SciTech 2011 – Innovation UK

The SciTech 2011 conference at The Barbican conference centre in London was quite an interesting introduction to UK R&D and innovation. Especially the speakers in the morning session gave me a lot to think and learn (more) about.

Imran Khan—Director, Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK—took a look at growth opportunities for UK High Tech exports with a focus on the BRIC nations. He stressed that High Tech companies rely on PhDs and that they know it. He made the point at the end of his talk that he thinks

“the sales of airwave spectrum for 4G telephony is science and engineering money and should be spent in science and engineering”.

Catherine Coates—Business Innovation Director, The Engineering and Phyiscal Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)—presented facts and figures on how research is funded by EPSRC. She pointed out that EPSRC wants to “make the UK the most dynamic and stimulating environment for research and innovation in the world”. Some tools for that are Centres of excellence, EPSRC centres, Centres for doctoral training, and Industrial Doctorate centres (19 IDCs are currently funded). The UK, I learned, is the “most productive country in terms of citations achieved per £ invested”. EPSRC’s strategic goals: delivering impact, shaping capability, and developing leaders.

Stian Westlake—Policy and Research, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)—presented a plan for innovation. In his view measures need to put in place regarding “research funding, procurement for innovation, access to finance, education, immigration, evidence-based policy, making Europe a true single market for services”. The plan comprises only policies. It still leaves out politics. Here,

“we need to make politicians implement changes”

by showing them ways to gain something for themselves, thinking also in their time frames of four to five years. Politicians at the moment very well grasp that research and development is key to innovation, but they also need ways to implement this.

Mike Short—President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology—concluded the morning session. He focussed on mobile phones and the Internet being the drivers of innovation of the last years. He sees three waves of “mobile”: connecting people, connecting people to the Internet, connecting everything. Spot on, I’d say.

The next session comprised a set of master classes. I selected first ”Engineering global biological solutions — a knowledge transfer continuum”. Prof Nigel Titchener-Hooker and Dr Karen Smith, both University College London, reported on their knowledge transfer work in biochemical engineering. They described the impressive work of the UCL Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering, available degrees (and how the biochemical degrees are complemented by engineering courses to accomodate the needs of the biochemical engineering industry). The Centre not only focusses on education for industry needs but also provides training for senior leaders in bioprocessing industry (e.g., in 3-day courses). The Centre has a 12 strong advisory board of international caliber. A (printed) newsletter is sent out regularly to more than 5,000 subsrcibers to keep the community informed. Intership placement provide job opportunities and knowledge transfer.

One of the remarks I found notable was a clear statement on what the Centre is not doing:

“We don’t do contract research.”

Prof Titchener-Hooker described such research as short-sighted (as money would be the only outcome of it) and not REF-relevant (as typically no publications about respective research are allowed).

In the second master class, Dr Clive Edmonds—Chief Executive Officer, Scienta Group—and a colleague (forgot to note the name, sorry) gave a talk on “Innovation and Commercialisation: engines for growth”. Dr Edmonds promised right at the start that he would not tell us anything new. He kept his word, but he also reminded us about a lot of things in a very good presentation such as:

• To innovate is not only a verb but a mindset.
• “Innovation means you make money from it.”
• Innovation projects need: passion, purpose (a clear business objective), and pragmatism (dynamic approach to and drive of the project)
• typically 60% of total profit come from 14% of breakout innovation (of course, risk is much greater than with incremental development)
• Motivation + Creative Thinking + Expertise are needed for innovation. Not necessarily to be found in one person, but in a team.
• True innovation takes place on the edge of chaos.
• No success in innovation without having innovation culture!

Innovation (as well as creativity) needs the right environment to flourish in – in companies as well as in universities I might add. I wonder about Scienta Group giving a talk on innovation and growth at university. Hm …

The afternoon session was not as interesting to me than the morning one. You might find the list of “Ten thoughts that will change the world next” collected by Jheni Osman—host of the conference—of interest:

• 3d printing (Sir James Dyson)
• Quantum computers (Iain Lobban, GCHQ)
• Ubiquitous computing (Michail Bletsas, MIT)
• Mood-sensing TV (Dan Heaf, BBC)
• Biomechatronics (Lesley Gavin, BT)
• Cancer-busting beams (Steve Myers)
• Biochar[coal] (Prof Tim Flannery)
• Protocells (Rachel Armstrong)
• Anti-ageing tech (Aubrey de Grey)
• Conscious-o-meter (Prof Marcus de Sautoy)

The final talks were given by Dr Malcolm Parry—Chairman of The UK Science Park Association and MD of Surrey Research Park—on “Science Parks: Bringing a new knowledge domain to research”, followed by Andrew Miller—MP, Chair, Science and Technology Select Committee—on “The future of UK science”, and, finally, Prof Steve Caddick—Vice-Provost (Enterprise), UCL—on “University-business collaboration: driving innovation and growth”. Prof Caddick repeated some of the points already made by Prof Titchener-Hooker in his master class, albeit now on a university level. (You may want to have a look at the four grand challenges UCL identified: global health, human well-being, sustainable cities, and intercultural interactions.)

So, what do I retain from the conference:

There is quite a lot we, the University of West London, can learn from UCL. Granted, they are a much bigger university, but nevertheless. I also think we—as in we at the School of Computing and Technology – are doing quite a lot quite well already.

Second, from Scienta Group I take with me the need to have an innovation culture in place, at the level of the Centre of Model-based Software Engineering and Explanation-aware Computing, the School of Computing and Technology, and the university.

Report: 7th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modelling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2011)

After a four years hiatus the CONTEXT conference series came back to life and presented itself as professional and ambitious as ever. The Seventh International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT) took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. It brought together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines.  Thanks to Prof. Michael Beigl and his team — most notably Dr. Hedda Schmidtke — the conference turned out to be a great event. About 70 participants enjoyed the conference venue, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Most of the participants attended nearly every talk. This shows how well the conference was received and how interesting the sometimes not so easy to follow talks from different fields of one’s own research were. The conference dinner at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) was a highlight of the event.

Three invited talks marked the milestones of the main conference. On Wednesday morning, Jerry Hobbs reflected on “Discourse Interpretation in Context”. The second keynote was given by Ruth Kempson, King’s College, London, on “Ellipsis in Conversational Dialogue”. Even though the last invited talk was on the morning after the conference dinner, Paul Holleis had many listeners for his  talk on “Explicit, Generic, and Social Context”.

From the three workshops before the main conference I attended the workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context (MRC). The one and a half days workshop was a lively event that I enjoyed very much. In between the eight presentations two panel discussions and an open discussion gave lots of opportunities to look at context from different angles.

The CONTEXT community decided to start a wiki to collect information about the topic of context and the people working on it. Stay tuned. More information coming up soon.

Report: 19th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ICCBR 2011

I never would have thought that ICCBR could get better for me, but it did, thanks to great colleagues and friends.

Last year’s conference marked a turning point in my career, having been offered a visiting professor position at the University of Hildesheim just at that time which in turn led to my new position at the University of West London. This year’s ICCBR—organised by Ashwin Ram, Nirmalie Wiratunga, and Miltos Petridis at the University of Greenwich just across town—was my first conference as Professor in Computing, which felt quite nice The conference started with a Doctoral Consortium where Edwina Rissland and I had been invited by David Aha to give talks about our respective careers.  The slides of the students as well as my slides will be made available on the DC homepage.

Recurring themes at the conference were reasoning and explanation. Ashwin Ram reported on an analysis of submission topics that showed still an emphasis on work on retrieval. He encouraged the community to work more on reasoning and learning. This was very much in line with my workshop on “Human-Centered and Cognitive approaches to CBR” co-organised by Jörg Cassens, Anders Kofod-Petersen, Stewart Massie and Sutanu Chakraborti. I’d like to point out David Leake’s talk on “Assembling Latent Cases from the Web – A Challenge Problem for Cognitive CBR”. As David and I have done quite a few workshops on explanation and as the topic is central to David’s research it is no surprise that explanation played a central role. His vision of the Web as a huge case base received quite some attention.

In parallel, workshops on “Process-oriented Case-Based Reasoning (PO-CBR)” and “Case-Based Reasoning for Computer Games” were held.

The first invited talk was given by Kris Hammond: “Reasoning as search: supporting intelligence with distributed memory”. He reviewed his work on CBR and current projects, nicely underlining Ashwin Ram’s encouragement for more research on reasoning. Kris first led us from “reasoning is remembering” to “reasoning is JUST remembering”. Cause “plan modifications are just damned hard” one needs to “pull modifications out of the hands of the machine and put them in the hands of the user”. He further led us to “Reasoning is (just) remembering other people’s stuff” (from CHEF to FAQfinder), “Reasoning is search”, “Reasoning is structure”, “Reasoning is knowing”, and finally back to “reasoning is remembering”. Go to his homepage to learn more about his research.

The second invited speaker was Steffen Staab. He talked about “Ontologies and similarity”. The focus was very much on ontologies and less on similarity. I very much liked his CBR view of Linked Data where “cases are metadata without frontiers”.

All in all, ICCBR was well organised and fun to attend. Next year ICCBR will be held in Lyon, France. I am looking forward to it!

Teaching at UWL

My teaching plans for the School of Computing at UWL are becoming more concrete. I’ll be teaching the “Knowledge-based Technologies” module together with Dr. Thomas Collins. For the next term I am currently developing a module on “Case-Based Reasoning“, which can be seen as an advanced topic of knowledge-based technologies. I have also plans for courses on “Explanation-aware Computing Systems” and “Computing in Context”. I am looking forward to my future students. Feel free to ask.

Erklärungsfähige Softwaresysteme: Ein neues Software-Paradigma?

Eingeladener Vortrag an der Universität Kassel am 30. 6. 2011

Erklärungsfähigkeiten haben bereits eine gewisse Historie in wissensbasierten Systemen. Erklärung, Vertrauen und Transparenz sind dabei Themen, die eng miteinander verknüpft sind. Man vertraut einem (Software-) System mehr, wenn es erklären kann, was es tut und warum es zu einer Entscheidung gekommen ist. Es “beweist” damit seine Vertrauenswürdigkeit gegenüber dem Benutzer. Erklärungen sind ein wichtiger Bestandteil menschlicher Verstehens- und Verständigungsprozesse. Sie sollten daher inhärenter Bestandteil von (wissensbasierten) Systemen sein. Der Vortrag stellt wichtige Konzepte zur Analyse und Entwicklung von Erkärungsfähigkeiten für Softwaresysteme vor und erläutert sie anhand von Beispielanwendungen.

[From Universität Kassel: 30.06.2011]

Missing out on ExaCt 2011 fun

The workshop series on Explanation-aware Computing is my baby and I am saddened that I cannot participate in it this year due to move to the UK. To my great relief, my co-organisers Nava Tintarev and David Leake will more than make up for my absence. Have a look at the agenda to see what’s in store for all you explanation-enthusiasts out there.

Besides many interesting refereed contributions (see proceedings here) participants will discuss such topics as “What are the common properties of explanation systems? Can a high level model be devised?” and ”How do evaluation criteria relate to each other?”. At least, that’s these are our suggested topics. Maybe other topics will come up and will be covered by attendees. Another highlight will be Nava’s talk in which she is addressing the question of “What makes good explanations?”.

London calling

The University of West London (formerly Thames Valley University) offered me the position of Professor in Computing at their School of Computing and Technology, starting on 1 September 2011. Of course, I accepted

Going to London is a dream come true for my wife and me, and it’s absolutely fabulous that it is in sync with the publication of our first novel Lux Domini.

Visualising EXPONO

When preparing the EXPONO project proposal this image of Princess Leia and R2D2 came to my mind. It’s a good example of human-computer interaction where explanations—at least for the audience—are required about what the droid “talked”. Unfortunately copyright prohibits us using this for a logo.

(r2 & leia stamp; originally uploaded by bep1972)

EXPONO – Enhanced human-robot interaction through explanations and adaptation

Same, but different … This year’s first try on getting (EU-)funding. This time as an affiliate of the University of Hildesheim.

Led again by my colleague and friend Anders Kofod-Petersen from SINTEF (Norway), we submitted yesterday the project proposal “EXPONO: Enhanced human-robot interaction through explanations and adaptation”. It addresses objective “2.1 Cognitive systems and robotics” of ICT Call 7, which had quite a different emphasis than last year’s Call 6. Here’s the proposal’s short summary:

The long-term vision for service robotics is to produce autonomous systems that interact in an intelligent way with their environment, and adapt their behaviour to match the evolving expectations of their users. EXPONO will make it technically feasible and economically viable to achieve enhanced interaction and learning capabilities in service robots, through the use of explanation and adaptation techniques.

For robot users, EXPONO will lead to increased acceptance of robots in real world situations since a robot’s ability to explain its behaviour will lead to greater trust, while a user’s ability to influence and correct robot behaviors will result in more versatile robotic applications.

For service robot developers, EXPONO will provide the means to conceive, design, implement and deploy innovative service robots that can generate explanations of their decisions and perceptual processes, and optimize future behaviours.

EXPONO will achieve these goals by:

(a) providing the computational foundations for developing explanation-aware robots;

(b) producing re-usable algorithms and engineering tools that allow companies to incorporate explanation-aware technologies in their service robot development; and

(c) developing three diverse real-world applications to encourage widespread adoption.

In co-operation with robotics networks such as EURON and EUROP, the community of researchers and industrial developers interested in explanation-aware techniques will be expanded to relevant stakeholders in robotics. Potential partners will be addressed through industry workshops, summer schools, trade fair presentations and publications.

Besides SINTEF, the project partners comprise the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Aldebaran Robotics (France), Entertainment Robotics (Denmark), Fraunhofer IPA (Germany), and the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

With a little help of my friends at WordPress ;-) 2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 15 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 131 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 523kb.

The busiest day of the year was October 1st with 56 views. The most popular post that day was About TRB.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were thomas.roth-berghofer.de, facebook.com, twitter.com, Private networks, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for beautiful diagrams, future desktop, mycbr, dialog explanation, and 3d desktop.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About TRB July 2006

2

Beautiful diagrams with OmniGraffle August 2006
1 comment

3

Future desktop user interface July 2006
1 comment

4

Report: 18th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning July 2010

5

Explanation, Dialog, and Communication: Supporting the Use of Complex Information Systems December 2006