The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Geospatial Science recently held a workshop on wearable personal sensing. First up was Evtim Peytchev of Nottingham Trent University who explained how GPS-enabled mobile phone technology is catalysing a new range of location-based services and applications. He outlined how this might be used, for example to enable road traffic … Read more

Climate change minister Ed Miliband likens the challenge facing us over climate change to the Apollo mission which landed a man on the moon. And it’s not just the technology that we need to get right – a huge collective, society-wide endeavour is required. We are, as they say, all in this together, so what … Read more

TechWatch has just published a report on the future of Ethernet, 100G Ethernet and beyond, which explains the background and technical development to the next upgrade of the thirty-year-old family of networking standards, which will be formalised in 2010. The key thing is that, traditionally, Ethernet has developed in incremental steps of ten. This means … Read more

A couple of weeks ago I spotted an article about the ISTC, a new publishing standard. What was particularly interesting was that it seems to have potential for much wider application: Ted Nelson’s ‘transclusion’ came to mind and there would seem to be the potential for using an ISTC to identify and make micro-payments for … Read more

The sixth edition of the Horizon Report, a USA-based collaboration between EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium has been published. The report is a summary of the latest thinking on emerging technologies and practices that will affect education over the next few years and is a useful read for all those involved in … Read more

ICT 2008 is a big conference and there are great many parallel sessions covering a veritable smorgisbord of technology areas. Taking a helicopter view of the proceedings gives a pretty good idea of the likely direction of travel for EU-funded ICT developments over the coming decade. I’ve collated a list of all the work packages … Read more

Will we start to see robots in our classrooms and university research labs within a decade or so? According to one of the sessions at ICT 2008 we are starting to see robotic applications move beyond their traditional use in high end automobile manufacturing (remember the Picasso car advert?). There is a push to put … Read more

I attended the British Computer Society’s Visions of Computer Science conference which took place in London, earlier this month. The idea behind the event was to provide inspiration for the future development of computer science as a discipline and, as such, offered a unique chance to feel the pulse of current computer science research agendas. … Read more