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My second talk in South Africa allowed me to reprise my forthcoming book for MIT Press on eSports - and all things digital about sport. It was a lot of fun, especially going across the breadth of subjects that come together. There are so many ways in which the future of sports are digitally constituted and this one covered some key trajectories...
My first talk at the Sports Institute of South Africa's 10th meeting on Sport & Fitness focused on the mobile health industry. I wanted to focus on the economics, in part because they are so hard to unravel. The key thing to know is that the mobile health industry is promising efficiencies, but a new era of ingestible sensors is also upon us!
Last week, I took part in an event run by the British Film Institute focused on the use of drones in film making. It brought together architect film maker Liam Young, extraordinary drone film makers The Helicopter Girls, and the amazing Seb Hagemeister who's worked with Marshmallow Laser Feast on our Project Daedalus.
The conversation was pretty far reaching and I opened the event with a video essay, taking people through the recent history of drone creativity and innovation. It felt like such a privilege to be amongst such amazing people who are at the cutting edge of film production.
My video essay is being held for live presentation only, so I'm not posting it online. However, you can find out more about my drones in a piece I wrote for the Conversation.
This week, I was down at the Royal College of Art again to give a talk for the Jewellery and Metals Department. Their brief was to imagine how we deal with a future where our survival is under threat...
This week, i gave a talk with colleagues at Salford University, focusing on how we want to build collaboration with industry partners and work towards more co-creation of research. Here's the presentation.
This week, I was in Seoul for the 7th eSport World Championships. Recently, I have begun working with the International eSport Federation and they ran their 1st eSport summit during the champs. It was a great chance to air some ideas I have about the field, many of which are in a book I have coming out next year with MIT Press. Here's what happened.
This week, I took part in a panel discussion about the future of hospitals, following this brief:
The Government is committed to a vision for hospital services structured around the needs of patients, both now and in the future. Delegates will explore the need for changes to how we organise and deliver hospital care and treatment that is safe, effective and meets the needs of patients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As the constraints on NHS spending continue, coupled with patient’s expectations of safer and higher-quality health care, the need to provide health services differently has never been more crucial.
Under intensifying pressure to change, hospitals are adapting their organisation and services to cope with cuts to financial resources. Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive, has made facing financial challenges a priority. He has also emphasised how frontline staff will be vital to create change and generate innovation to deliver services differently.
A core part of the vision laid out by Simon Stevens in the NHS five year forward view involves hospitals becoming more closely integrated with other forms of care. If the health and social care system is to respond to the changing needs of the population, and also address the financial challenges it faces, all hospitals will need to play a fundamentally different role within local health economies.
Hospitals across the UK and around the world face significant challenges as a result of demographic change, rising demand and a staffing challenges. The changing needs of the population make it increasingly important that hospitals are able to provide high-quality care for people with multiple chronic conditions and complex needs, including but not limited to the growing numbers of frail older people. To respond effectively to these changing needs, health and social care services must be capable of providing ongoing support over time, anticipating and preventing deterioration and exacerbations of existing conditions, and supporting a person’s multiple needs in a well-co-ordinated way.
With all this in mind, hospitals will need to develop new ways of working that span traditional service and organisational boundaries – including working more closely with other hospitals (for example, through alliances and partnerships), and strengthening connections with community-based services such as primary care, social care, community services and mental health. This points towards hospitals playing a more outward-facing role in their local health system, in which they shift
from an organisational focus to a system leadership role, and play a more active part in preventing illness and promoting health in local communities.
What the future hospital will look like and what its central role will be will emerge out of the remnants of a system currently not fit for purpose. The Future of Hospitals Conference will address all the key issues and ask the main question, namely, what will the future hospital look like and how will it operate on a day to day basis
Salford University's Creative Entrepreneur event has become a huge success, with over 400 delegates registered over 1 day. I took part in a panel this year focused on Sport Business 2.0, at which I spoke about the game development community around sports and the growing mobile health market.
Another big delivery for me within the Manchester Science Festival was the Drone Expo at the Museum of Science and Industry, which took place over the opening weekend of the festival. It was produced in association with my Josh Award for Science Communication and we created a large flying space at MOSI with professional pilots and STEM volunteers to show the public what's happening with this amazing techology.
My slides from the 7th International Olympic Committee Athletes' Forum, which focused on the use of media to empower and enable people. Also, here is the programme from the event.
My first contribution to the Manchester Science Festival is this amazing screening of Back to the Future 2, a trilogy that was certainly defining of my teenage years. I'm so excited to have been able to produce this with #MSF15 and that Gorilla in Manchester is screening. Here is my presentation from the night.
As part of the Digital R&D for the Arts funding stream overseen by Nesta, they put together a programme of presentations as a final showcase. I was asked by their new Director for Digital, Tim Plyming, to make a contribution to the final session of the day, looking at future directions. It was a really fun panel with Freya Murray, Director, Stamp House; Anthony Lilley OBE, Interim CEO and Creative Director, The Space and CEO, Magic Lantern Productions; David Watson, Head of Digital, Hull UK City of Culture 2017.
As part of my involvement with the amazing 2020 Health project, I was asked to take part in a Conservative Party fringe event, exmaining how digital technologies can transform the health care system. It was a pretty far reaching discussion and my central concern was around data ownership, mobility, and expansion. More to come on that.
Chaired by: Dame Helena Shovelton DBE, Chair, 2020health
With guest speakers:
Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair, Science & Technology Select Committee (Invited)
Paul Burstow, Independent Health Consultant
Dr David Lee, Medical Director, Computer Sciences Corporation
Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
Talk today for Salford University CPD conference.
AND festival went to Grizedale forest this year, a return after 5 years. We delivered a number of drone activities over the weekend, including a networking event for drone enthusiasts and some flying experiences for beginners and experts. We were incredibly lucky with the weather and had some great people come along and learn.
This week, I was privileged to speak at the University of Salford's London meet up. It was a unique event for me and incredibly humbling to see and speak to so many remarkable people who have come through the university, including a Lord who was involved with writing the House of Lords report on drones - the subject of my talk! It was a great way to conclude an extraordinary first academic year at the university.
University of Salford 087e1
This week, I took part in a Battle of Ideas debate at the UK Space Conference in Liverpool exploring the Internet of Things and its transformative potential. It was a pretty far reaching debate, but my main argument focused on the need to step back and imagine a world where the IoT is not imagined as something in the service of humanity, but something which may serve a wider notion of ecosystem well being. This doesn't mean ignoring the desires and needs of humans, but instead trying to come to terms with what might be afforded by this technology if we adopted a wider perspective. I went on to advocate the need to think about an 'Interstellarnet of Things', which takes us beyond the confines of our planet in imagining the potential of this technology, along with the importance of thinking about some of the consequences of artificial general intelligence and the possibility that objects becoming sentient. In this regard, the idea of an Internet of Things at all misses the point - they will not be things, but beings, entities which may have a certain moral status by virtue of its capacity for volition or self-actualization.
Finally, I talked about the importance of the open data initiative and the need to overhaul some of the conventions operating around digital platforms which restrict our freedom to roam by precluding us from exporting our data into some universal language.
2015.07-UKSpaceConf
My first #SciFoo (Science Friends Of O'Reilly Media) event just came to a close and it was a marathon of crazy conversations with people doing remarkable things in science, art, and technology. Some of my highlights were a conversation with a paleontologist about using a probablistic approach to explaining why mammoths became extinct, chatting with the Pope's astronomer, and running two sessions in the programme, one on Drones, the other on Google Glass. Here's a glimpse from start to finish...
#Scifoo about to kick off here at @google in Mountain view! Excited! @makingscience@TechMoonshotspic.twitter.com/qKxLcHRQ3N
— Georgia Dienst (@georgiadienst) June 26, 2015
at the Google holodeck for #scifoopic.twitter.com/MgieukSU1s — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
googling #scifoo (@ Googleplex - @google in Mountain View, CA) https://t.co/drwfXkOuh5pic.twitter.com/HJIU981h4g
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
Google's driverless car shown at #scifoopic.twitter.com/fpqzbxNgJ6 — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
check out this 360 filming @GoPro rig at Googleplex #scifoopic.twitter.com/YXzpm4aRfU
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
Google glass session. main room at tent, in 5. #scifoopic.twitter.com/xIzzHk1kBY — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
Video essay, from my talk at #YorkFoi York's Festival of Ideas.
This week, I took part in a panel at the Cheltenham Science Festival focused on the use of drones in every day life. I talked a lot about Project Daedalus and some new innovations, particularly high authority autonomous systems - essentially completely intelligent drones - while Gerry Corbert from the Civil Aviation Authority gave a run down of the rules and regulations surrounding application. He was quick to point out that the guidelines that surround UAVs were never designed for the very small UAVs which can now be picked up in toy stores or even the Apple store, but there were some key issues that seem unresolved. One of them relates to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkZ4FONiiw
This example of a form of augmented reality glasses being used to give FPV perspective of the drone's camera is provocative because the CAA guidelines stipulate that flying with FPV goggles is actually not legal, since the pilot must always have visual line of sight (VLOS). However, these glasses offer transparency which permits VLOS, while locating the drone's camera feed within the glasses as well. So the question is, 'is this legal?'
This seems one of the future directions around the use of augmented reality devices with drones, making even more complicated the way in which the rules operate.
