1. Postdoc in Mobile HCI: the postdoc will conduct research on mobile user interfaces for public transport systems, with a particular focus on proactive services that predict user movement and information needs. Applicants should have a strong background in experimental HCI. The postdoc will apply human-centered design methods to create engaging mobile user experiences, and use empirical research methods to conduct user studies and field trials. The official ad for this post is here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEL512/research-associate-in-mobile-human-computer-interaction/
2. Postdoc in Context and Behavior Prediction: the postdoc will conduct research in algorithms and systems for context and behaviour prediction. Applicants should have a solid background in experimental systems research with a focus on algorithms. The postdoc will develop and evaluate location and behaviour prediction algorithms, and build system infrastructures for collection and processing of movement and behaviour data. The official ad for this post is here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEL513/research-associate-in-context-and-behaviour-prediction/

Both postdocs will be expected to develop proposals for own or joint research and to contribute to writing bids for research funding. The posts are available in the EU-funded GAMBAS project. The main objective of GAMBAS is to develop fundamental technologies for context-aware, behaviour-driven services for innovative public transportation applications.

Application deadline is 7 June 2012. Salary is as usual for postdoc in the UK, in the £30,122 - £31,948 range. Both posts are available immediately, until 31 January 2015.

If you are interested contact me at g.kortuem@open.ac.uk.

To apply go to http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=6256

For detailed information, an electronic copy of an application form and how to apply go to http://www.open.ac.uk/employment, or call the Staffing Assistant on +44 (0)1908 654161 or email mct-staffing@open.ac.uk.

The network grant, made possible by the EPSRC Digital Economy Program and managed by Catherine Mulligan, is designed to bring together the best and brightest in the UK and across the world to help solve some of the world’s toughest sustainability problems – from reducing environmental impact to creating jobs, reducing poverty and developing new industries.  Specifically, this network aims to create connections between those who have not discussed with one another previously and also to help define the policy and research grand challenges in this area. 

The Network+ (who came up with the + suffix?) is not only for academics, but also includes industry and third sector organisations that help define the research agenda.

Read more aboyt the network at the community blog. 

A recent study of consumer innovation in the UK by von Hippel et al [1] indicates that consumer or user-led innovation dwarfs traditional company-driven innovation in that consumers spend twice as much as companies in their own product development and adaptation efforts. Similarly, Bergman et al [2] suggest that bottom-up, social innovation - defined as behaviour and lifestyle changes, energy saving through new forms of business and governance, and users employing new technical solutions - is a powerful yet under-utilised tool for addressing climate change. 

Catalyst ("Citizens Transforming Society: Tools for Change") is a £1.9M project funded by the EPSRC which brings together academics from social science, computing, design and management science to carry out research on the theme of citizen-led social innovation. Catalyst explores how citizens can use a bottom-up process to create community-driven solutions to major societal problems such as climate change, environmental degradation and energy poverty. (I am one of the co-investigators of Catalyst.)

Change-hungry citizens have turned to mobile digital communications during key world events from the London riots and the subsequent ‘clean up the streets’ campaign to the so called ‘Twitter revolutions’ in Tunisia and Egypt. But do social networking technologies really make it easier for communities to change the world? Or do they merely promote weak links between people rather than the strong links that are needed for real social revolution? And how should we design future digital technologies – technologies with built in grassroots democracy?

Catalyst uses an unique bottom-up community-driven research methodology to investigate citizen-led innovation. Rather than letting academic researchers alone drive the research agenda, Catalyst is using a Launchpad mechanisms to engage in collaborative research with communities. Launchpads are community-led activities aimed at helping community groups find out how the sorts of problems they are facing might be helped through digital technology.

There are currently two Launched projects in Catalyst: 

As a community group or community member, you have a unique opportunity to drive the research. Catalyst is actively looking for community groups to collaborate on problems that could be developed into a Catalyst sub-project. The idea does not need to be fully formed; we are looking for a committed group of people, a context of genuine citizen engagement, a problem or challenge which can be clearly identified, in short a setting where Catalyst can make a positive and useful contribution. For more details see http://www.catalystproject.org.uk/content/participate. 

On his web site he states: 

"One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career."

"Now that I have seen the true power of education, there is no turning back. It's like a drug. I've just peeked through a window into an entire new world, and I am determined to help bring education to everyone out there." 

Incidentally, one of the first courses offered by Udacity uses exactly the approach I have long been pushing at the Universities I have worked, teaching computer science and software development holistically and building courses around ambitious real world challenges: 

Udacity's CS 101 course is described as follows:

"CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE: Learn programming in seven weeks. We'll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!"  

"Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. [...] And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based."

 (P.S. Thrun remains a non-tenured research professor at Stanford and appears to keep his job at Google)

This from Joel Spolsky's blog: 

"New York City gets a Software Engineering High School
by Joel Spolsky
Friday, January 13, 2012
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money."

More here. See also Fred Wilson's blog. 

Finally, as suggested by Fred Wilson check out Mayor Bloomberg's State of The City Address.

"On January 12, Mayor Bloomberg delivered the 2012 State of the City Address at the Morris High School Campus in the Bronx. In 2012, New York City will lead the way by pushing progress in city schools to the next level, making the economy a global capital of innovation, and making the government the most innovative of any in the world:

• Citywide economic growth will be facilitated by expanding industries, creating jobs, connecting New Yorkers to job opportunities, and increasing the minimum wage.
• Innovative solutions to government will be implemented across all city agencies in order to streamline operations and better serve New Yorkers."
• New York City will improve schools by attracting, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers with programs that include loan forgiveness, increased salaries, and new methods for teacher evaluation. Successful charter systems will be expanded, students will be better prepared for college and careers, and the City will help students claim federal financial aid for college.

Here is a short excerpt from the course description:

"The Software Entrepreneurship course focuses on the intersection of software and business, and investigates the theory and practice of creating and growing successful software firms. The class combines topics from innovation, entrepreneurship, business planning, finance, business management, design, software technology and engineering to provide students with a holistic understanding of software business in general and the software start-up process in particular.

The course is designed for students interested in understanding and practicing innovation in the fast-changing software landscape. Lessons from this course will not only be valuable to budding software entrepreneurs but to everyone who wants to understand and influence how software transforms business and society. The course will in equal parts explore business and technology aspects of software - this is in realisation that successful software firms are often characterized by a close alignment of technology and business innovation."

The Oxford Software Entrepreneurship course is based on previous courses that Jyoti and I have taught independently at various occasions, but this is the first time that we will be teaching a course together. 

Course details are not yet available online so please contact me if you want to know more.

"The overall objective of the GAMBAS project is the development of an innovative and adaptive middleware to enable the privacy-preserving and automated utilization of behavior-driven services that adapt autonomously to the context of users. "

"Michael Gove admits schools should teach computer science."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/06/michael-gove-computer-science

"On Monday 28 November UKIE announced the launch of the Next Gen Skills campaign to call for fundamental changes to the education system to drive hi-tech growth."

http://ukie.info/content/next-gen-skills-campaign-launched

"New Gen Skills is a major new campaign formed from an alliance between the biggest names from the UK digital, creative and hi-tech industries and the UK’s leading skills and educational bodies to improve the computer programming skills needed for the future growth of the UK’s economy."

http://www.nextgenskills.com/

"This landmark report sets out how the UK can be transformed into the world’s leading talent hub for video games and visual effects."

http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/assets/features/next_gen

What is ACI? A quote from the abstract:

"Although we have involved animals in machine and computer interactions for a long time, their perspective has seldom driven the design of interactive technology meant for them and animal-computer interaction is yet to enter mainstream user-computer interaction research. This lack of animal perspective can have negative effects on animal users and on the purposes for which animal technology is developed. Not only could an Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) agenda mitigate those effects, it could also yield multiple benefits, by enhancing our inter-species relationships with the animals we live or work with, leading to further insights into animal cognition, rendering conservation efforts more effective, improving the economical and ethical sustainability of food production, expanding the horizon of user-computer interaction research altogether and benefiting different groups of human users too." Advances in both our understanding of animal cognition and computing technology make the development of ACI as a discipline both possible and timely, while pressing environmental, economic and cultural changes make it desirable. But what exactly is ACI about and how could we develop such a discipline? This Manifesto describes the scientific aims, methodological approach and ethical principles of ACI and proposes a research agenda for its systematic development."

Check it out and let me know what you think about ACI.

Mancini, Clara (2011). Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI): a manifesto. Interactions, 18(4), available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/28857/

"Helsinki Design Lab helps government see the 'architecture of problems.' We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solution..."