Community conference: ITaaU people, ideas and achievements

Steve Brewer

Our first community conference proved to be a great success with many attendees wanting to put a date in their diaries for the next event.

As ITaaU is an emergent network, many of the attendees had never met before while others had perhaps only exchanged emails or tweets. The tightly packed programme delivered a wealth of information on the funded pilot projects, workshops and other activities that the network has enabled. The meals and coffee breaks provided time for conversations to flourish and new partnerships and introductions to be formed.

Interdisciplinary collaboration, trustworthiness and design matters have arguably emerged as the three main themes that cut across all of the topics inherent in the idea of IT as a Utility. We will certainly return to these in future workshops. However, to capture the work to date and the discussions at the conference, a booklet is being produced that will summarise the findings of the network so far and celebrate the success of the community conference.

“It was extremely rewarding to see how the very diverse community we have been attempting to build really appreciate how much in common they have and how much they can learn from each other and other disciplines. The comment from one participant that 'this [meeting] has already changed the way I think about things' really sums up what we have achieved," said Jeremy Frey, ITaaU chief PI, of the conference.

Delivering food security from the cloud to the app - workshop

The security of information within and about the food supply chain, or more accurately, food supply network has been a key theme for ITaaU since the network's inception. The agenda-setting two-day conference in Northern Ireland last autumn initiated many sub-topics and personal introductions. This event at the University of Southampton built upon this work and welcomed new experts to the effective working group. In addition to Sian Thomas from the UK Food Standards Agency (pictured) we were very pleased to welcome Guy Poppy from Southampton who was in the process of taking up his new role as chief scientific officer for the FSA.

ITaaU co-investigator Gerard Parr from the University of Ulster brought the attendees up to date with the previous work in this area in the UK as well as the ongoing discussions with equivalent bodies in Ireland.

Apps for Healthcare - workshop

This workshop began with a fascinating and stimulating presentation from David Rew (pictured), consultant surgeon at the University Hospital of Southampton, on his ongoing work in developing a data analysis system to support surgeons like himself working in the field of breast cancer.

Paul Watson from Newcastle University presented an update of his work on apps and other systems for health and wellbeing in a socially inclusive context and also summarised benefits of bringing experts together at events like this to share best practice and explore future opportunities.

Winter in New York: WSDM talks and more

At the start of the year Steve Brewer presented a short submission co-authored with Jeremy Frey at Web Search and Data Mining 2014 in New York. The submission had been accepted for the workshop Data Design for Personalization: Current Challenges and Emerging Opportunities run by Elizabeth Churchill, who is director of human computer interaction at eBay Research Labs in San Jose, California. The keynote talk from Sri Subramaniam of Groupon, called The Frontier in Personalization: E-commerce Discovery, focused on the role of physical location in terms of understanding user preferences and the importance of unobtrusive UX to delight and surprise customers.

After the workshop participants were invited to make a tour of some top tech outposts in NYC. These included Cornell University's Chelsea base within the Google building and the buzzing Betaworks labs. The tour also included a frosty but sunny walk along the stunning High Line Park which occupies a disused overhead railway spur.

Libraries of the Future: community engagement - Aberdeen

Libraries of the Future: community engagement - Aberdeen 25-26 March, 2014

The most recent libraries of the future workshop took place at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, Aberdeen earlier in the year.

The goals of the day were to:
• Explore role of IT utilities in the context of the evolving role of
libraries.
• Capture key issues for libraries engaging with their communities.
• Articulate a route forward for investigating and developing these findings.
• Broaden the network of people with interests in this area.

In addition to the talks and discussions the attendees were also taken on a tour of the special collections department to learn about the extensive learning and outreach programme that encompasses schools, communities, volunteers and interns, exhibitions, and the wider community.

There were two key discussion points for the workshop: business models; and where does the community keep its memories? These proved to be rich and productive. Suggestions for future work included the idea of the community as the library and new methods of co-creation to enable the "community as creator and curator".

The full report is available