Digital Futures ~ Martin Hamilton

From anechoic chambers to wind tunnels, mass spectrometers to supercomputers, institutions are increasingly looking to share high value items of research equipment. Martin Hamilton outlines how Jisc is working with a variety of partners to help embed and accelerate asset sharing.

[This piece originally appeared on Efficiency Exchange in February 2015]

In this article I will look at three areas where Jisc, with partners including BIS, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), HEFCE and Innovate UK, is helping to reduce the friction of asset sharing, between institutions and also with industry.

We are doing this by:

  • Working with EPSRC to make the details of more than £200m worth of high value equipment available for sharing between institutions and with industry.
  • Piloting standard terms and conditions for access to £60m of publicly funded supercomputing facilities and expertise.
  • Providing support for industrial connectivity to the Janet network at speeds of up to 10 Gigabits/second for collaborative R&D projects.

Kit-Catalogue - your "one stop shop" for equipment data

 Kit-Catalogue is a piece of free software that lets an institution quickly and easily set up its own equipment database, and also provides a data feed of shared items into the EPSRC funded national portal equipment.data.ac.uk.



An example of a typical Kit-Catalogue page from University College London - here showing the one-of-a-kind Lighting Simulator at The Bartlett, UCL's Faculty for the Built Environment.

Jisc and EPSRC originally funded the development of the Kit-Catalogue software, and I am delighted that we are once again working with the Kit-Catalogue team to explore its potential as a Jisc service, including gathering data on running costs and institutional benefits that will help to inform the business case.

With support from HEFCE, we are piloting Kit-Catalogue with ten institutions over a two-year period and also supporting the continued development of the software as part of this initiative.

One particular new development that I am very pleased with is our Kit-Catalogue app, available from the Google Play Store for Android devices.

Two screenshots from the Kit-Catalogue Android app

The output from Kit-Catalogue contributes (along with other data sources) to the national equipment sharing portal, equipment.data, which makes the details of some 10,000 items of high value research equipment available for sharing. With an conservative average value of £20K-£25K per item, then the total value of equipment being shared is at least £200m. Newcastle University alone is sharing more than 814 items of equipment valued at £20K or above, with a combined value of more than £16m.

Frictionless supercomputing - £60m of public investment in HPC

 Before joining Jisc, I set up and then ran EPSRC's HPC Midlands regional supercomputing centre of excellence, a collaboration between Loughborough University and the University of Leicester.

During the course of this work it became increasingly apparent that businesses - and also many higher education institutions - were keen to explore a pay-as-you-go model for access to high performance computing and big data facilities, but required formal contractual assurances around service provision. Information security and protection of intellectual property was a key concern. For example, HPC Midlands industrial users required that we destroy any failed disk drives rather than returning to the vendor for replacement.


To address these requirements, we worked with Rolls Royce to develop a standardised contract and pro forma covering data security and information assurance, aligned with ISO 27001 standards. I brought this with me to Jisc and with support from HEFCE we subsequently reached agreement with HPC Midlands, HPC Wales, N8 HPC and STFC DiRAC that they would offer their services under this basis. This landmark agreement opens up £60m of publicly funding supercomputing facilities for institutions and industry to access as shared services. I hope that we will be able to extend this approach to other classes of equipment, building on both this work and the Brunswick Agreements.

Here is a powerful example from HPC Midlands customers E.ON of the potential that industry access to academic facilities and expertise can have:

"We ran the gas turbine simulation with a number of different parameter sets and observed speed-ups of between 30 and 145 times the performance of the in-house system based on workstation class PC" - Lionel Mazzella, E.ON New Build & Technology


Gas turbine simulation, CC BY-NC-SA E.ON UK Plc

Janet Reach - ultrafast connectivity to the Janet network for industry

Most of today's research equipment is data intensive, none more so than supercomputing and big data applications. Back in my days of running a supercomputer centre it was not unusual for customers to bring their data over on a hard drive, because connectivity was poor or non-existent between industry and the research and education sector. Whilst this worked well for local firms, and provided a useful opportunity to catch up over a coffee, there was clearly no way that this approach could scale.

In parallel, Jisc has received £4m as part of a package of e-Infrastructure funding from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to support greater interaction between businesses and academia in the e-Infrastructure environment. One component of this is a scheme, Janet Reach, to support high-capacity business connections to the Janet Network in the context of innovative R&D collaboration with academic partners to exploit the e-Infrastructure resources they host and manage.

This is another area where I believe that we can act together to give today's data-driven businesses a significant leap forward in capability. Just think what a high-capacity connection at up to 10 Gigabits/second to Janet could do to accelerate your R&D collaborations.

Details of the first awards under Janet reach will be made available shortly, but from what I am hearing, I think we will see a good spread of connections from startups and micro-SMEs to major UK firms.

The Janet Reach scheme runs until August 2015 as a series of calls modelled on the Innovate UK competition process. The latest call for proposals deadline is 28th February 2015 - we'd love to hear from you.

Find out more

Jisc's Kit-Catalogue pilot and frictionless supercomputing initiative are part of our R&D programme. Martin Hamilton will also be appearing at University UK's annual Efficiency Conference on 25 March in a workshop on equipment sharing.

To learn more about the Reach scheme and industrial connectivity to Janet more broadly, please see the Janet Reach homepage.

Universities and colleges have a vast amount of equipment at their disposal and rich seams of talent and expertise that can be mined. Sharing those resources with other institutions and with business opens up new opportunities to boost the UK's technology sectors.

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc blog in February 2015]

CrowdEmotion demo their emotion recognition software at the Digital Catapult launch,
CC-BY Paul Clarke for the Digital Catapult

If like me you are a child of the 1970s and 80s, you probably grew up surrounded by the first wave of the tech revolution - personal computers, video games consoles, and all sorts of other home electronics. But then something went horribly wrong, and those promising ideas and the firms behind them largely disappeared. Of course what happened was IBM's PC and Apple's Macintosh, which quickly gathered a global momentum that many of the early pioneers were unable to compete with.

But how does a promising new invention go from the research labs at a college or a university into full production and shipping? All too often the answer in the UK has been that it doesn't hence the popular view of us as a nation of inventors who allow other people to realise our ideas. But it doesn't have to be that way as counter-examples Dyson and ARM prove.

Lend me your ARM

In 2010 the then Secretary of State Peter Mandelson commissioned Acorn and ARM co-founder, Dr Hermann Hauser to advise the government on ways to support the commercialisation of UK research. Hauser recommended the establishment of Technology and Innovation Centres to bring academia and industry together in a similar way to Germany's Fraunhofer Institutes.

Catapult Centres (are) a physical base for R&D collaborations between businesses and academia, equipped with state of the art facilities and expertise

The recommendations have subsequently been acted on through the coalition government's Catapult Centres, a physical base for R&D collaborations between businesses and academia, equipped with state of the art facilities and expertise.

An initial seven Catapult Centres were set up under the auspices of Innovate UK, with two more set to launch this year:



Pooling resources to maximise the benefits

My own involvement with Innovate UK and the Catapult network began back in 2012 when I set up the HPC Midlands regional supercomputer centre for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

I found that computer-based modelling and simulation was already either an essential part of the workflow for many businesses, or something they had identified as a key future requirement. But often, the most advanced computing capability that the firm had was a high specification workstation that might take days or even weeks to complete a routine task.

For me the defining moment came in working with E.ON, which had a powerful in-house workstation cluster of its own. We determined that use of our facilities could speed up E.ON's modelling and simulation jobs, such as the gas turbine simulation pictured, by a factor of 30 to 145.

Working with more and more businesses, we found that this kind of dramatic reduction in "time to solution" was often possible. In some cases firms found that the impact on their bottom line was so significant that they were prepared to move their entire simulation workload onto our supercomputer.

Thus began my work exploring how to make facilities like HPC Midlands 
more accessible to industry.

There is a wide range of equipment held by universities and colleges that is also of value to business

When we are talking about a small island like the UK, it makes sense for us to take a serious look at pooling our resources. There is a wide range of equipment held by universities and colleges that is also of value to business.

Say you're designing a new turbine blade. Once you have tested virtual models of your design, the next stage might be to use additive manufacturing like 3D printing to create a physical prototype, and then carry out wind tunnel tests. And when the first pre-production models arrive, you might want to use a mass spectrometer for materials characterisation and verify the integrity of the manufacturing process.

The combination of the facility plus the expert skills to operate it and interpret the results can make a huge difference.

On joining Jisc I realised that we are in an ideal position to complement the work of the Catapults

 On joining Jisc I realised that we are in an ideal position to complement the work of the Catapults by making equipment held by colleges and universities easier to find, and by reducing the friction of sharing those facilities and that expertise.

What are we doing already?

And so to our work. We are brokering common terms and conditions for access to HPC facilities. We now have four major HPC centres offering their services through our common terms and conditions - HPC Midlands, HPC Wales, N8 HPC and STFC DiRAC. Together, these represent £60m of public investment in supercomputing, for institutions to share and industry to access.

We now have four major HPC centres offering their services through
our common terms and conditions

Looking to the future we are also piloting Kit-Catalogue, a piece of software that lets an institution quickly and easily put up a database of the equipment that it holds, as a simple sharing idea.

Our ten pilot sites are feeding into EPSRC's one stop shop for equipment sharing, equipment.data, which holds the details of some 10,000 items of high value equipment. Newcastle University alone is sharing over 814 items valued at £20,000 or more, with a combined value of over £16m, and we estimate the total value of publicly funded equipment being shared by the sector at over £200m.

Find out more

 For more on these initiatives visit the project page on equipment sharing, watch our video or contact me.


ETAG's vision for 2025, CC-BY Bryan Mathers

A couple of months ago my daughter came home from school with an interesting new project: everyone in her year group was being asked to imagine what the classroom of the future might be like.

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc blog in January 2015]

After a few weeks of frantic activity, parents were invited to school to view the children's creations. There were models made of papier-mache and Lego, and even shoe boxes and old loo roll holders. My daughter decided to make an entire model school in Minecraft on her iPad.

Fast forward to late January 2015 and all eyes were on Bett 2015 this week, opened by education secretary Nicky Morgan - who also happens to be my constituency MP. In her speech, Nicky launched the report of the Department for Education's independent think tank the Education Technology Action Group (ETAG).

ETAG, chaired by Bournemouth University's Professor Stephen Heppell, has also been imagining the classroom of the future. In this blog post I thought it would be interesting to compare their conclusions.

ETAG's view of the learning landscape

The graphic above by ETAG member Bryan Mathers from City and Guilds summarises the group's perspective on what the learning landscape of 2025 (or perhaps even 2020) will look like.

The ETAG report makes 19 pragmatic recommendations that the group believes will help us to prepare for this new reality. Some of these are principally about establishing a level playing field in terms of core infrastructure services, eg high speed internet connectivity and a safe, secure and resilient organisation-wide wireless network. These could be viewed as potential capital projects to ensure equitable provision across schools, colleges and universities.


The ETAG report makes 19 pragmatic recommendations that the group
believes will help us to prepare for this new reality

Alongside the pure technology plays, ETAG also make a number of recommendations that are about developing digital skills. For example: a 'digital Duke of Edinburgh Award' scheme to inspire learners and enhance employability outcomes, and a programme of continuous professional development for staff which would showcase, reward and celebrate innovation in digital technologies.

The group felt strongly that the voice of the learner should feature in all of this, such as digital residents from what they called the 'iPad generation'.

The school of the future - in Minecraft

Talking to my own digital resident, I was struck by the fact that she had constructed a school which was practically a self-contained community, with technology seamlessly woven into its very fabric. Her school scored well on sustainability, with wind turbines and solar panels for power, and composting toilets. It had practically every wall usable as a screen, and of course all the children had tablets and computers at hand when required.

At the same time the school also featured its own farm, growing vegetables and farming animals for the children to look after. At break time the children would collect eggs from the school chickens to give to the cook, and after some practice (and a few hints and tips) even I eventually learned how to dye a sheep in Minecraft - a vital skill that would sit nicely on any LinkedIn profile.


The key message of the ETAG report is all about bringing the technology
we now use every day into the classroom and lecture theatre

As my daughter and I discussed her project, I was reminded of our Jisc Digital Festival, and last's year's keynote speaker Sugata Mitra's School in the Cloud initiative, which is all about giving children just the right amount of encouragement to support their own self-directed learning. In a world where technology is ambient and ever present, learners can potentially range far and wide beyond the narrow boundaries of the material that is present in the school or college library, set texts and so on.

For me the key message of the ETAG report is all about bringing the technology we now use every day into the classroom and lecture theatre. Albert Einstein once said "never memorize something you can look up", and there is a real sense in which today's digital technologies may well mark "the end of remembering", as I recently suggested in Jisc's technology foresight and horizon scanning activity.

Technology access for all

However, there is a big but here: many learners do not have home broadband and access to a device of their own. I was therefore particularly pleased to see the ETAG report reference the Open University's Your Own Technology Survey (YOTS) project, which is aimed at giving schools a snapshot of the technology that their pupils have access to - including whether they are allowed to bring their own device to school.

Many learners do not have home broadband and access to a device of their own

YOTS is aimed at schools, but is just as relevant to colleges and universities. I hope to use it in the near future in collaboration with the FE Sussex college consortium to explore their options in connection with implementing the government's targets for online delivery following last year's FELTAG recommendations.

How might it work?

I recently visited the Perry Beeches II Free School in Birmingham, and learned from pupils that they were able to use the school facilities for long periods outside of formal school hours. This gave them access to a comfortable and safe working space with state of the art facilities in what is one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK, and I was delighted that Perry Beeches was recently rated outstanding in all categories by Ofsted, with a 97% pass rate at A level.

Assessment and accountability

The ETAG report also looks at assessment, accountability and issues around collection of learner data and the uses to which it is put. This became a hot button topic after the failure of analytics firm InBloom. The scandal around InBloom led to the development of the Student Privacy Pledge, which now has 91 signatories including the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and the support of President Obama. I should mention in passing here that we recently launched a Jisc code of practice for learning analytics as part of our learning analytics co-design challenge.

Looking ahead

So there we are - do take a look at the ETAG report, and let us know what you think about its recommendations. As Stephen Heppell says in the foreword "this is not a time to stand still or to simply finesse the past", but at the same time we have to square our enthusiasm for progress and continuous improvement with the realisation that it could easily mean ever-increasing workloads for teachers, lecturers and administrators.


We have to square our enthusiasm for progress with the realisation
that it could mean ever-increasing workloads

I will close by reiterating the report's key messages about access and inclusion, much which could be facilitated centrally by a supporting agency, and bringing everyday technologies into the classroom and lecture theatre.

As my daughter and her friends say when I ask them a tricky question, "just Google it, Daddy!"

Photo credit: CC-BY Flickr user slgc.
It’s the Internet’s dirty little secret, and one we ignore at our peril. There’s a reason that every new startup is the Amazon of this, the Facebook of that or the new Uber, Airbnb and so on. That’s because the incremental costs of scaling from a startup to a global concern are very different when you don’t need to take on huge numbers of staff and open bricks and mortar stores, hotels, or taxi offices. And a lot of the major product slots have already gone. These days, Amazon alone really is The Everything Store of Brad Stone’s book. Amazon even rents out its own infrastructure as Amazon Web Services.

So will we see an Amazon of Education? Will someone crack the successful online “delivery” of “learning”, coupled with robust assessment, and what will that mean for the institution? The last few years have seen quite a few concerted attempts, largely based on replicating the traditional lecture (watch a video, e.g. a captured lecture) and tutorial format (discussion in a forum), but these haven’t been hugely successful. We’ve seen huge drop out rates, and pivots from some of the leading lights. It may be telling that the MOOC platforms of recent years bear little relationship with their antecedents, such as the near infamous DS106 Digital Storytelling course. And perhaps the future of education will look more like a video game than a lecture. If that seems unlikely, watch the video below from Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Right now, more people are learning a language online through Duolingo than the total number of people learning a language at school in the United States.


If the future of education interests you, why not continue the dialogue with Simon Nelson, the CEO of the UK’s own MOOC platform FutureLearn. Simon will be one of the keynote speakers at Jisc’s Digital Festival 2015 – book now, it’s early bird rate until January 5th 2015.

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc Technology Foresight blog]


Most of us now have a cupboard or two’s worth of old media that we’re keeping because one day we might want to go back to it. Floppy disks, old hard drives, audio and video cassettes, CDs and so on. But how many of us no longer posses a device capable of reading/playing that media? There’s a software equivalent too: files that you are no longer able to read. Perhaps the license expired, or the application isn’t compatible with modern hardware or operating systems. And then there are files that were locked into defunct cloud services, with no equivalent of Google Takeout – or services that simply went away one day.


So are we entering a new “Digital Dark Age”? This may well be the case if we do not take care to carefully curate our data and metadata. A number of studies show significant link rot in academic publications, but we have also made significant progress through initiatives such as DataCite’s Digital Object Identifiers, and the CLOCKSS archive network for orphaned or abandoned scholarly content. And moving beyond academia, the Internet Archive’s Internet Arcade provides a great (and fun!) example of what can be done in terms of code and data re-use when enough people are sufficiently motivated – see video above.

At Jisc we are just kicking off our Research Data Spring initiative, which is a two year project looking to close any gaps which presently put “research at risk”. Please do take a look at and vote on the ideas people have submitted, and add your own – the first round of Research Data Spring ideation closes on January 12th 2015.

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc Technology Foresight blog]

As service users or consumers, we love that the Internet removes intermediaries. Just think: one click to buy and download a new book or album, everyone now able to “publish” their thoughts and ideas to a potentially global audience, the rise of the citizen journalist and citizen science, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, and so on. Future generations will undoubtedly look back at this time in human existence and recognise it as a phase change – suddenly the friction of a whole lot of stuff that people want to do was drastically reduced.



But of course there is a downside – what if that intermediary is you? We have just about gotten used to the changes wrought by the first wave of Internet based disintermediation – though do you still miss your local book shop or record shop? It’s becoming clear that there are huge areas where machine learning, cloud computing and robotics will come together and wreak even greater changes. Consider Google’s self-driving car video above – it’s hard to suppress a tear as the blind man goes for his first solo car ride. But what will all the taxi drivers do when driverless cars take off? And more importantly, what skills will our children need to learn to find work in a world where any job that can be done by an algorithm will ultimately be automated?

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc Technology Foresight blog]

Last night saw the sector come together in London for the 2014 Times Higher Education (THE) Awards. One of the most eagerly awaited categories was the Jisc-sponsored Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year - celebrating the use of innovative and strategic digital technologies in universities, with The Open University's OpenScience Laboratory announced as the very deserving winner.

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc blog in November 2014]

Jack Dee and Jisc CEO Martyn Harrow with THE Awards winners 2014,
picture courtesy of Times Higher Education

As one of the judges of the THE awards, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the shortlisted institutions and their projects in this category. I will start with the winner, and go on to give attention to each of entries, which I think epitomise some of the excellent digital work that's being done in UK higher education.

Open University

The OpenScience Laboratory from the Open University and Wolfson Foundation gives distance learners the closest possible experience to studying in a real lab by allowing them to conduct 'virtual' experiments using real data.

allowing distance learners to conduct 'virtual' experiments using real data

It strategically supports distance learning at a variety of education levels, providing resources through open access to a wide range of potential audiences. Crucially, it promotes STEM subjects by providing a glimpse of the world and work of the scientist which really engages the learner - you can see its success by the fact it has been accessed by over 10,000 informal learners, which is in addition to the more than 2,000 registered users studying on Open University courses.

The panel felt that it was a genuinely exciting project within an ambitious overall programme with a great roadmap for further development. The project clearly demonstrates the power that technology has to enable people in higher education to perform at the forefront of international practice - which is precisely our mission at Jisc.

University of Aberdeen and partners

 The North East of Scotland Shared Data Centre (NESSDC) is a £1.2m joint project to create a shared data centre for regional higher and further education institutions, led by the University of Aberdeen.

creating a shared data centre for regional higher and further education institutions

Recognising that their existing data centres were environmentally unfriendly and unsustainable for future growth requirements, four institutions - the University of Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen College and Banff & Buchan College - came together to create a new state of the art facility where they could share services. The new data centre will save the participating institutions a six figure sum every year whilst also helping them to drastically reduce their carbon emissions.

Bournemouth University

The team at Bournemouth University and Poole NHS Trust wanted to support staff and enhance healthcare delivery during epidurals. Together, they created a fully integrated wireless prototype to guide surgical staff administering injections by determining the position of the needle. They have also developed a training package to help users monitor progress.

supporting staff and enhancing healthcare delivery during epidurals

This project could have huge societal benefits given that complications associated with epidural injections during labour are estimated to affect around 365,000 women and cost the NHS some £15m every year. The team at Bournemouth is now working with NHS Innovations South West, who commercialise new inventions.

De Montfort University

 De Montfort University's IT4Free project from its Square Mile community engagement initiative is targeted at maximising digital inclusion in Leicestershire. It aims to close the digital divide through free community IT suites and training.

closing the digital divide through free community IT suites and training

Working in partnership with a number of public and private sector bodies, including HP, the NHS and The Prince's Trust, a team of academics and 50 student volunteers have given their time to make the project a success, with the students also gaining valuable skills and confidence.

International State Crime Initiative

 The International State Crime Initiative is an e-testimony project from Queen Mary University of London, University of Ulster and King's College London. It is an online casebook that provides material about criminal state practices, including eye witness testimonies in the form of interviews, film, photographs and other imagery, that is available to those interested in studying these events.

an online casebook that provides material about criminal state practices,
including eye witness testimonies

The results of the project have been widely taken up and used in teaching in the UK, US and Australia, as well as by non-governmental organisations.

University of Leeds

 Patients admitted to hospital with acute illness need to receive prompt, effective treatment if their condition gets worse. Recognising and Responding to Acute Patient Illness and Deterioration (RRAPID) from the University of Leeds is a programme that uses technology in a subtle way to support trainee doctors in reacting to emergency situations.

using technology to support trainee doctors in reacting to emergency situations

A suite of interactive resources have been created to support the RRAPID approach including a multimedia e-book that features video demonstrations and photographs and a diagnostic app covering a range of commonly occurring acute scenarios.

The app gives students the ability to self-test how they would respond to a given emergency, and a log book to record their experiences. This approach has had a transformational effect at Leeds and is now integrated into all five years of its medical degree training.

Outstanding practice

 The jury was hugely impressed by the quality of the entries, which gave a great snapshot of the kind of innovations in ICT taking place in UK higher education. Of course only one institution can take home the trophy, but all of the institutions shortlisted and the individuals involved in these projects should feel justifiably proud of their achievements.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)