How cloud computing helped one university to digitise the student experience

Article by SA Mathieson, Guardian Labs, (The Connected University series paid for by Staffordshire University), 4 December 2019

Until recently, a university that wished to remind students about lectures, answer their questions around the clock and provide personalised suggestions on which societies to join would have needed a call centre of support staff working shifts. Staffordshire University is now providing all of these services and others through its app, Beacon, a digital coach for students available on mobile devices accessed through voice and text. Continue reading “How cloud computing helped one university to digitise the student experience”

Mr Robot: will androids ever be able to convince people they’re human?

Article by SA Mathieson, Guardian Labs, (The Connected University series paid for by Staffordshire University), 29 November 2019

In his quest to build robots that can pass as human, Carl Strathearn has drawn on various fields including prosthetics, materials science, computing and animatronics – the last by talking to John Coppinger, designer of the Jabba the Hutt animatronic puppet used in the 1983 Star Wars film Return of the Jedi. “He helped me out in my master’s when I was doing research in advanced animatronics and gave me plenty of inspiration in my PhD,” says Strathearn. Continue reading “Mr Robot: will androids ever be able to convince people they’re human?”

Searching for specialist search services

General search engines are an amazing free service that participants in one piece of research valued as being worth US$17,530 a year. (Not sure about that, although DuckDuckGo did help me find said piece of research in seconds.) But as I write for Computer Weekly, professionals can benefit from more-focused search services.

Several of these specialist search services are aimed at journalists. Krzana focuses on recent material, linked to geography and subject to minimise time wasted by journalists in Birmingham sifting out news from the city of the same name in Alabama. The Inject Project aims to provide related but different material, such as similar stories in another country. (More on both these services from the NUJ Freelance newsletter here.) Image library Shutterstock has launched services that let users search for images with images. Continue reading “Searching for specialist search services”

Looking for interviews on diversity of approach in software development

I’m working on an article for Computer Weekly on the benefits of diversity of approach in software development. Employers have legal obligations to avoid discrimination by gender, race, religion and other protected characteristics, but in this case I am interested in how involving people with a range of professional and personal approaches can lead to better results.

This could include people focused on anthropological research, visual design, representatives of those who will use the software or something else entirely.  I am particularly interested in specific examples where the diversity of people involved has improved the resulting software.

If you would be willing to talk about this or can help in organising an interview, please email mail [AT] samathieson.com by 5pm on Monday 28 October. Thanks in advance.

Why don’t you ditch your smartphone and do some NUJ freelance training instead?

Times theatre critic Ann Treneman recently wrote about an Edinburgh Fringe show that encouraged the audience to use a smartphone while watching, and being told by an usher that “99.99999%” of people have one.

Actually, Ofcom research says the actual figure for smartphone usage in 2018 was 78% of Britons aged 15 and over, up just two percentage points on 2017 (see page 12 of narrative Online nation report). So there are 12 million adults in the UK who don’t use smartphones, including for several years me. Continue reading “Why don’t you ditch your smartphone and do some NUJ freelance training instead?”