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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