Dr Laura James's writings

Another Ada Lovelace Day, another blog post (see 2010 , 2009 ). This year, I'm going with a topical woman in technology from the lovely DevChix community. I'm not sure if she'd want to be named; but she stood up and asked for an apology after a male speaker made a sexist joke at a major tech conference (JavaOne) recently . She also made sure the organisers heard about it, and they apologised and will follow up with the speaker's company.  But in some quarters she's been criticised for making men in the audience uncomfortable - but she's still an inspiration. It's depressing that these things are still happening (and that the joke reportedly got a good laugh). But raising awareness helps others understand that such incidents are offputting to women in technology The lovely ladies at GeekFeminism provide great resources - they too should be celebrated today.

This week I've been settling into my new role as Head of Knowledge at True Knowledge .  It's very exciting to be joining such an awesome management team , and a company full of incredibly smart and capable people.  The best way to describe what we're doing is probably to quote our website : True Knowledge is building the first internet-scale platform for answering the world’s questions. Our goal is to power a new kind of search experience where users can access the world’s knowledge simply by asking for the information they need in a way that is completely natural to them; just as if they were talking to another human being. Instead of a list of links that may or may not be relevant to the query, the user experience is an immediate, perfect response, giving them exactly the information they are after. Our unique semantic technology has been many years in development. It understands user questions, represents knowledge in a way that the system can understand and p...

One of the new things I'll be working on in 2011 is Makespace . Makespace will be a physical space in Cambridge, where people can come together to design, build or fix almost anything, and the community of those who share the space and help and train each other. Ultimately, it will be a place in the city containing many things: A FabLab including a 2D laser cutter, 3D printer, CNC router, soldering stations, etc A meeting and training area Flexible access control and facilities The surroundings to meet, work, build, socialise and do amazing things As a community resource, we hope to bring together a network of enthusiasts and innovators, the prototyping industry, consultants, businesses and educational communities in a mutually beneficial way. Makespace should support people from all across the East of England, using Cambridge as the initial hub.  We won't be the first FabLab in the UK - that honour went to Manchester - but with any luck we'll be the second. ...

I went to my first Rewired State event last weekend; this time the theme was carbon and energy. It was a great weekend, with lots of ideas and a great range of projects at the end (which I'll blog later). Thanks to all the people and organisations who made it happen! I'd vaguely hoped there might be more electronics hackery there; but that would really require equipment and maybe a different kind of space ( Makespace , anyone?). There's also a question as to how much of a hardware hack event would need to be devoted to training, rather than doing. I had a lovely chat with Georgina from Tinker.it and perhaps we'll be able to do something more in this vein down the line... During the introductions, where we learnt about useful datasets and tools, I wondered whether we had quite the right blend of people in the room. Everyone seemed to have data, and be asking for others to help out with visualisations and other efforts to engage a broader audience, but there were...

I'm imagining a new job. We could call it the Personal Data Assistant, or "PDA".  For most people, their PDA would be a part time role, perhaps just needing a couple of hours a week. This would be a highly trusted role, just like a PA, but with a different set of specialist skills. The Personal Data Assistant would do all the tedious tasks which one ought to do around personal data - creating it, sharing it, securing it, archiving it, curating it. Sure, there are tools for some of these tasks, but none of them operate without manual intervention, and these tasks tend to be either tedious work which we avoid doing at all, or tricky things which could more quickly and effectively done by an expert. So, what would my PDA do?  He would archive and preserve my old emails and files, which I don't usually do very well. I, like Bill Thompson with his Zip disks , have old files on old disks which are running a serious risk of becoming unopenable and unpreservable; I think...

Overheard yesterday at Science Online - In the 1990s, one would say “sorry, your email didn’t reach me.” In the 2000s, one said “your email must have been eaten by my spam filter.” Now, one will say “alas, your email didn’t make it into my Gmail Priority Inbox!” A weak joke, but an interesting idea - do unreliable systems fulfil some social need? Hilary Mason is thinking along similar lines : How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional tec...

It's been a while since I posted my list of Android apps . Since then, I've moved to an HTC Desire, and a similar-but-different set of apps, arrayed differently across my increased number of screens, and folders. The recent upgrade to Froyo has been valuable in that I can now move apps to storage on my SD card, as the phone's internal memory has been getting short... So, here's the epic list, which might help you if you're wondering what apps to install or buy, but is mostly for my own reference... I've ignored the built-in apps, in the main, and I have probably missed a couple of widget-only apps (I know I have a blue thing which lets me toggle silent/vibrate/ringer - no idea what it is called though!  First off: alphabetical list, or go straight to the same apps listed by category . Say No to 0870.  Because no one likes paying premium rates for calls if they don't have to.  Abduction! and Abduction World Attack -  two superb games Action Potat...

Another year , another Hide&Seek weekender !  But this year was different, because Michael and I were organising a game , as well as playing. Time*Trails was our first outing for Michael's new creation, PlaceWhisper (a DigitalFlapjack production - more info here ), a mobile location-based app, which lets you leave and collect messages attached to specific places; like geocaching , only without the tupperware. Time*Trails uses an iPhone app to let users explore the South Bank area as it was in the 20th century, particularly during the Festival of Britain in 1951 - with the support of some terrific period maps. We had over 50 "whispers" with facts about South Bank history, so that players could learn about the places they visited as they would have been in the past. Also, we had three story trails, which let you follow in the footsteps of three people in 1951 as they explored the festival.  It was wonderful to get it out in the open at last, to see so many exci...

Another Tuesday, another Arcadia Seminar! This week we heard from Lilian Edwards , Professor of Internet Law at Sheffield, on Death 2.0: What Becomes of Digital Assets after Death.  I won't attempt to summarise - there is a great precis from Daithí Mac Síthigh here . Professor Edwards went beyond questions of how to provide your heirs with the ability to access your encrypted data (usefully discussed by Cory Doctorow here ) and into the tricky area of digital assets and reputation. The talk covered questions of archiving and access (for the public good and for financial gain, as well as for sentimental reasons), issues of privacy, and of course the tricky legal situation, where the third party of an internet platform probably has some control. Terms and conditions of web services vary in the ways they handle the death of a user  - if they do at all - as well as the jurisdictions where they might operate. Facebook, for all the fuss around privacy and control of data, is o...

This week, the Playmakers film launched on the web. It's a combination of the story of the design and evolution of the Playmakers game, as coaxed into existence by Alex Fleetwood and Holly Gramazio from Hide&Seek , and a compelling overview of what pervasive gaming is all about. The film includes wonderful people such as Howard Rheingold and Michael Wesch , and brings in elements of theatre, public spaces, playfulness in everyday life and specific games, as well as the edginess where pervasive gaming tilts towards street protest. There's also a little discussion of conventional computer games, compared with "no technology" games and technology-assisted pervasive gaming. The documentary is worth watching, whether you are already interested in gaming, or interested in learning more about an exciting emerging field. Playmakers from thinkpublic on Vimeo . All this leads up to the final launch of Playmakers the game, which Michael and I were lucky...

We cooked lunch on my lovely new Rondue, which is rather like the hot rock cooking we first enjoyed in a restaurant in Wales. Thanks to Michael for the Rondue, and my parents for the new camera which took the picture!

It's Ada Lovelace day today, and just like last year , I am pondering whom to blog about. On the CARET blog , today we've featured our wonderful technical women, and I'm proud that without any positive discrimination our small department has managed to hire so many. If you've been wondering why we celebrate Ada Lovelace, there is history on the Finding Ada site. But in recent weeks I have been reading the wonderful stories of Sydney Padua , who is crafting splendid comics from the real history of Lovelace and Babbage, and giving them exciting lives in a parallel universe where they succeeded in realising their early potential. Their true histories shine through, though, in scholarly footnotes, from Babbage's real anecdote about cheese to economic commentary . So, which woman working with technology will I blog about this Ada Lovelace day? I shall go off the beaten track, here, and nominate my mother . (Hi Mum!) Mum is not only on FaceBook, twittering ...

Yesterday was my friend Robert Priddey's funeral. He was only 34, and his sudden death in hospital was a huge shock. Funeral services are always hard, and for someone who has died with so much unrealised potential even more so. Robert's family had done an incredible job during the worst of times to pull together a lovely service, punctuated with Robert's own poetry and music compositions, as well as moving tributes. It was particularly special to hear more of his music, including the startlingly beautiful Tinnitus Siderium, the pianola track produced by converting the layout of stars of the night sky directly into a score, and the only composition of his I had heard before. There were many periods of silence, as even when filtering in and out of the crematorium, it seemed like the crowd had no words to fill the gaps. And it was a crowd - every seat was taken - and rightfully so, as even a hall packed with weeping women could not have done justice to Robert's wonderful ...

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Last autumn, I made several rash promises to friends who were considering buying an Android phone, that I would at some point blog the list of applications I had on my HTC (slogan: "quietly brilliant") Magic, and what they were good for. I procrastinated sufficiently that this eventually became a Christmas holiday task, and then my phone decided on Christmas Day that it no longer wished to turn on, causing me to spend nearly 3 weeks without it, and also necessitating a complete reinstall of all my apps. Luckily, my phone did have a rough idea of things I had downloaded before (thank goodness) so reinstalling was not as painful as I had anticipated. Nonetheless, I am now writing that blog post... If you are not interested in Android, you should stop reading here, as it is about to get boring. The HTC Magic has three "home screens", where shortcuts and so on live. On one, I have useful things I often need (email, calendar, weather, RSS feeds). On the main first sc...

At Playful09 on Friday, Kareem Ettouney, Art Director at Media Molecule, spoke eloquently on the challenges of leading creative teams - and becoming a servant, rather than the head honcho. The difference between a small team who know each other well and where you can each do everything, and a larger team, where you are hiring in new specialist talent, is huge. Kareem emphasised that people will always moan about their work; and when you become the person in charge, or start a new business, you intend to create an environment where people don't feel the need to gripe. But that is an impossible dream; and when you become a leader, you see the big picture in a way you didn't before, and you see how the apparently easy changes which would improve things often aren't as simple as they initially appeared. All you can do is minimise those moans, and hope to get great designs out of the world class people you've hired (more than the 2% Kareem quoted as a common level of output...

Friday was Playful09 , a day of talks about play, games and related subjects. The tagline was "a day of cross disciplinary frolicking" which sounded fun, whilst leaving me without much idea of what to expect. It turned out to be around 16 talks, of the "no audience questions" format which allows good content to be packed in, in the relaxing setting of Conway Hall . The audience was almost all white, mostly 25-40 I would say, and at least 2/3 male, which was a worse proportion than I might have anticipated, for an event with a strong design/art/play theme. There were 4 female speakers out of 17. And there were balloons. Kareem Ettouney spoke about leading creative teams, and I have blogged this separately - it was one of the best talks of the day. Roo Reynolds spoke about the difficulty of converting games into films - and the comparative ease of the opposite path. It's all about storylines, and one's ability to dream about playing another character: to put ...

Definitely not drowning, in fact, as the number of my friends on Google Wave is still exceptionally small. The invitations seem to take many days to get through... The original fuss about Wave was around the merging of email and instant messaging. Personally, now I'm actually using it a little, all this seems to give me is a confusing, messy interface. The key elements I think may make this a really interesting system are open federation - the ability to run your own server and keep your data out of the Google monolith - and bots, which are already appearing, and offer a wide range of functions. A recent workshop with senior academics at the University highlighted email administration as a key challenge, with a "virtual PA" being the ultimate technology advance sought ("as smart as someone with a PhD in my field"), and I can imagine Wave, with a range of quality bots to deliver filtering, automatic responses and so on, delivering part of this quite soon. In th...

On Thursday I took advantage of one of the perks of working for the University of Cambridge : a free place at one of the regular Horizon conferences. This one was about Energy and Environment, and provided a nice overview of some of the issues, whilst of course beautifully showcasing the best academics in the field. Professor Dame Ann Dowling kicked things off, as newly appointed head of the Department of Engineering . She presented the work of the Energy Efficient Cities programme, taking a holistic look at the connected areas of buildings, transport and energy. In cities, it's all about tradeoffs (even just in the engineering space - once you pull in the socio-economic factors too, it's worse again). Low density buildings mean you can use natural convection, vegetation for shade, distributed power and so on; but they may increase the demand for heating and transport. There is a need to consider local air quality, as well as climate change effects, and the layouts and green s...