The 31st edition of the European Conference on Information Retrieval was held in Toulouse, France from the 7th to the 9th of April. This year confirmed ECIR as one of the major conferences in the IR field. The organisers were thrilled about the high number of participants coming not only from European countries but also…
70 Oakgrove School students have been out and about this spring, exploring environmental conditions in Northampton and Milton Keynes, with the support of the Personal Inquiry project (PI). As a major component of their GCSE coursework, counting towards their exam results, the Year 10 students walked across the two towns with their teachers and OU…
This year’s SCDI forum was held at St Andrews and was concerned with the theme of ‘connecting Scotland’ KMi were asked to develop a workstream for the annual gathering of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry on the theme of e-learning and e-working. Alan Fletcher presented key KMi technologies and research themes, demonstrating the…
In a visit to the Multimedia Interaction Group at the University of Delft in the Netherlands recently, Al Selvin presented his research work to the team there. Al was invited to talk to the MMI group about his work on "Coherence, Engagement, and Usefulness as Sensemaking Criteria in Participatory Media Practice". When skilled practitioners create…
An Enabling Remote Activity (ERA) presentation at mLearn 2008 has lead to JANET to issue a call to develop extreme portable WLAN projects. The presentation at mLearn impressed Mark O’Leary of JANET enough for him to set up a call for projects to investigate ‘networking at the edge’. ERA, along with four other academic teams…
KMi’s new 7th Framework project ROLE kicked off its work in a meeting on 2 – 3 March 2009, in Lausanne, Switzerland. ROLE is a project on Responsive Open Learning Environments and is intended to connect well with established OU work on OpenLearn, current work such as iCoper, and then to new initiatives such as…
Robbie Bays is attending this year’s "VMworld Europe" conference in Cannes. VMworld, organized by VMware, primary purpose is to share and discuss their advances in virtualization with thousands of industry professionals and experts. KMi runs many virtual servers within our SAN environment, and VMware’s latest developments promises to bring huge benefits to our infrastructure. This…
The Hyderabad International Convention Centre, India saw the annual meeting of the Executive Heads of Commonweath Universities this week. KMi Director Peter Scott gave an invited talk on "New Channel Thinking: YouTube, iTunes and the live and online world". The Association of Commonwealth Universities, chaired this year by UKOU VC Brenda Gourley arrange a conference…
Prof Enrico Motta flew to China for the weekend to deliver a keynote address at the 2008 Chinese Semantic Web Symposium. The event was organised by the members of the Apex Lab at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and was chaired by Professor Yong Yu. The chinese Semantic Web research community is currently one of…
The Open University and KMi are to host the 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in March 2010. This annual conference has previously been held in London (2006), Rome (2007), Glasgow (2008) and Toulouse (2009) and is considered the main European forum for presenting research in the field of Information Retrieval. As such, approximately…
