This poster for the 2014 International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC 2014) in San Francisco was produced by my Loughborough University colleague Sue Manuel, with Sarah Jones and Angus Whyte from Jisc's Digital Curation Centre. It summarises our recent survey of UK Higher Education institutions' planning for Research Data Management in support of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) mandate on open data. For more information on the survey, please see our summary report Metadata is Love Note to the Future and the Loughborough University RDM blog.

This post takes us from the Quantified Self to the Quantified Driver, and the Internet of Things to the Botnet of Fridges. We've been hearing a lot about the Quantified Self movement, and how in years to come our gadgets (that other thing we hear a lot about - the Internet of Things) will be quietly collecting information about us to help us plan our routines, sleep, diets, exercise regimes, and so on. A landmark interview with Stephen Wolfram a couple of years ago put this onto a lot of people's agendas. This might sound like science fiction, but we can get a glimpse of that future right now if we know where to look, particularly around fitness tracking and what I suspect my Californian readers would describe as wellness monitoring. In this post I'll look at some of the tech which is out there now, including some surprisingly well established systems, and give you my own tale from the edge…

We have a great opportunity at Loughborough for an experienced E-Learning professional, if you are between contracts or looking for a new challenge. As part of commercializing the Co-Tutor software (with £100K of HEIF funding), we are looking to bring in some extra help. You will be working on Co-Tutor and other locally developed PHP based software including the open source Kit-Catalogue and Web-PA packages. You will also have the opportunity to work on other systems and services operated by our E-Learning Systems team, including Learn (Loughborough's Moodle based VLE) and Computer Aided Assessment via QuestionMark Perception and OMR/OCR.

Earlier this year I wrote one of my most popular blog posts “Hacking the Google Smartwatch” about the hacking potential of Motorola’s Moto Actv smartwatch. In this post I’ll turn my attentions to the Samsung Galaxy Gear, which launched in Autumn 2013 and has already been quite comprehensively hacked to vastly expand its capabilities. I’ll conclude by showing you how you can run the Google Glass software to get an early peek at how Glass will work.

As part of the HPC Midlands project, we've been developing a series of case studies about the work that we are doing with our industrial collaborators around supercomputing. Here's the latest one, about our joint project with Applied Multilayers to model thin film growth in photovoltaics We'll post further case studies both here and on the case studies section of the HPC Midlands website.






View HPC Midlands and Applied Multilayers Case Study - Thin Film Growth in Photovoltaics on Scribd (and see other documents posted by Martin Hamilton)

We just learned that our iconic supercomputer, Hera, has been selected for a Design Museum / Technology Strategy Board prize in their joint Future is Here competition. The competition celebrates our new industrial revolution of computer based modelling and simulation, high value manufacturing and 3D printing, big data and the digital economy, space systems, genomics and other present day developments that offer "a glimpse of the future, today". This is particularly appropriate for our supercomputer, Hera, which is a one-of-a-kind design artifact, but also a mixture of both R&D lab and factory floor.

From the Future is Here manifesto:

We are in the midst of a transformation in the way we design, make and use the objects that we depend on. It is a transformation that will affect commerce, industry, and the way that we all live as profoundly as any previous Industrial Revolution.

The Future is Here exhibition runs until 29th October 2013 at the Design Museum - for more information, see the-future-is-here.com.

I'm delighted to be able to present here the results of our recent survey of the UK Higher Education community's plans for Research Data Management, along with a little initial analysis and an executive summary. To stay true to the spirit of openness, we have made a redacted version of the raw data available, along with our analysis, using the figshare cloud RDM service.