin
Rayner, purchasing director of kitchenware retailers Lakeland Limited, which was the competition's
principal sponsor,
said: “To keep ahead we're dependent on designers coming up with new
ideas such as these."
Mr Thompson
won a
work placement
with thermoplastic manufacturer Ticona UK Ltd along with cash prizes
for himself and his university. Designs for an ultrasonic cleaning
device and an electronic shopping aid were
among the runners-up.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 15th,
2001, page 14.
Entrepreneurs
get advice on risk and on carrying the can
Sharon Ann
Holgate
Rapid
movements in the stock market, negative commercial and social responses
to technology and the fast pace of technological development can prove
fatal for high-tech companies if they do not have a strategy for
dealing with risk.
Tim
Cook, managing director of Isis Innovation, the University of Oxford’s
technology transfer company, told delegates at “ Managing Risk in
High-Tech Markets” that allowing time to deal with problems and
establishing good relationships with staff and suppliers could help
companies cope with crises.
Dr
Cook also advised new companies to recruit experienced senior managers.
"In the spin-offs we’ve done that have gone really well, the scientist
has stayed in the university and we’ve recruited a managing director
from outside who has directed a technology-based business before,” he
said.
Dr
Cook said that in too many cases, the managing director set a high-risk
strategy and walked away with a pay-off when it went wrong, he added.
Focusing
capital on research and development most closely linked to your
business goals reduced the effects of risk according to Daniel
McCaughan, managing director of consultancy and investment company
McCaughan Associaties and former chief scientist of Nortel Networks.
“You
have to make some clear decisions about what you’re going to do, and
then stick with that focus long enough to make it work,” he said.
Dr
Cook said that the window for flotation of high-tech companies was shut
because investors seemed to put high-tech companies into the same
bracket as dotcoms.
But
he added that people should not be deterred from forming high-tech
spin-offs.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 4th,
2001, page 12.
Fibre feat is a load of thin air
Sharon Ann Holgate
An optical fibre being developed at the University of Southampton looks
set to improve telecommunications networks.
The fibre should carry more data than existing optical fibres and could
speed the routing of light signals through networks.
Tanya Monro, from Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, said:
“We design and make these fibres to have optical properties you can’t
have in conventional fibres."
In solid-glass optical fibres used in telecommunications,
data in the form of pulses of light zig-zag down the central core,
reflecting off the boundary between the core and the cladding
surrounding it.
Over the length of the fibre, these discrete pulses tend to spread out.
This limits the speed at which data can be fed into the fibre - too
fast and the pulses merge together at the other end, which makes the
data unreadable.
The
Southampton fibres have a solid central core region that is surrounded
by air holes. Because they confine light of shorter wavelengths more
tightly in the core than light of longer wavelengths, they can be
designed to minimise dispersion over a broad range of wavelengths,
allowing fast data transmission and the possibility of sending more
data down a single fibre.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, March 2nd,
2001, page 12.
Project aims
to lift internet experience
Sharon Ann
Holgate
Design, engineering and computing researchers have
teamed up with British Telecom to look at how people are responding to
businesses on the internet.
Nicola Millard, manager of BT’s customer contact futures project, said:
“Customer expectations of e-business are rising, but reality is not
matching the expectation.”
The researchers from Bournemouth University and Ms Millard’s team said
lengthy download times and poor navigability top the list of complaints
about the internet, and companies should take care to prevent both when
designing their websites.
“If people have problems on the internet, they do get angry and, in the
future, the competition is going to only be a click away,” she said.
Ms Millard said that the current lack of human contact could be putting
off many potential customers from shopping online.
“Certainly, for high-value products people feel more confident if
they’ve talked things through with a salesperson,” she said.
The availability of a high standard of after-sales service is another
concern for consumers. “Which is why bricks-and-mortar retailers are
coming out fairly strongly on the internet at the moment, because you
know who to complain to.”
Combining
e-business with older technologies such as call centres was one way of
giving the internet a more human face she suggested. Personalising the
experience by keeping track of individual users’ buying patterns, name
and credit card details, and whether they prefer to go directly to
buying rather than be distracted by other things, was another way of
obtaining customer loyalty, Ms Millard said.
“One
of the most intriguing questions in human-computer interaction is why
are computer games so addictive? We have been looking at the psychology
behind computer games and at their interface design, and seeing if we
could use this in a business context,” she said.
BT’s
new motivational user interface was outlined at the British
Psychological Society’s recent London Conference. The MUI, which BT has
been developing with Linda Hole from Bournemouth University, was
originally designed to motivate their call centre staff. But Ms Millard
said some features of the interface such as information about products
appearing as a series of text bubbles that the user can "burst" when
they have finished reading them, would be just as effective in
encouraging customers to return to a website.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, February 16th,
2001, page 13.
Project to
rethink software design
Sharon Ann
Holgate
A
research project involving five United Kingdom universities looks set
to revolutionise the way that computer systems are designed.
The
£6.8 million research collaboration between City, Edinburgh,
Lancaster, Newcastle and York universities is bringing together
psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists and statisticians in a
bid to create more dependable computer systems.
It
aims to discover how people interact with computers in an
organisational or business setting and how to avoid the huge financial
losses or even accidents that can occur when an unsuccessful system is
installed.
“One
issue that we are interested in is the notion of people changing their
strategies under pressure,” said Michael Harrison, of the University of
York’s computer science department.
“Air
traffic controllers, for example, will nurse the aircraft in a
relatively empty sky, but stack aircraft if it is a very full sky. They
have different working strategies for dealing with those different
situations.”
The
York team will look at whether varying degrees of automation could help
operators of computer-based systems cope better with sudden increases
in workload. This is a complex problem, as operators can become
confused and then enter the wrong commands if the computer has taken
over tasks without their knowledge.
Part
of learning how to design systems that adapt to the way people work
will involve looking at timing issues, ranging from human reaction
speeds to planning for deadlines.
“Typically,
when people design computer systems they do not think about human
deadlines,” Professor Harrison said. “ But, if we can articulate the
kind of decision processes we think users will need to execute, then we
can give that to the psychologists and ask can they do it?”
Andrew
Monk, of York’s psychology department, said: “Dependability hasn’t
traditionally been a concern of human-computer interaction.”
Professor
Monk, chairman of the British Human Computer Interaction Group, a
specialist group of the British Computer Society, added: “We hope to
provide tools for the designers such as diagrams or mathematical
formulae that they can use to check their design and prove that it is
going to work.”
The
six-year collaboration will also address the reliability, safety and
security of critical computer-based systems.
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The
Times Higher Education Supplement, November 10th, 2000, page
14.
Hub of
activity for start-ups
Sharon Ann
Holgate
A network of
Enterprise Hubs linked to local universities will soon be providing
support to entrepreneurs and start-up businesses across southeast
England.
According to
Anthony Dunnett, chief executive of the South East England Development
Agency (Seeda), which is responsible for the project, the hubs will
address five areas essential to all businesses access to:
technology, investment, flexible workspace, business mentoring and
other growing companies.
Seeda is
committing
£9 million over
three years to establish
30 Enterprise
Hubs.
“We expect to
help give birth to 600 new
companies a year by 2005 and provide
five times this number with some direct benefit,” Mr Dunnett said.
The first
five hubs have recently been announced and, while having a
different focus, each will have an affiliated university, a hub
director, incubator space and be business led.
The Isle of
Wight hub, which is the first to have appointed a director, is
linked to Portsmouth University, for example. It aims to create a
world-class research centre in composite materials.
By contrast,
the Newbury hub, connected to Reading University and Henley Business
School, will specialise in the implementation of robotics in
manufacturing. Best practice in dealing with business angels will be
provided by the North Oxfordshire hub, linked to Oxford University,
while Southampton's hub, affiliated to Southampton University, will
focus on telecommunications, computing, media and creative industries
and marine technology.
Both Brighton
and Sussex universities are linked to Brighton and Hove's hub, which
will concentrate on new media industries, including e-commerce,
multimedia and TV production. A web portal will be created that will
link into local cable TV and provide easy access to sources of help for
new businesses.
The
incubation units will be provided by the Sussex Innovation Centre,
based at Sussex University, which has been helping academics to set up
spin-off companies and has been providing incubation support to new
technology businesses since
1996.
Mike Herd,
executive director of the Sussex Innovation Centre and a member of the
Enterprise Hub's steering group, said: “The Enterprise Hub will enable
us to extend what we’ve been doing in terms of networking and will
provide support for more students and academic staff to bring their
ideas through.”
Mr Herd hopes
new media will not be the only area to benefit. “If we are attracting
potential investors to the area to look at new media, let's start
introducing them into new biotech and electronics projects as well,"
he said.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, May
26th, 2000, page 15.
Wanted: an angel flush with money
Sharon Ann Holgate
The path from scientist to entrepreneur rarely runs
smooth, according to David Hall, director of the Thames Gateway
Technology Centre at the University of East London's Docklands site.
"A scientist or a technologist may have great ideas,
but it's very difficult to get an investor interested," Dr Hall said.
Part of the reason is because academics do not
understand business activities such as marketing, product launch, the
consumer and after-sales service.
"I think there's no way, as an academic, that one can
develop that [understanding] without having operated in the business
community," Dr Hall said.
Technology-based businesses in particular tend to
make potential investors more nervous because they are often developing
new products and trying to define new markets simultaneously.
Sue Birley, director of the Science Enterprise Centre
at Imperial College, London, said that often a number of people are
involved in creating a new technology. Entrepreneurs need to identify
the owners of the intellectual property and negotiate an agreement with
them.
"Establishing a clean intellectual property portfolio
is key," she said. "Without that, they will have problems raising
funds."
Garry Moore, an independent electrical engineer from
Essex, has been finding out just how hard obtaining funding can be.
Mr Moore founded his company, Phoenix Product
Development Limited, to develop and market his air-displacement toilet
16 months ago and is keen to expand with the [UEL] centre's help.
The toilet uses air pressure to flush instead of
water, but unlike existing pressure-assisted toilets, it plumbs into
standard pipework, requires little maintenance and is lighter in
weight.
Moore's toilet does use some water - 1.5 litres per
flush - but this is a substantial water saving compared with the six to
seven litres used by standard toilets.
"I have been talking to the United Nations about the
technology and they see great potential for the new toilet alleviating
the problems of the limited availability of fresh water and the need to
produce less waste water in many of the world's arid and semi-arid
regions," he said.
But there is a catch.
"The UN wants to arrange field trials of the new
toilet as soon as demonstration prototypes are available. However, I
cannot produce the required prototypes for field trials until I have
the development funds that I need," he said.
"As a start-up company I have no collateral to secure
a bank loan. The Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme can provide loans of
up to £100,000 with 70 per cent underwritten by the Department of
Trade and Industry, but it requires advanced orders or other serious
commitment from customers. Obviously this cannot be obtained until the
invention has been developed into a product".
For the same reason, Mr Moore has found it difficult
to attract venture capitalists or business angels. Ideally, he would
like to set up in a business incubation unit at the centre.
There he would get help in developing prototypes,
access to equipment, workshops and students, and academic expertise
from the University of East London and its other academic partners.
The centre also offers access to potential sources of
finance, such as Business Angel Networks, Enterprise agencies and
Business Link networks. Bringing in a business angel certainly made all
the difference to a centre-based start-up founded by two of UEL's
academics when they applied for a Smart award.
"We were explicitly told that without that business
angel in place and without that business balance there, there was no
way the investment would have been made," Dr Hall said.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement,
April 14th, 2000, page 14.
Niche products to govern research
Sharon Ann Holgate
Market opportunities offered by e-business could mean
that research assessments will need to include a measurement of the
success of technology transfer.
Brian O'Neill, from the electrical and electronic
engineering department at Nottingham Trent University, told a Brighton
conference last week that despite the financial hurdles involved in
setting up spin-off companies, he felt strongly that the days ought to
be numbered of engineering departments having their research assessed
by the number of research papers published.
"Success in technology transfer is an important
measure for the quality of research," Dr O'Neill said. It can certainly
prove a great advantage to students.
"The bottom line of anything I've done is the
training I give to research students. They've all got jobs at a far
higher standard than they would have if they'd just come out as raw
graduates."
Dr O'Neill, at "The Role of Physicists in Building
the Internet" conference, held as part of the Institute of Physics'
annual congress, said it was possible to carry out small-scale research
within a university that can compete with larger industrial research
groups.
But researchers must find niche applications for
their products and be prepared to be more adaptable than larger
companies.
Dr O'Neill founded his spin-off company in 1996 after
a research project involving digital circuit design led to a
commercially viable microchip. The chip is used to link
microprocessors, acting like the hub of a telephone network. Its main
application has been in state-of-the-art computer graphics animation,
but a new version of the chip could play a large part in creating the
first "home networks", connecting household devices to the internet.
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The Times Higher Education Supplement, March
17th, 2000, page 12.
Big help for small businesses
Sharon Ann Holgate
South-eastern electronics and engineering companies
now have access to industrial research and development facilities
thanks to a new centre at Sussex University.
The £4 million South East Advanced Technology
Hub (Seath) will enable smaller businesses to try different techniques
and to create and test prototype products without having to invest in
expensive new equipment. "The vision is to provide world-class advanced
engineering and knowledge-based technology to businesses in the
region," said Chris Chatwin, Seath research director.
The Seath site includes high quality clean rooms,
opto-electronics laboratories and an IT suite. Desk space and
telephones are available for people wishing to set up spin-off
companies from technologies developed at Seath, and there is access to
scientific equipment in other parts of the university as well,
Professor Chatwin said.
The idea came from the Alliance of West Sussex
Electronics Manufacturers and the Electronics Action Group, which
represent local companies. Sussex Enterprise, a business membership
organisation incorporating the local training and enterprise council,
Business Link and the chamber of commerce, produced a business plan and
helped negotiate with the university.
"Postgraduates get experience of working with real
companies, so when they leave they have contacts in industry, and
understand working to deadlines and budgets," said Andy Carr, Seath
project manager at Sussex Enterprise.
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