KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at the event organised by UNESCO: Unlocking Knowledge: OER DC Webinar for Open Education Week – Exploring the Future of Education with AI and Blockchain. This annual event serves as a platform for global collaboration and learning in the field of Open Education. The aim of the 2024 event has been to...

Milton Keynes City Council and The Open University are collaborating once again on the MK:Smart initiative, aiming to strengthen Milton Keynes’ position as a leading smart city globally. Led by the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute , MK:Smart involved over 20 organizations, focusing on technology trials to enhance city living standards, particularly in sustainable transport,...

[The following post has been authored by Prof.John Domingue and published at The Open University blog.] Ahead of interactive public events in Scotland exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI), Open University (OU) Professor of Computer Science John Domingue shares the latest developments in AI at the OU and beyond.  Within the past decade or so Artificial Intelligence has come to the...

KMi’s excellence in research and innovation would not be possible without the extraordinary women working and studying here. We invited the women of KMi to be featured in this update of our annual commemorative poster.   The theme of International Women’s Day this year is “Inspire Inclusion”. Inclusivity is a guiding principle in everything we do,...

This summer the 19th annual Open Repositories Conference will take place from June 3rd to 6th at the Clarion Post Hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over 300 submissions were received this year and the CORE team will be in attendance, presenting several areas of the work we have been undertaking over the last few months.  We will be introducing our work as coordinators for the SoFAIR (Making...

The AI UK 2024 Fringe event aims to explore the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd), drawing inspiration from Bloom's 1984 paper on personalized teaching. The event focuses on using AI to overcome socioeconomic barriers and provide personalized education on a large scale, aligning with the ethos of equality. The in-person workshop, scheduled from 10 am to 4...

The GATEKEEPER is one of four EU flagship projects tasked to develop the European Health Data Space, taking on the challenge of developing AI for prevention and chronic conditions. On the 23rd of February, GATEKEEPER had its successful end-of-project review for the exceptional quality of our work and the project's achievements.   The feedback from the reviewers was as...

The "AI for the Research Ecosystem" (AI4RE) workshop highlights the rapid evolution of AI and its significant impact on the entire research process. Technologies like deep learning and large language models are poised to transform various stages of research, including study design, literature reviews, code design, data collection and analysis, dissemination, peer review, and research...

In his inaugural lecture on February 13, 2024, Prof. Advaith Siddharthan, addressed the consequences of contemporary culture's detachment from nature. He proposed the use of citizen science methodologies as a means to address this issue. Prof Siddharthan also advocated for incorporating outdoor field studies into science education to actively involve students in practical scientific...

The OU has been highly commended at the Higher Education Strategic Planners Association (HESPA) Awards for its innovative use of data to enhance student success. The institution's pioneering project, the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), popularly known as OU Analyse (OUA), was recognised for its transformative impact on student outcomes in remote learning environments. With...

The Open University proudly announces its success in the highly competitive AI Fairness Innovation Challenge delivered by the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Innovate UK. Out of 75 submissions nationwide, only four were selected for funding, with The Open University emerging as one of the coveted winners. This achievement underscores our institution's...

On January 26th, John Domingue presented the most recent OU Experiments on Generative AI at Bett UK - the largest EdTech exhibition event in the world. This year Bett UK attracted over 30,000 attendees from the global education community to the ExCel in London to see the latest innovations in the education space. John showcased two of the latest OU technologies on Generative AI, the “AI...

  Professor Petr Knoth, founder and team lead for CORE was recently invited to participate in a workshop entitled ‘Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework with open technologies’ hosted by UNESCO at their Paris headquarters.  With many public and funder policies now mandating Open Access deposit of funded research, the need for tracking and measuring the impact...

KMi’s OU Analyse, also known as the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), is widely used at the OU to enhance student retention and has been highlighted as part of the inaugural issue of Academic Quality & Standards.  In this issue, Janet Hunter, a senior lecturer at the OU, described how she utilised the EAID to pinpoint students showing lower engagement with the module. At...

On Friday 26th, doctoral students Paula Reyero-Lobo and Angel Pavon-Perez participated at the Alan Turing PhD networking event. The overarching initiative aims to create a more interconnected network of doctoral students across various organizations, improve student skills by supplementing PhD program activities, and offer opportunities for greater awareness and connection to real-world...

Following the signing of a new contract, which extends the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature (SN) to December 2025, KMi researchers Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne and Angelo Salatino spent two days at the SN campus in London. The purpose of the workshop was to gather all the relevant stakeholders from the various SN scientific sectors around the world to touch base on the state of...

The Mark - Milton Keynes 5G project kickstarted in November 2023 and will end in March 2025. The project's primary objective is to create and showcase cutting-edge 5G neutral infrastructure tailored for high-density urban environments. The infrastructure's practical application will be demonstrated at the MK Stadium, incorporating innovative technologies like autonomous shuttles and...

In an article for Government Business magazine, Prof. Harith Alani discusses the dual potential of AI, emphasising its ability to be both beneficial and detrimental. He underscores AI's significance as a tool for analysing misinformation, experimenting with preventive measures, and mitigating its effects. Utilising historical data, AI can effectively identify misinformation by recognising...

Professor Peter Scott has been appointed as the new President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), starting on January 8, 2024, following an extensive global search.  With a distinguished 40-year career in open and distance learning, Professor Scott aims to continue COL's mission of providing quality education globally. The announcement acknowledges the significant...

On December 4, Kitty Chisholm gave a 3-minute talk, titled "Can Belief in Brain Plasticity Really Enhance One's Career?", which was based on her work towards a PhD. Her presentation was an introduction to her dissertation which looks at the power of growth mindset interventions over a longer period of time.  The intervention is delivered via Immersive Reflection —a web...

In November, there was a whole-day workshop held at the headquarters of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) in London on the topic of article-level persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the context of the UKRI OA Policy. There were representatives from HEIs, UKRI, and scholarly services providers, including Crossref and Cosector (host repositories). Professor Petr Knoth, together with Dr...

Many congratulations to Dr. Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath for successfully defending her PhD thesis with the title: “Language Models for Citation Classification”. Her PhD topic focused on large language models for citation classification and how this can impact several areas including research evaluation, literature discovery and summary generation. Suchetha’s panel was chaired...

An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a need to help...

The 22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2023), a leading global event for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph Community, has successfully wrapped up, marked by notable involvement from KMi researchers. The ISWC series of conferences is coordinated by the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), whose Vice-President is KMi's Harith Alani. Professor Alani is also leading a new...

We are pleased to announce that the Open University has just been awarded a new research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software.Open research software and data are pivotal for scientific innovation and transparency, but are often not cited as first-class bibliographic records....

Prof. Harith Alani, presented on “Live Misinformation Correction: Lessons Learnt” and participated in a panel discussion on misinformation and disinformation in crisis management, concerning the utilisation of social media and crowdsourcing during disaster situations. His presentation related to the older (January 2016 - December 2018) COMRADES project, in which Prof. Alani served as...

Last Friday, the Knowledge Makers from KMi were out in force at the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM in Schools Day. The makers group showcased an array of demonstrations ranging from innovative robots and intriguing puzzles to Lego and electronics projects.     The spotlight however was undeniably on the 'Crack the code' challenge. This captivating contest had...

The KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students stand at the MK Innovates Festival attracted interest and engagement from schoolteachers, parents, college lecturers, young people, and even the local job centre. School teachers were particularly interested in the program, with many expressing their desire to have us come and talk to their 16-year-old students who are doing their A Levels. We...

The "Music Meets Machines workshop" presented by the Polifonia team gave a look into cutting-edge technologies used to represent music history. Led by Alba Morales and Jason Carvalho, the event brought together local school students in Milton Keynes to learn about generative AI and music knowledge graphs. Through this exploration of music heritage information, attendees were inspired...

KMi was represented by three activities at the “MK Innovates Festival for the STEM in Schools Day”. The Knowledge Makers showcased an array of demonstrations ranging from innovative robots and intriguing puzzles to Lego and electronics projects, the Polifonia team presented a workshop on "Music Meets Machines", where it gave a look into cutting-edge technologies used to...

Prof. John Domingue was invited to DKGcon (October 9, Ljubljana, Slovenia) where he gave a presentation on “How Decentralisation, Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI will Transform Adult Learning: Experiments at the Open University”. He also was part of a panel on “Trusted AI for media and education”.   The first DKGcon conference aimed to unite pioneers in...

A new OU research platform is open for collaboration on some of the most important challenges of our time. The Open Societal Challenges Online Platform that will enable those outside The Open University (OU) to work with our researchers on society’s most pressing issues, is launching this month (October 2023). The Platform is based on a concept introduced by Professor Kevin...

The Open University (OU) has joined a growing list of universities in The Alan Turing Institute’s network. The Turing University Network offers UK universities, with an interest in data science and AI, the opportunity to engage and collaborate both with the Institute and its broader networks in academia, industry and the public sector. It will also connect universities across the...

The CORE team, represented by David Pride and Petr Knoth, were at The University of Zadar in Croatia last week for the 27th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) where they were presented with the Best Paper award for their submission entitled ‘CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question...

On September 12th, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics and the Higher Education Commission delved into Generative AI and HE. In this roundtable session, which was chaired by Daniel Zeichner MP, the participants debated the influence of Generative AI on assessment and feedback within education.  Speakers at the event emphasized the impact of novel technology and software...

Last week, the Semantic Web Community gathered once again for another yearly top-notch event: the 19th International Conference on Semantic Systems; commonly known as SEMANTiCS 2023. The SEMANTiCS conference is a leading European conference focusing on Machine Learning, Data Science, Linked Data and Natural Language Processing. Over the years, SEMANTiCS has established itself as the forum for...

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at an event organised by the Erasmus+ project D-ChallengHE and hosted by the Hellenic Open University. The event was attended by educators and researchers from across the D-ChallengHE consortium, i.e., Slovenia, Italy, Greece, Romania, and Lithuania. The D-ChallengHE project is building a generative network among...

The GATEKEEPER project is a European multi-centric large-scale pilot on smart living environments. Funded by the EU's Horizon 2020, the project focuses on smart data-driven solutions for personalized early risk detection and intervention. As part of the project, the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) hosted a three-day twinning event, a mechanism which facilitates the transfer of innovation and...

Professor Peter Scott today paid a flying visit to KMi, the department he was director of from 2007 to 2015, and spoke with our current Vice Chancellor Prof. Tim Blackman and two other ex-directors, Prof. John Domingue and Prof. Enrico Motta, as well as other long-term KMi staff. Renowned for his transformational leadership in learning innovation, Peter left the OU and went on to even...

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has co-authored a journal editorial on the current state and the future of openness in education. The editorial is entitled “Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices” and has been published in the latest issue of the Open Praxis journal. This has been a collaborative publication...

Many congratulations to Dr Lucas Anastasiou on the successful defence of his thesis entitled: “Computational Argumentation Approaches to Improve Sensemaking and Evidence-based Reasoning in Online Deliberation Systems. Under the supervision of Prof Anna De Liddo and Prof Petr Knoth, Lucas’s study explored how computational methods can advance the current state of online discussion....

Last week, the research group "Shifting Power" from the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University visited the International Conference Series on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI) 2023, held from June 26th to 30th in Munich. Their organised workshop on the Ecology of AI (EcAI) 2023 garnered attention from conference participants and sparked insightful discussions among...

The OU Analyse team, which works to identify students at the university who may need extra support, has been awarded the prestigious Educational Dataset Prize by the Educational Data Mining Society for their remarkable work with the ‘OULAD’ dataset. OU Analyse is a system powered by machine learning methods for early identification of students at risk of failing. All...

I recently had the opportunity to attend The Groups Network summer workshop at the splendid Lost and Found Club in Leeds. UKRI's FLF Development Network supported the event, led by Dr Martha Newson and Dr Anne Templeton. Groups is an interdisciplinary network for researchers whose expertise lies in understanding group formation, collective experiences and group behaviours, and this year's...

The CORE team are proud and excited to announce that our paper entitled 'CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers', was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com. This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both past and present. It discusses how CORE has grown from a...

Research Fellow Dr. Tracie Farrell spoke with ITV on Tuesday afternoon, July 13th, about the consequences of Artificial Intelligence on society and her research team’s efforts to reframe the conversation around ethical AI as an “Ecology of AI”.  Dr. Farrell is the Principle Investigator of “Shifting Power”, a project funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship...

KMi's Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at the EmpowerED webinar series, with the title: “Investigating the use of Generative AI for improving course production”. The EmpowerED webinar series is aimed at developing and fostering an academic Community of Practice (CoP). It is an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars,...

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference (C&T 2023) took place last week in Lahti, Finland. This conference provides an unparalleled platform for interdisciplinary dialogue amongst researchers, practitioners, industry experts, and community advocates living in the intersection of communities and technology. The five-day event had a diverse program of research...

The HEROS Project recently wrapped up its final stakeholder conference, presenting its innovative actionable knowledge that contributes to improving pandemic response under four areas: governance, models in epidemics, medical supply chain management, and social media analytics. HERoS aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak. HERoS is a Horizon...

The Semantic Web Community gathered in Crete for the 20th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023) to hear the latest results in research, technologies, and applications in its field. This is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. In addition to a technical program organized over numerous tracks, the five-day event...

Well done to the Knowledge Media Runners, Harith Alani, Jason Carvalho, Rachel Coignac-Smith, Alba Morales-Tirado, who finished in the top half of the rankings - 29th out of 61 teams -  in the annual OU Running Club Relay Race. This was the first race held since 2019 due to things being on hold for a couple of years over the pandemic. Competitors were made up of mixed teams of four...

KMi is happy to announce the official launch of “Shifting Power”, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship-funded project investigating the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Justice. The project focuses on the perspectives of those with intersectional and/or non-normative identities that go underrepresented in AI research.  At the moment, the team is running two parallel...

Congratulations to three KMi's Doctoral Students who presented their research to the international community in Austin Texas last week.   Ángel Pavón Pérez and Joseph Kwarteng presented papers at the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (WebSci 2023) in Austin Texas on 1st May. Each student were lead authors representing their co-author teams. Ángel...

Researchers from the Knowledge Media Institute participated in the Extended Intelligence for Cultural Engagement (ExICE) conference in Bologna, showcasing the outputs of the EU H2020 project SPICE "Social Cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement". The team, led by PI Paul Mulholland, included Enrico Daga, Jason Carvalho, and Chukwudi...

Professor John Domingue is featured in a podcast where he discusses Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI with researcher and writer Chad Watt. The podcast is the latest in the Ahead in the Cloud series hosted by the Infosys Knowledge Institute where business leaders share what they've learned on their cloud journey. In the discussion, John outlines the innovative...

We're keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for our members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide. In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining members; University of Exeter, Cardiff University,...

Congratulations to Gianluca Bardaro, Alessio Antonini & Enrico Motta whose article Robots for Elderly Care in the Home: A Landscape Analysis and Co-Design Toolkit has been announced as one of the Top 10 Downloaded Articles in the International Journal of Social Robotics in 2022. The article, published in August 2021, was based on a case study for the EU large-scale...

Congratulations to Tiff Leek, a member of the STEM Technical Services Team, on being awarded a Social Microbes Residency. Social Microbes is a new collaboration between Then Try This and Dr. Elze Hesse, funded by Elze’s UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Tiff is a research software developer and animal computer interaction researcher, maker and artist. Her residency will be an...

On March 23, 2023, KMi hosted an open forum called "How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything." The event was about ChatGPT and related technologies such as DALL E 2 and Stable Diffussion. It aimed to explain what lies underneath this type of AI, including its limitations, facilitate discussions and see if there was sufficient interest in holding an ethical workshop. The talks...

On Monday, 13th March 2023 I attended an event hosted by the Kindness Studio to commemorate Ada Lovelace which was supported by the University of Warwick and The Alan Turing Institute. Lovelace, a 19th century mathematics, and computer science pioneer is celebrated globally as a role model for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In March 2022, a statue of Ada...

Since 2020, KMi have provided financial support to Black scholars to enable them to experiment in a cutting-edge field, that can help to change the world. Hot technology topics previously covered include: Misinformation, Robotics, Human Computer Interaction, Blockchain and Knowledge Graphs. The 4th call is now open. Three successful applicants will receive financial support with a bursary...

Happy International Women’s Day 2023! We invited women in KMi to be featured in this update of our annual commemorative poster.   KMi are proud to #EmbraceEquity throughout the year.  We are one of a handful of computer science units with Athena Swan silver awards. This award, received in 2022, recognises the positive impacts of our actions over the past...

As part of our ongoing sustainability plan, in December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. Following the recently announced changes to our status, to remain free for public use, CORE is leveraging a membership...

Dr. Tracie Farrell, a Research Fellow at KMi and winner of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (Round 6), has announced a new publication today on LinkedIn outlining a methodology that individuals and groups can use to develop their creative practice, particularly when engaging with large, complex problems. The “Kinetic Method” is the result of more than 10 years of...

On the 24th of January 2023, the Woughton Community Council is hosting an event for local volunteer groups showcasing how the MK:Community App can be used to support activities in the neighbourhood. The app is the result of a joint effort, a co-design activity started in October 2021 with WCC, the SME Spirocco and KMi in the context of the H2020 GATEKEEPER project. The app enables local residents...

Congratulations to Dr. Agnese Chiatti, who brilliantly defended her PhD Thesis, entitled "Visually Intelligent Agents – Improving Sensemaking in Service Robotics”. Agnese’s thesis, carried out under the supervision of Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Enrico Daga, tackled the problem of service robots operating in the real world, which need to interpret correctly the environment...

Earlier today, the Robotics team of KMi’s Intelligent Systems and Data Science group conducted experimental activities with the TIAGo robot in Northamptonshire. The robot was deployed for the first time in a real home environment, in the context of our research in the EU-funded GATEKEEPER project.   Specifically, our work focuses on developing robots that can assist older...

We are delighted to announce that Dr Retno Larasati successfully defended her thesis today. Retno’s study was entitled: Trust and Explanation in Artificial Intelligence Systems: A Healthcare Application in Disease Detection and Preliminary Diagnosis. In her work, Retno has looked at the extent to which explanations and interactions can help non-expert users properly calibrate trust in...

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis gave an invited talk at the event “The Future Use of Self Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Credentials”, organised by the European Horizon 2020 project TOKEN. The event took place online on November 30, 2022. Alexander presented the lessons learned from the European Horizon 2020 project QualiChain and specifically from the lifelong learning pilot...

The Vice-Chancellor has issued a video message to Associate Lecturers via internal channels to explain the importance of using the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID).  In his video message, Tim Blackman said: "We want to highlight to you the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard and, if you are not using it, ask you to use it"   Powered...

Congratulations to Doctor Alba Morales Tirado, who successfully defended her thesis today. Alba’s PhD was entitled "Health condition evolution for effective use of electronic records: knowledge representation, acquisition, and reasoning”. Recently, there has been a growing interest in aspects of smart living, particularly due to the increasing adoption and use of Electronic...

Members of KMi’s Scholarly Knowledge Modelling Research Group have been announced as winners of the In-Use Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference, which is the premiere scientific venue for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs community. The award was given for the paper entitled Leveraging Knowledge Graph Technologies to Assess Journals and Conferences at Springer...

Congratulations to Hassan Saif, Yulan He and Harith Alani on winning the prestigious Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) Ten-Year Award. The prize was announced at the opening ceremony of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2022) on 25th October.  The Award recognizes the highest impact papers from the ISWC proceedings ten years prior. The decision is based...

The 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2022), the premier international forum for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph Community, is currently underway and, as in previous editions, is characterised by a significant participation from KMi researchers. The ISWC series of conferences is co-ordinated by the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), whose Vice-President is KMi’s...

As part of KMi’s third cohort of summer scholars, Samuel Kwaku Antwi was researching the subject of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine online. Specifically, Sam was interested in understanding how vaccine-related misinformation was impacting young people from Ghana. This fresh topic addressed gaps in the literature on young people’s responses to misinformation, particularly...

Congratulations to KMi's newest Doctor, Venetia Brown, who has successfully defended her thesis "The role of interactive web broadcasts in fostering distance learning students’ engagement with practical lab and fieldwork". Chaired by Dr Aisling Third, the examiners, Professor Eileen Scanlon (WELS, IET) and Dr Lynda Yorke (Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography,...

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis gave a keynote talk at the 7th panhellenic scientific conference “Integration and Use of ICT in Education”, organised by the University of Patras in Greece. The event was very well attended by researchers and educators from higher and secondary education. Participants exchanged best practices on the effective use of ICT in different stages of the...

KMi's John Domingue attended the EDUtech_EUROPE 2022 conference that was held in Amsterdam between 5-6th October. The event brought together more than 3000 educators, 250 speakers and 200 edtech providers from across Europe to present stories, showcase innovation and inspire educators across the region. There were four event themes: T1: Schools Leaders and Hybrid...

The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards. CORE was announced as a runner-up in the...

KMi members were among the 250 attendees who gathered in London on 22nd September for the OU Research Excellence Awards 2022. The evening was a celebration of research across the OU and also saw the launch of the new OU Strategy. We are delighted that KMi members were recognised as winners in two award categories. These were: Equity, Diversity and...

CORE (core.ac.uk), a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University in partnership with Jisc, has been serving the scholarly community since 2011 and in that time has experienced phenomenal growth in every way. CORE collates Open Access research from over 10,500 data providers across the world and is now the largest collection of open access research literature. Over 30 million users...

In partnership with Springer Nature and the University of Cagliari, the Scholarly Knowledge Research Group at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute has developed the AIDA Dashboard, an innovative tool for exploring and making sense of the dynamics of research topics, scientific conferences and journals in Computer Science. These capabilities can be used to provide insights about...

KMi’s Dr Lara Piccolo hosted a visit yesterday by Prof Alexandre Marino Costa, from Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. Alexandre last visited KMi in 2016 when he collaborated with Dr Ale Okada and Paul Hogan to develop Augmented Reality applications (AR) for education. Lara said: “I am very happy to share that this collaboration was very fruitful and now...

KMi staff and doctoral students met on campus on this week for the first large face-to-face gathering since the 2020 lockdown. The afternoon event was held outdoors at the OU Pavilion in glorious sunshine. For members who joined KMi in the last two years this was opportunity to meet other lab members in person. People brought along a picnic lunch, chatted and played games in the sunshine. ...

During the 3rd-9th July KMi’s Agnese Chiatti, Paula Reyero Lobo, Angel Pavon Perez, and John Domingue attended the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS 2022) which was held in a castle in the small medieval hilltop town of Bertinoro, Italy. ISWS is held in the University Residential Center and is a well-known opportunity to learn from mentors and peers, network and...

The OU’s Citizen Science and AI Research group had a stand at the Parks Trust Love Nature event on the 4th of July. The group sported a fantastic number of activities throughout the day: Rachel Redford,  Citizen Science Project Officer, engaged with children and adults alike about the fascinating world of moth eco-systems; Nirwan Sharma, Research Associate, demonstrated a...

KMi is delighted to announce PhD Research Students Shuang Ao and Joseph Kwarteng are the first-ever recipients of the prestigious Melete Scholarships. The Melete Scholarship will provide Shuang and Joseph with the opportunity to have the extra financial freedom to realise their talent through their project proposals Melete was founded in 2019 by John & Kitty Chisholm. The scheme's...

This Vision Interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk), served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways in which text and data mining impacts the present as well as the future. They...

Congratulations to The Digital Development Team Services Team on receiving a STEM 'Recognising Excellence' Award at the Faculty Assembly on 22nd June.  Tracie Farrell led the nomination, citing the team's Support with new and ongoing initiatives within KMi and STEM and exemplary attitude to providing support: "The team is proactive, enthusiastic and supportive....

Congratulations to our PhD Research Student, Shuang Ao, who won the Judges 1st Choice at this year's OU Grad School Social PhD poster competition. The awards ceremony took place at an in-person event in the Hub Theatre at The Open University Campus on the 15th of June. All the winners and runners-up were announced in a tweet by...

Dr Tracie Farrell has been announced among 84 promising future leaders as part of a sweep of research and innovation awarded fellowships given funding totalling £98 million. These 84 most promising science and research leaders will benefit from £97.8m to tackle major global issues and to commercialise their innovations in the UK, Science Minister George Freeman has...

KMi would like to congratulate our newest Doctor, Zeeshan Jan. Formerly a PhD Research Student, Zeeshan has been a part of KMi for over four years. His thesis, entitled 'Peer-review on a Decentralised Web', was supervised by John Domingue, Aisling Third and Tracie Farrell. The paper was reviewed by examiners Tobias Kuhn and Bart Rienties, who stressed how much they enjoyed reading the...

At a ceremony held this morning in Milan, Agnese Chiatti has received the “L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science” prize, in recognition of the excellence of her research in Robotics. This award, which was established in October 2002 by L'Oréal Italia, in collaboration with the Italian National Commission for UNESCO, provides six scholarships of €20,000...

KMi is delighted to announce that we have received an Athena Swan Silver Award following our recent submission to Advance HE.   The Athena Swan Self-Assessment (SAT) Team had membership drawn from our academic, professional services and doctoral students. Prof Advaith Siddharthan, who led SAT’s submission over the past year, said: “Our most compelling narratives were...

The Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) robotics team has developed HanS, a Health and Safety Robot Inspector. HanS is an experiment in service robotics and has been designed to be able to patrol KMi to try and identify possible violations to Health and Safety rules. For instance, typical rules check that all fire extinguishers are in place and that emergency exits are free of...

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be operated and sustained. In this post, we demonstrate CORE’s commitment to adhere to these principles and show our current progress in achieving these aims. The principles are divided into three main...

The Conversation UK is an independent source of news analysis, and informed comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share their knowledge with the world. KMi’s Social Data Science Group members, Prof Harith Alani, Dr Gregoire Burel, and Dr Tracie Farrell have co-authored a piece in The Conversation. The article titled Elon Musk could roll back...

The Research Excellence Framework 2021 results are out! KMi contributed to several units of assessment, the biggest of which was Computer Science and Informatics, which submitted 45 full-time equivalent staff, 44% more than in 2014. The Open University’s Computing Research is ranked 27 out of 90, for Research Power, which puts us in the top 30% of UK submissions. 73% of our research...

BeyondFacts 2022 is a leading international workshop on the topic of misinformation, which was collocated with The Web Conference in Lyon. The workshop provides a venue for sharing and discussing the latest scientific research on a range of related topics, such as social media mining, computational fact-checking, and misinformation spread analysis. Prof Harith Alani, our soon-to-be Director,...

The first quarter of the new year was very productive for the CORE team with a number of new releases.  First, we have been working hard on improving the user interface and experience of the website and its performance on technical, visual communication and usability levels. In January, we released a new homepage and redesigned the CORE services page.  More about it...

We are an incredibly diverse research lab, with around 20 nationalities within our 60-80 personnel. KMi's Joseph Kwarteng, Angel Pavon-Perez, Martino Mensio, and Paula Reyero-Lobo competed in a challenge to build a model that can detect racist language over text messages, against 9 other teams. The Datathon was hosted by BCN Analytics, and kicked off on the 25th of March 2022 in Barcelona,...

KMi is excited to announce that Professor Harith Alani has been appointed as KMi's 5th director. Harith will be taking up his post on the 1st of August, once Professor John Domingue steps down after seven years as director. Harith joined KMi in 2009 as a Senior Lecturer, then progressed to full Professor a few years later and became KMi's Deputy Director in 2021. Harith is a Professor of...

CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0. CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date on the latest scientific literature. CORE constantly...

The 2022 AAAI Symposium on Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering for Hybrid Intelligence (AAAI-MAKE) took place on March 21-23. The symposium is aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners that are exploring the integration of Machine Learning methods with knowledge-based systems, to improve the explainability, performance and data efficiency of existing...

KMi has launched our 3rd year's range of Summer Scholarships for Young Black People, offering to provide financial support with a bursary of £2,700, alongside the experience to build up their careers as young members in STEM.  We are offering three challenges to this year's applicants. These topics aim to use hot technologies to solve societal challenges and...

PT Anywhere, a flagship KMi technology, has played a vital role in remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several universities from across the world have incorporated PT Anywhere in their curricula and have been using it for remote laboratory sessions with their students. PT Anywhere is also featured in the UK Government’s Digital Skills Toolkit, which is preparing the...

We are proud to announce that the work in our EU-funded project ON-MERRIT that aims to analyse and deliver a set of evidence-based recommendations for science policies, indicators, and incentives, which could address and mitigate cumulative (dis)advantages in Open Science has been mentioned in a Nature news article. The work of the Open University, which is a partner in this project, focuses...

Last week saw the final review of the QualiChain project. Starting in January 2019, QualiChain has targeted the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project pilots have targeted 4 key areas: (i) lifelong learning; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing...

Modern world conflicts are increasingly influenced by misinformation and propaganda. Martino Mensio from the Social Data Group at KMi collected over 800 claims so far about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that were debunked or flagged as unreliable by many registered fact-checking organisations around the world. Gregoire Burel then began monitoring the appearance of these claims on Twitter and...

Joseph Kwarteng, a second-year PhD student in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), has launched Misogynoir Online, a website that invites Black women to share their stories of misogynoir by posting them on the platform. The term ‘Misogynoir’ was coined in 2008 by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey. It is used to describe the unique form of misogyny and racialised...

Happy International Women’s Day 2022! This year’s theme is #BreakTheBias and we invite you to join in the many missions in KMi and around The Open University.   KMi's IWD 2022 celebrations For this year’s celebrations, we have created an all-new #BreakTheBias page where all KMi members were invited to make a pledge to make the world around us more diverse, equitable,...

On Wednesday, 2nd March, Professor John Domingue gave a keynote in the EdTech stream of one of the most significant events globally. The Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, attracted more than 60,000 attendees from almost 200 countries. Other speakers in the same stream included a partner in Europe’s leading EdTech Venture Capitalist company, a founder of an EdTech unicorn and...

We are very proud to be able to announce that three KMiers have been placed into the top 300 nationally of a new prestigious ranking of computer science researchers. The ranking, published by Research.com, is based on a strenuous examination of more than 9,724 scientists on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph. In particular, the inclusion criteria for scholars to be considered into the...

This post is our personal story of how members of the CORE team have been affected and caught up in the armed conflict in Ukraine. It is one of the many testaments to the implications of war and a plea to the Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop this violence.  Follow this link to read the full story on the CORE blog.  Related Links: Read more.

CORE and Iris.ai are extremely pleased to announce the initiation of a new research collaboration funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Discovering scientific insights about a specific topic is challenging, particularly in an area like chemistry which is one of the top-five most published fields with over 11 million publications and 307,000 patents. The team at Iris.ai have spent the last...

Our society is facing significant challenges due to the widespread misinformation, in particular on social media, substantially influencing public opinion. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand for innovative text processing methods to fact check and provide an automatic assessment of trustworthiness and credibility. Machine learning and natural language processing have started to be widely...

A series of articles featuring KMi’s Blockchain work have been published in OpenLearn. The articles have been authored by John Domingue and Alexander Mikroyannidis and address the following topics: What is Blockchain? Professor John Domingue and Doctor Alexander Mikroyannidis help decode the meaning of "blockchain". How do blockchain technologies work, and what do they do?...

On the 14th of February, the Marshal Area hosted the MK:5G Connect: an expo of all technologies and advancements connected with the 5G pilot in Milton Keynes. We participated as ISDS group with a stall presenting the research of Agnese and Gianluca, our TiaGo robot and the upcoming GATEKEEPER pilot in MK about robotic intervention at home. The expo included SMEs operating in...

We are always excited to announce new releases of tools that support Open Access and use the CORE services. This time there is a release from our friends at the Open Access Helper. This is a tool that helps everyone discover a legal Open Access version of research outputs around the web.  What is new with this version is the application’s ability to bring to researchers...

On Thursday 27th January, Professor John Domingue was an invited speaker and panellist at two online International Conferences hosted in India and Saudi Arabia. In the morning (GMT), John attended the 12th International Confluence 2022 Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering organised by Amity University, where he is an honorary Professor. At Confluence-2022, John...

Many congratulations to Charlotte Hamilton who has been elected Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Co-Chair for KMi. Charlotte is a Senior Research Manager in our Professional Services Team and a member of the Athena Swan Self Assessment Team. She will serve for a term of 2 years and work with Jane Whild to set up an EDI Board for the Unit. Jane was appointed as KMi...

On Thursday 13th January 2022, Petr Knoth, Head of CORE and Matteo Cancellieri, Lead Developer, gave a webinar describing the new CORE APIv3 features. There were  72  attendees. In the first part, we introduced new features in the API, and the second part provided live coding examples followed by answering questions from the audience.  Read about this webinar more on...

THE Campus is a platform that Times Higher Education launched; THE Campus presents advice from academics and professionals on an international perspective in key areas of higher education. From teaching and learning; equity, diversity and inclusion; internationalisation; Sustainable Development Goals; early-career research and research management. John Domingue discusses ever-growing...

The Multiplier Event of the Erasmus+ project OPENLang Network [Open Languages & Cultures Network], entitled: “Open Educational Resources and Practices in Language Learning and Teaching” has taken place online on December 10, 2021. The event was organised by Alexander Mikroyannidis and presented the lessons learned from the 3-year OPENLang Network project...

The Multiplier Event of the Erasmus+ project OPENLang Network [Open Languages & Cultures Network], entitled: "Open Educational Resources and Practices in Language Learning and Teaching" will take place online on December 10, 2021, 9:00-13:30 GMT. The event is organised by The Open University and will present the lessons learned from the 3-year OPENLang Network project regarding...

KMi PhD student Alba Morales attended the 11th KCap Online Conference which took place on 2nd to 3rd December.  Alba presented a paper entitled: "Reasoning on Health Condition Evolution for Enhanced Detection of Vulnerable People in Emergency Settings" which she co-authored with Dr. Enrico Daga and...

The EDSA project has been featured in the European Data Market study 2021-2023. The latest European Data Market study demonstrates that the demand for data professionals is expected to grow with 8.7% in the next 5 years, while in 2019 there were an estimated six million data professionals in the EU27. However, still as a result of a shortage of skills, digital transformation initiatives in Europe...

MoodleMoot Greece 2021 took place online on November 26-27, 2021. The purpose of this annual event is to promote a fruitful and creative dialogue in the educational community about the use of Moodle, to highlight its good practices in Greece, as well as to present innovative uses of Moodle operations in Greece and internationally. Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and presented his...

Congratulations to our Social Data Science Researchers whose work received wide coverage in the Finnish press this week and in an OU News story. The research, led by Gregoire Burel, Tracie Farrell, and Harith Alani, aimed to examine misinformation about COVID-19 online to improve the effectiveness of the response to the pandemic. The group's work on HERoS Project has found that...

Congratulations to Joseph Kwarteng, our PhD Research Student who has won Best Paper at ASONAM, for his publication: "Misogynoir: Public Online Response Towards Self-Reported Misogynoir", alongside his co-authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Serena Coppolino Perfumi. This paper investigates Misogynoir - a portmanteau coined by Moya Bailey in 2008 to describe the specific forms of...

The Innovate Learning Summit took place online on November 9-11, 2021. The conference was organised by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education and was attended by over 600 participants from more than 40 countries. The Innovate Learning Summit provides a unique forum for education and training professionals to discuss the latest research, development,...

This week's Spotlight Interview features Angel Pavon Perez, a new member of KMi. Angel is a PhD Research Student, who focuses on biases in artificial intelligence (AI). What is your background? I am a computer scientist from the University of Cordoba with a master's degree in artificial intelligence from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Since I started in artificial...

The KMi Maven of the Month initiative originated back in 1995, as a collaboration between the Knowledge Media Institute and the BBC's Open University Production Unit. It was one of the first Internet Radio in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_talk_radio), that used state of the art technologies (for the time...), including RealAudio,...

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the ‘official’ birth of the Semantic Web community, as 2001 saw both the publication of the landmark paper on the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila, as well as the staging of the 1St Semantic Web Symposium (the precursor to the International Semantic Web Conference series), which took place at Stanford, California, in...

I have an exciting story to share about a recent event where I was invited to deliver a guest lecture on the future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies in India. It was an online event organised by the Youth United Council of India (Tamil Nadu Branch). Due to the higher number of registrations received (more than 1000), the organisers decided to host it as a live event via my YouTube...

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Cypris, a leading AI-driven, market intelligence platform that connects research & development (R&D) teams with innovation data and trends in their field. The partnership will provide Cypris with unlimited access to over 210 million open access articles to further enhance their platform and regularly add live...

We are excited to hear that Prof Peter Scott, who was KMi Director from 2007 to 2015, has been announced as President-designate of Athabasca University.    In the announcement video, Peter said, “AU’s Imagine plan has created a fantastic new platform for change, so I will be joining a team that is already...

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis has developed the new badged open course: Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology. The course introduces Blockchain technology and its potential for decentralising and transforming education. The course also presents the work carried out by the QualiChain project for the decentralised management and verification of education and employment...

KMi has initiated a new project with WELS and the external company BlueScreenIT on leveraging Blockchain technology for OpenSTEM Africa. The project, led by WELS and funded by HEIF, is developing a business case and implementation model that leverages Blockchain capacity to create a smart and sustainable future for OpenSTEM Africa, BlueScreenIT’s education offerings and explores the wider...

See Full programme here: https://ukcop26.org/the-conference/green-zone-programme-of-events/ Ancient Knowledge and Modern Thinking: Climate Perspectives in Folk Art   13:00 - 14:30, 07 Nov 2021 The Open University and Glasgow Life How can art and science come together to inform the future of climate action? How can we utilise learnings from Indigenous communities to inspire...

Co-Inform, a European collaborative project with KMi as a key partner, had an event on the 29th-30th September to present the project's tools and results, which were developed to foster critical thinking and digital literacy towards a better-informed society. These tools were designed and tested with policymakers, journalists, and citizens in 3 different EU countries. Martino Mensio gave a...

Since the pandemic the Admin Team have been working from home, like most staff and students at the Open University. Now we are permitted to meet, last week the team took the opportunity to all meet in person for the first time since March 2020. Their team building afternoon took place aboard Electra, The Milton Keynes Community Boat, on the Grand Union Canal. Electra is a brand-new, 54-foot...

The 24th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021) took place as a hybrid event on September 22-24, 2021. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. KMi's Alexander Mikroyannidis...

The forest chatter has been clamorous since Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Academic (MAG) at the end of 2021. Like many others, at CORE, we have used MAG for a number of tasks including data quality enhancement and enrichment, to obtain citation data, for our research in semantic typing of citations and to enrich MAG and Microsoft Academic Search by supplying direct...

Milton Keynes, UK: Along with other colleagues at the OU, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum in Germany, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, EPFL in Switzerland and Diversync Limited in the UK, KMi will be hosting a workshop at the annual European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) on the subject of learning technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). The workshop,...

Last week saw the latest edition of the Semantics series of conferences, Semantics 2021, which took place in Amsterdam, Holland. Since 2005, the Semantics conferences provide the main European forum covering both advanced academic research in semantic technologies, as well as the state of the art in the relevant industrial applications. Semantics 2021 saw a very strong presence of KMi...

What can you tell us about your role? I work on all kinds of projects with the researchers here at the OU; this means I can be working on project spec and design, frontend and backend web development, electronics and other physical computing projects – whatever development is needed. What are you working on right now? I’m currently working on some Arduino-based electronics...

The ALT Annual Conference took place online on September 7-9, 2021. The conference was organised by the Association for Learning Technology and was attended by nearly 400 participants from 24 countries. This year's conference offered an opportunity to bring together educators, learners, managers, senior leaders and policy writers, in order to reflect on the shared experience from...

Last week, from the 6th to the 10th of September, the 2nd International Smart Cities and Robotics Challenge (SciRoc) was held in Bologna  (Italy) in the historic location of Palazzo Re Enzo. As a part of the European Robotics League (ERL), the event was aimed at showcasing the integration of robots in smart urban environments and followed the successful first edition of the competition,...

What could you tell us about your research? My research is about intersectionality in hate speech detection, focusing on "Misogynoir" - a particular kind of hate that black women experience. Moya Bailey coined the term "Misogynoir" to describe "the specific hatred, dislike, distrust, and prejudice directed toward Black women". It is misogyny against black women...

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Arabic Digital Reform Institute (ADRI), providing services to researchers to store, share and access Arabic academia online. The partnership will provide ADRI with unlimited access to millions of open access articles to provide research platform and repository services to academics all over the world.  The...

This week's Spotlight Interview features Kaushal Kumar, a recipient of our Summer Scholarship, who tells us about the 6-week project he is doing in KMi. Kaushal is a Sixth Form Student studying Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Further Maths and he starts his final year in September. He hopes to study either Mechanical Engineering or Main Level Engineering at university. What can you tell us...

This week the spotlight shines on Vaclav Bayer who is a Full-Stack Developer in our Learning Analytics Team.  Watch this video to hear Vaclav explaining his work. What can you tell us about your research?  UniversitiesUK and AdvanceHE reports show a 13% degree-awarding gap for Black, Asian and Minority ethnicity students in the UK. Similar issues are found for female and...

We are delighted that our colleagues Anna De Liddo and Miriam Fernandez have been awarded their chairs. The promotions, which take immediate effect, were announced by STEM Executive Dean, Professor Nick Braithwaite. Anna De Liddo is promoted to Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, this reflects her excellent research portfolio and the societal impact of her technologies. Anna leads...

In this week's summer series of Spotlight Interviews with KMi people, Pasquale Iero tells us about his work in KMi What is your role?  I joined KMi as a Research Assistant in 2019 after nearly two decades of working in the software industry. I support the researchers in the Open Blockchain Research Team. My tasks may involve coding software, writing documents, or providing...

 Since the start (10 years ago!) CORE's mission has been to aggregate and facilitate access to Open Access scientific research at an unprecedented scale to both humans and machines. To achieve this aim, we are always refining and improving our methods for access and use of the CORE data.    A key consideration in making improvements is that CORE users hail from many...

As part of our summer series of interviews with KMi people, this week’s spotlight falls on Zeeshan Jan, PhD Student What are you researching right now? I am in the final phase of conducting my research about the academic peer-reviewing process, which is thesis write-up. The peer-reviewing process is perceived as the backbone of academic research publishing. Researchers leading this...

It all started in 2010 when the then PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute at the  Open University, Dr. Petr Knoth wanted to collect a large corpus of academic papers to explore related research content. It was a frustrating job as he realised that there not only wasn’t a readily available corpus of all research papers, but that collecting this information for machine processing...

As part of our summer series of interviews with KMi people, this week’s spotlight falls on Audrey Ekuban, who tells us about her PhD research on privacy in Educational Analytics.  What can you tell us about your PhD research?  I am exploring the solution space of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning...

Much of CORE Team’s focus involves developing services that underpin open research. The updates for this half-year include numerous examples of this in action. You can find details about these and more news on the Jisc Research blog. Related Links: Read more.

OUAnalyse, The Open University Predictive Learning Analytics system, was selected as a finalist and among the four best projects for the 2020 edition of the UNESCO Prize in education. Since 2005, UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education rewards each year the best projects focused on education. Specifically, it highlights projects using technology to...

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis recently gave two invited talks at the SLERD 2021 conference and at an info day organised by EKDDA. The first event took place online on June 25th. Alexander was invited as speaker on the panel “Towards Learning Ecosystems Based on Competences: the promise of the micro-credentials” panel, in the context of the 6th conference on Smart Learning...

Milton Keynes, UK: Along with other colleagues at the OU, Ruhr- Universität Bochum in Germany, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, EPFL in Switzerland and Diversync Limited in the UK, KMi will be hosting a workshop at the annual European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) on the subject of learning technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). The workshop,...

The need for administering automated methods for evaluating research is gaining more attention lately. The primary motivation for this is to replace the regular, more exhausting exercises like peer-reviewing and the not so sophisticated, less accepted ways of ranking research works like Impact Factors, which solely depends on the citation-frequency. One such proposition is the utilisation of...

Maven of the Month was a pioneering initiative launched by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) back in 1995, in collaboration with the BBC's Open University Production Unit. This was one of the first Internet Talk Radio anywhere in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_talk_radio), which used state of the art technologies (for the time), including RealAudio, CU-SeeMe, Netscape...

Every year the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) is one of the leading destinations for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The ESWC event also offers a PhD symposium: a forum for PhD students in the area to present their work and an opportunity to receive constructive criticism from mentors and peers. This year's edition of the symposium was organised by Dr Ilaria Tiddi...

On 26 May 2021, Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University, UK) delivered the webinar Facilitating lifelong learning through the use of blockchain technology as part of the CPD webinar series of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). In this webinar, Alexander presented the QualiChain project and the lifelong learning pilot that he is leading. This pilot aims at supporting lifelong...

KMi's Alexander Mikroyannidis is the managing guest editor of a special issue on Blockchain-Based Decentralised Solutions for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation. This special issue will be published in the new Elsevier journal Blockchain: Research and Applications. This special issue explores how learner empowerment, education reengineering...

  Part of the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the hands-on workshop Opinions, Intentions, Freedom of Expression,... , And Other Human Aspects Of Misinformation Online was held on 7th of May.  It gathered multidisciplinary researchers from across the world (i.e. Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and the UK), including...

Prof. Harith Alani, Prof. Enrico Motta, and Dr. Francesco Osborne are among the top 25 most influential scholars in Knowledge Engineering, according to the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List. This is an international ranking produced by AMiner, a popular academic search system, to celebrate the 2000 most significant contributors to the field of Artificial Intelligence. The AI...

The OERxDomains Conference took place online on April 21-22 as a special edition of the 12th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy. The conference was organised by the Association for Learning Technology in partnership with Reclaim Hosting’s Domains Conference, thus incorporating a special strand hosted by the Domains Conference and bringing...

Congratulations to Kiran Parmar on passing his Level 3 Digital Marketer Apprenticeship. Kiran began his apprenticeship with the OU in September 2019 and due to the pandemic, he has had to work remotely for the majority of the time. The apprenticeship was comprised of on-the-job training in the KMi Admin Team and STEM Comms Team, and formal training provided by Milton...

Dr Anna De Liddo (Senior Research Fellow and lead of the IDea research team) has been invited to become President-elect of the SIG (Special Interest Group) on Cognitive Science Research in IS of the Association for Information Systems for 2021-2023. Anna will join Luca Iandoli (President-in-office and Associate Dean for Global Programs and Research at St. John’s University, New...

Flowcite has teamed up with CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers. The partnership will provide Flowcite users with free and unlimited access to millions of open access research papers from the CORE database. CORE is delighted to partner with Flowcite and progress our aligned goals to make open research content available to all. By connecting our innovative...

A final virtual consortium meeting celebrated the successful conclusion of the MK:5G project, a flagship city initiative centred around the deployment of 5G technologies in Milton Keynes. In particular, MK:5G has deployed a dedicated 5G infrastructure for the city and an associated Data Exchange facility. KMi’s contribution to the project centers on the design and implementation of a...

  Dr Lara Piccolo has received a seed funding award from the Royal Academy of Engineering to tackle violence against women in Sierra Leone. Gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread in Sierra Leone, with almost 70% of women reportedly experiencing violence in their lifetime. The adverse health, social, and psychological consequences of GBV have a severe impact on women and...

This week, Christina Myers defended her thesis titled ‘A Framework to Democratise the Design of Educational Games on Social Issues during Game Jams’. Game Jams are multi-day events organised to create computer games, usually attended predominantly by male game developers with game design and development skills. Christina’s thesis proposes a framework with educational...

October to December 2020 CORE broke records, partnered with arXiv.org and continued improving our REF2021 compliance monitoring service. The CORE team had a busy end to 2020!  Our team concentrated on multiple areas, including collaboration with the open access community and new feature development. Find out more details on Jisc Research Blog.

Advaith Siddharthan has been awarded his chair, with the title of Professor of Computer Science and Society.   STEM Executive Dean, Professor Nick Braithwaite said:  This is in recognition of his excellent research portfolio and the associated international impact of his work. Advaith has shared his knowledge and enthusiasm to develop socially responsible AI technologies that...

KMi are inviting applications for our Summer Scholarship 2021. This is an exciting opportunity for 16 to 20-year-olds from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds to discover what it's like to be a computer scientist. Successful candidates will receive a grant to carry out a short computer science project in KMi, lasting up to 6 weeks during June-August. The project may be...

Happy International Women’s Day 2021! This year’s theme is #ChooseToChallenge and we invite you to join in the many celebrations in KMi and around the Open University.  KMi's IWD celebrations We have created this special feature page showcasing video messages from KMi Director, Professor John Domingue, and other staff members. They talk about...

KMi’s Scholarly Knowledge Modelling team (SKM) and Springer Nature have formally agreed to extend their strategic collaboration agreement until March 2022. The new contract defines the latest chapter in a highly successful strategic partnership, which started back in 2014 and has since gone from strength to strength. During these years the SKM team has established itself has one of the...

Alan Fletcher, Head of Research and Enterprise Support in STEM and Lab Manager in KMi has written a thought piece for businesses regarding both threats and opportunities that the digital disruption from Covid presents to their business models.  The article appears in the January 2021 edition of the Biztech Blog. The Open University is an active member of Biztech, a...

On the 26th of January 2021, King’s College London and The British Council launched the STEM Education Hub targeting research and education in Brazil. The Hub’s mission is to act as a point of co-operation between the UK and Brazil. As a member of the Hub KMi Researcher, Lara Piccolo, presented her research on technology design to promote social changes both in Brazil and...

CORE provides access to freely available full text papers which were previously unavailable in PubMed to enhance the experience of its users. This is delivered via the LinkOut service. Read the CORE blog post to find out more about this integration. Continue reading on the Open Research blog.

The Polifonia project kick off meeting was held today. The project aims to identify and recreate connections between music, people, places and events from the 17th century to the modern day. Funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Framework Programme, project partners such as, King’s College in London, and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences met virtually, (due to...

KMi has joined the I4OA Stakeholders' Group, adding its support to their Open Abstract Initiative. This action, launched on 24 September, aims to advocate to all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them to trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote...

KMI's CORE has reached a new milestone of 30 million monthly active users. This follows already significant growth of CORE’s user base in 2020, as they only reported achieving 20 million monthly users in June 2020.  Read the detailed blog post here.  Related Links: Read the detailed blog post here.

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) blog has initiated a COVID special collection, featuring the latest news about the PT Anywhere network simulator. PT Anywhere, which has been jointly developed by the Open University and Cisco, has recently launched an accessible version for the visually impaired, in the context of the Open Networking Lab Accessibility project. The Open Networking...

The 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020) took place online on November 21-25, 2020. eLmL is bringing together federated views on mobile learning, hybrid learning and online learning. The conference is dedicated to educators, eLearning experts, and students to exchange their ideas, experiences and lessons learned in different facets of modern...

Our latest paper from BeeWatch Planting for Pollinators citizen science data has just been published in Nature Scientific Reports. Widespread concern over declines in pollinating insects has led to numerous recommendations of which “pollinator-friendly” plants to grow and help turn urban environments into valuable habitat for such important wildlife. We used data gathered through...

The Open Education Global 2020 conference took place online on November 16-20. The Open Education Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students to discuss and explore how open education advances educational practices around the world. This year’s conference...

KMI's CORE team continues to work on improving the CORE. This period was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products. Find more in the blog post. Related Links: Find more in the blog post

Most conferences this year are being held virtually and the 2020 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the most prestigious international venue for research on the Semantic Web and Linked Data, is no different. Over the years, KMi has been one of the top contributors to the conference and this tradition continues in 2020, with members of the lab chairing tracks at the conference,...

The first edition of the shared task organised by the researchers at CORE, Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, UK featured the classification of citations for research impact analysis. The new shared task, known as the 3C Citation Context Classification task, organised as part of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020 and was hosted on the...

The Black Lives Matter movement has (re)highlighted systemic inequalities within our social structures, including Higher Education (HE), that require immediate attention. Efforts to decolonise research and curricula must be accompanied by real investment in communities that have been historically disadvantaged or excluded from HE or specific domains, like STEM.  To contribute to balance...

October 15, 16 & 17, 2020 marked three days of celebration of the Erasmus+ Programme in Europe and beyond. Erasmus Days are a unique opportunity to organise an event, share Erasmus experiences and spread the word about Erasmus projects. For those that want to study or train abroad, Erasmus Days offer three dedicated days to learn about the Erasmus+ Programme, talk with the...

The I4OA was launched this September, calling for an increase in the volume of open abstracts. After having identified that either a large number of the published literature does not have open abstracts, or that available abstracts are currently disseminated via proprietary platforms with reuse restrictions, I4OA calls the publishing community to open up all abstracts of the published...

arXiv readers now have a faster way to find articles relevant to their interests. From an article abstract page, readers can simply activate the CORE Recommender to find additional open access research on similar topics. Read more at the arXiv.org blog. Related Links: Read more at the arXiv.org blog.

The 23rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2020) took place online on September 23-25. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy.  KMi was represented by Audrey Ekuban and Alexander...

The 17th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2020) was held virtually on September 12-18. This year, a special track was devoted to research contributions at the intersection of Knowledge Representation and Robotics. 25% of the submissions to this special track were accepted as full papers. Agnese Chiatti, together with supervisors Enrico Motta...

The Open University (OU) has won the categories for Best use of data by a not-for-profit organisation and the Data for society in the DataIQ Awards 2020.The two OU winners were announced in a vibrant virtual tea-time awards ceremony which honoured and celebrated the outstanding contributions to the data and analytics industry. A third entry was shortlisted in the Most innovative use of AI...

CORE’s mission is to increase the discoverability of open access research and promote as widely as possible the content of our data providers, i.e., repositories, journals, and web resources. We currently collaborate with more than 10,000 data providers from around the world and are continuously looking for new ways to increase this number to offer an as complete as possible coverage of the...

Blockchain technology provides a decentralised peer-to-peer infrastructure, supporting openness, transparency, accountability, identity management and trust. As such, the Blockchain has the potential to revolutionise education in a number of ways. Blockchain technology offers opportunities to thoroughly rethink how we find educational content and training services online, how we register and pay...

Last week Milton Keynes College, the education provider of KMi's two apprentices, featured our Digital Marketing and Social Media Apprentice Kiran Parmar in their blog.  Kiran has been with us for a year, alongside a Web Developer Apprentice. In the blog Kiran talks about why he decided to take an alternative route to studying as an undergraduate which many...

The 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2020) will be held virtually on 16-18 September 2020. EKAW is one of the leading international conferences in the area of knowledge engineering and its applications. This year, it is being organised by the Free University of Bolzen-Bolzano. This year’s theme was "Ethical and Trustworthy...

The first virtual Summer Summit of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) took place on August 26-27, 2020. The event was a great success, with over 300 participants joining from 25 countries. The event's theme was exploring Learning Technology in a time of crisis, care and complexity. Participants explored the themes of crisis, care and complexity together with an international line...

The 1st Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKG2020) was held virtually on 25th August, when participants were invited to explore innovative solutions and ideas for the production and consumption of Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs). SKG was a satellite event of the 24th edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL2020), which was...

Despite the global situation caused by the pandemic and the ongoing changes, the second quarter of 2020 has seen significant progress in the operation and development of CORE – new products have been released and the team reached new achievements. Follow the link and be informed about: 1. 20 million monthly CORE users and growth of CORE’s worldwide rank 2. CORE Repository...

Due to unprecedented events following the global pandemic situation, this year, the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020 was fully organised virtually. The entire workshop constituted a single day, with four sessions, featuring keynote talks, with accepted paper presentations and a shared task on citation context classification. More details regarding the...

Congratulations to Alessio Antonini, who was co-author of the Best Paper at the 31st ACM International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT’20). This year’s conference theme was Hypertext for Social Good with a focus on ensuring that technology will have a positive impact on both society and individual users. HT’20 turned some important stones to reunify different...

Tracie Farrell, one of KMi’s Research Associates, won second place for her presentation on exploring emergent language in the manosphere at WebSci2020 this month. This work was based on a large-scale study using word embeddings to help extract and define new words from online communities focusing on men’s issues. The paper is available here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/70529/. Collaborating...

At the end of last week, Anita defended her thesis titled ‘Capturing and exploiting citation knowledge for the recommendation of scientific publications’ which explored various notions of citations for recommending scientific publications; notions such as citation graph, citation intention, citation context, citation section and citation proximity. By exploiting such knowledge, she...

On July 13th 2020, the work of the Open Blockchain group was presented to the W3C Credentials Community Group. John Domingue, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Niaz Chowdhury and Mano Ramachandran joined a conference call between all members of the W3C group and presented their latest work on Verifiable Credentials and Blockchains. In particular, John and Allan presented the Open...

As the COVID-19 pandemic puts the focus on literacy and numeracy in home-schooling, KMi researchers have developed technologies to also help families learn about the natural environment.  The Human-Computer Collaborative Learning in Citizen Science (X-Polli:Nation) project, which received £507,000 from the Engineering and Physical Research Council has responded to the...

Congratulations to Oliva, KMi’s web development apprentice, who along with her many classmates passed her exam despite being in lockdown! Started in October Olivia Hagen passed her Software Development Methodologies assessment along with all her classmates at MK College in May. Olivia was tested on all sort of skills such as development methodologies and stages on the software...

CORE is happy to announce the release of a new version of the CORE Repository Dashboard. The update will be of particular interest to UK repositories as we are releasing with it a new tool to support REF2021 open access compliance assessment. The tool was developed for repository managers and research administrators to improve the harvesting of their repository outputs and ensure their content is...

The first formal review of the QualiChain project took place on June 18th, 2020. The review was held online and was attended by representatives from all project partners, the Project Officer, two external reviewers, as well as DG CONNECT representatives. The review was a complete success, with the reviewers and the Project Officer commending the work carried out by the project partners. Very...

Thousands of data providers from almost 150 countries from all over the world are connected with researchers, students, life long learners and the general public via CORE. This past month  CORE’s monthly users reached 20 million -  we are really proud of it and grateful to all our content providers. Read more about this here. Related Links: Read more.

Great result of Agnese Chiatti, PhD student in KMi and member of the Intelligent Systems and Data Science group, at the 15th Edition of the Postgraduate Research Student Poster Competition, which was held earlier today at The Open University. Agnese submitted a poster entitled “Robots with Common Sense - Improving Sensemaking in Service Robotics”, which was ranked 2nd out of 39...

The OpenLearn course Discovering Computer Networks has been included in the UK Government Digital Skills Toolkit for furloughed workers. The Digital Skills Toolkit is a collection of training resources, including courses from Google, FutureLearn and the Open University, aiming to help people acquire digital skills for improving their employability. This online training initiative will be...

Members of the CORE Team have been working on submissions for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and today we are extremely happy to inform our readers that our two teams have both received acceptance notices. Doctors  Bikash Gyawali, Dr. Nancy Pontika and Dr. Petr Knoth have been working on “Open Access 2007-2017: Country and University Level Perspective” while...

CORE follows its mission and makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure. This time CORE joins its forces with Lean Library, whose aim is to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service will now be indirectly used by library systems integrating Lean Library, thereby reaching...

KMi Research Fellow, Miriam Fernandez, received a Commendation from the STEM-Executive-Dean, Nick Braithwaite, at the STEM Faculty Assembly today.  Miriam was nominated by her KMi Director on behalf of her colleagues.  The commendation is recognised with a £250.00 award which can be used towards conference fees and travel/accommodation costs Miriam has lead a refreshed...

  As part of the International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications, WOSP 2020 (https://wosp.core.ac.uk/jcdl2020/index.html), researchers at CORE are organizing a new shared task: the '3C' Citation Context Classification Task. The aim of this shared task is to classify the citation context in research publications based on their influence and purpose. There will be two...

SPICE is a 3 year EU project developing new technologies and methods that enable groups at risk of exclusion to actively participate in culture through a process we term citizen curation. Our approach to citizen curation supports virtual and physical visitors to the museum to engage in two interrelated processes of interpretation and reflection. Citizens will be supported in developing their own...

At the end of March, CORE presented a webinar (slides and recording) on how UK HEIs can track compliance with the REF2021 open access policy. The webinar was fully booked and attended by 131 repository managers and research administrators from the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) groups.  During the webinar the...

Every day, millions of people access free OU content. Congratulations to all members, past and present, of our CORE and iTunes U teams for being recognised as two of the five Open Access sources mentioned on the OU’s Mission Page. CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers delivered in partnership by the Open University and Jisc. CORE hosts over 19...

Congratulations to KMi Research Fellow, Martin Hlosta the Early Alerts IndicatorsTeam and tutors for their Excellence in Teaching Award in the ‘enhancing teaching and learning’ category . The award was for OUAnalyse which is now deployed in all undergraduate OU modules to support student...

The 9th eSTEeM conference took place online on April 29-30, 2020. The conference is organised annually by the Open University, UK. Entitled "Informing Student Success - From Scholarship to Practice", this year’s programme has been a mix of short orals, workshops and poster presentations, showcasing scholarship work conducted by STEM colleagues. Alexander Mikroyannidis...

Despite being in COVID-19 lockdown, Taha Tobaili successfully defended his PhD Thesis entitled "Sentiment Analysis for the Latinised Arabic Arabizi". Taha’s supervisors, Dr Miriam Fernandez and Professor Harith Alani expressed their delight at his achievement. The panel was chaired by Professor Marian Petre with Professor Zdenek Zdrahal as internal examiner alongside external...

RET is a scheme at The Open University created to celebrate outstanding contributions to learning, teaching and the student experience in all types of roles across the University - both individual and team roles. More than 470 student submissions were sent this year. OUAnalyse and the Early Alert Indicators project was recognised as winners of the OU Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET) in...

Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and Enrico Motta Professor of Knowledge Technologies, were ranked 7 and 24 respectively out of-the top 2000 scholars in their AI field.  AMiner produces the rankings by drawing on a variety of sources available on the web, including semantic-based profiles,...

  KMi Professors in the Top 25 on Most influential Scholar List Two KMi Professors feature among the top 25 most cited scholars inthe Knowledge Engineering field, according to the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List for 2020. Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and Enrico Motta Professor of...

CORE is extremely happy to keep its reader up to date and here is its quarterly report for January to March 2020 period. Read CORE Blog Post which includes:   CORE is ready to release a premium version of the Repository Dashboard CORE’s products are used by Open Access Helper CORE is continuously expanding its ambassadors’ network CORE step by...

KMi researchers have created the world’s first digital application to certify COVID-19 immunity test results. The Open Blockchain Team, led by Professor John Domingue, have developed a prototype mobile phone app that enables instant verification of tamper-proof coronavirus test results and vaccination certificates. Speaking on the new mobile phone app Professor John Domingue,...

KMi’s Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and leader of the Social Data Science group, has received a grant of €393,000 from a European Union (EU) emergency fund to track the spread of misinformation about coronavirus (COVID-19) on social media platforms. Harith and his team will track the extent of misinformation about COVID-19 in social media content so that it can be brought...

Alexander Mikroyannidis has co-edited the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020). The eLmL 2020 proceedings include the papers of the QualiChain Special Track on “Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain”. Project partners have contributed 6 papers that describe the context and goals of the QualiChain...

Last Tuesday, March 3, we were privileged at CORE to welcome a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge. Carl Malamud and Petr Knoth had a very productive discussion of their work, common goals and shared their experience. What is more, Carl Malamud has given a talk at KMi on text and data mining in scientific journals. For more information about his talk, read here....

KMi conducted a successful pilot of the IoC blockchain-verified badges this week at the second Institute of Coding (IoC) Conference. Conference attendees were given delegate badges with blockchain technology to log their activities over the course of the two-day event as part of the OU pilot. During the conference, delegates took part in a series of activities, such as visiting the...

Read about our work on going beyond mirroring content from our data providers to improve data quality. In our latest blog post, we present how we link CORE data to complementary scholarly sources and databases including Crossref, MAG, and ORCID.    Related Links: Read more.

KMi gathered yesterday to celebrate Prashant Khare’s successful defence of his PhD thesis, Identifying and Processing Crisis Information from Social Media.  The exam panel was successfully convened, despite severe weather from Storm Ciara which caused disruption to the examiners’ travel plans. Ironically, Prashant’s work is focused on processing crisis information, which...

Claus Wolf, with CORE’s support, has developed the OA Helper - a  brand new application, which enables iOS users to search for scientific articles in their devices without hitting a paywall. Fascinated by Open Access and Open Source, Claus Wolf implemented CORE Discovery and CORE Recommender into this application.  Claus Wolf says: “Open Access provides a level playing...

Last week saw four KMi researchers travel to Noida, near Delhi, for a week-long meeting with the senior team of Amity University. Amity University has around 175,00 students across 22 campuses in India and 13 more globally including in London, Dubai, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, South Africa and China.  This meeting followed a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the OU and...

In the UK, there are over 2 million people with sight loss, with 360,000 registered as blind or partially sighted. Approximately 25% of those with partial sight loss are employed, but this decreases to 10% for those who are blind. There is therefore a pressing need to enable blind and visually impaired people to gain better access to the job market. Evidence has shown that people who are visually...

KMi researcher Allan Third, and KMi Director John Domingue attended the DEL4ALL Project Kick Off Meeting in Luxembourg  on 21-22 January 2020. Digital Enhanced Learning for All (DEL4ALL) is a new EU H2020-funded Coordination and Support Action.  The project aims to promote a forward-looking perspective, for more personalised learning solutions for everyone, while demonstrating the...

KMi researchers are among the leaders of a new group of academics, aDecentWeb, which aims to create a web where individuals and organisations remain in control. John Domingue and Allan Third co-chaired the group’s first Decent(ralised) Web Symposium held in Vienna on 17th January 2020. The event was restricted to 200 attendees drawn from a range of research interests including...

KMi Director, John Domingue’s, TEDx Talk 'A Blockchain-based decentralised university' is available on TEDx Talks on YouTube. John was one of 24 selected speakers for the very first TEDxOpenUniversity event which was held on 8 November 2019 in Milton Keynes. The theme of the event was ‘Imagine What’s Next’ and it attracted over 22,000 viewers either online or...

The latest meeting of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network took place in KMi on December 5-6. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting...

CORE supports Plans S in granting open access to scholarly outputs (such as publications) to anyone without any barriers and restrictions, including to most forms of use and re-use by humans and machines. PlanS is an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS") who, from 2020, will require that all articles by their grantees...

The Open Education Global Conference (OE Global 2019) took place in Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy on November 26-28. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances...

On November 11-13, the Co-Inform project team attended the Paris Peace Forum event, which aims to place global governance at the top of the international agenda. The Call for Projects received more than 700 project submissions from 115 countries. The Co-inform project was showcased in the New Technology category. The event was attended by 7000 people, including 33...

The annual Ufi VocTech Showcase took place on November 21, 2019 in IET London. The event showcased a wide variety of projects funded by the Ufi VocTech Trust. Attendees had the opportunity to learn about the latest innovative vocational learning solutions and approaches helping to upskill adults across the UK. Alexander Mikroyannidis (KMi) and Andrew Smith (Computing &...

At the 25th Anniversary KMi Festival we invited staff from across the OU campus to come and find out how our latest knowledge and media technologies are impacting education, science, and cities.  The Festival attendees included Lady Kitty Chisholm, one of the three founders of KMi, the STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, and the new CFO Paul Traynor.  Visitors had in-depth...

The GATEKEEPER project official starts in Madrid (23-25 Oct. 2019) with a pack-full kick-off meeting (KOM). With the size of a small conference, the KOM guided the forty-three partners in building a shared vision for GK. During the three days, the consortium worked on sharing their experiences on advanced health & care solutions and integrating the different perspectives of clinicians,...

Every year the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the main destination for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The 18th edition of the ISWC was held last week in Auckland, New Zealand, and hosted around 500 researchers coming from all around the world. ISWC is of high importance to KMi since it relates to much of the core research and projects in the lab. Many researchers...

The Open Networking Lab project has launched a free online course entitled “Discovering computer networks: hands on in the Open Networking Lab”, where learners can explore how computer networks operate, discover how data is sent around the internet, as well as put their understanding into practice using the PT Anywhere network simulator to create their own simulated computer...

The Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference (OOFHEC2019) took place on October 16-18 in Madrid, Spain. This is the flagship annual event of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), Europe’s leading institutional association in online, open and flexible higher education. This year’s event was hosted by the National Distance Education University...

CORE was presented with the Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award at The Open University's Research Excellence Awards Ceremony 2019 which took place at the MK Stadium on October 23rd.   Over 150 Researchers, academics and support staff attended with Professor Kevin Hetheringthon, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Scholarship hosting. The...

Early October saw the KMi Director participate in two panels in a Conference on Understanding the Post-truth Society held in Valletta, Malta. The aim of the event was to bring together technology experts, social scientists and journalists to discuss how recent challenges and issues associated with fake news, mass datafication, mass surveillance, censorship and the death of trust. Our input to...

Following scandals in the media such as with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook there has been widespread concern around the abuse of personal online data. These include from Sir Tim Berners Lee who in a Variety article called the over centralisation of data on the Web ‘anti human’. At the annual EU Big Data Value Forum, held in Helsinki, KMi’s Director highlighted how a...

Last week saw robotics teams from several European countries converge to Central Milton Keynes to take part in the First ERL Smart CIty RObotic Challenge (the SciRoc challenge). The event, which was organised by KMi’s ISDS team, was held at centre:mk from 18 to 21 September. The aim of SciRoc, an EU-funded project comprising 10 partners from 6 EU countries, is to bring robotics competitions...

The consortium of the QualiChain project has met in Madrid, Spain on September 19-20, 2019. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The QualiChain project targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment...

CORE has just made it to the top 5,000 websites globally accroding to Alexa Global Rank, which is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3 month period. As of today, CORE ranks at 4,924, climbing 871 places over the last 90 days. The improvement is impressive considerring that academic websites typically experience a seasonal slowdown...

The Pan Commonwealth Forum (PCF), held at Murrayfield Stadium the home of Scottish rugby, brought together over 500 attendees from 61 commonwealth countries including many ministers and university vice chancellors to discuss the future of learning. The overall aim of this year’s event was to discuss, debate and showcase how innovations are improving the quality of education and creating new...

The Fifth Summit for the STI International Summit, a bi-annual event, was held in Crete this week. Chaired by KMi’s Director John Domingue, the event brought together leading researchers from across the globe (including Stanford and the University of Southern California in the US and Wonkwang University in Korea) to discuss the research challenges associated with Knowledge Graphs. The...

Alexander Mikroyannidis and the QualiChain project are organising a special track at the 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020), which will be held on March 22-26, 2020 in Valencia, Spain. The special track is entitled Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain and it will investigate the creation, piloting and evaluation of decentralised solutions...

Last week, Angelo was in Oslo for the 23rd edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL2019). Every year, this conference attracts many researchers from all over the world, working in the fields of digital libraries, information retrieval, text analysis, web archives, and many others. Angelo attended the conference to present his recent results...

Alexander Mikroyannidis joined the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALTC) last week and delivered a QualiChain workshop. ALTC 2019 took place on 3-5 September 2019 in Edinburgh, UK with a packed programme and over 450 participants from across the globe. ALTC is an annual event aiming to confront and challenge established assumptions, approaches and accepted truths in relation to...

OU Analyse has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Awards (THE 2019 Awards) in the category Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year! Conceived in 2013 by Prof. Zdenek Zdrahal, OUAnalyse is a joint collaborative project between the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Data and Student Analytics (DSA). The resulting product of this...

Success in research and innovation should primarily build and depend on clarity of thought, innovation of ideas, and integrity of processes, rather than on external factors like prior reputation or levels of resources.  Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation aim to bring equity and inclusivity to research. Yet could policy interventions in these directions actually worsen...

CORE participated at the Open Repositories conference (10 - 13 June 2019), which took place in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s conference theme was “All the user needs”, where CORE received much attention and participated actively with 5 presentations:     Assessing compliance with the UK REF2021 Open Access Policy Comparing the performance of OAI-PMH with...

The 2nd edition of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS) was organised by STLab-ISTC National Research Council at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro between 30th June and 6th July 2019. Following the success of last year, the Summer School was held once again in Bertinoro, a small village on a scenic hill with a wonderful panoramic view. The school focused on...

This week, WIRED Magazine released an article covering KMI’s ongoing work about networked misogyny and misogynistic language online. WIRED reporters interviewed KMi researchers in response to a paper delivered at the WebSci19 conference (Sunday June 30th - Wednesday July 3rd, Boston, USA). Authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani, along with associated researcher Jakub...

This past week (Thursday July 4 - Sunday July 7) has seen the SciRoc team (specifically, Matthew Studley and Mark Wilson from UWE and Enrico Motta, Ian Pulford, Gianluca Bardaro and Agnese Chiatti from KMi) camping in Middleton Hall (Central Milton Keynes), as part of the MK Futures 2050 event. The SciRoc stand was conceived for showcasing different robotics technology and advertising the...

Christina Myers' PhD, supervised by Lara Piccolo and Trevor Collins, explores how to democratise educational game design in order to enable diverse teams to design games in an egalitarian and well-informed way. To evaluate some of the tools that Christina has developed, she organised two weekend-long game design events, also known as ‘Game Jams', where participants learnt how to...

Last week saw the second plenary face-to-face meeting of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network, which took place in Limassol, Cyprus. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly...

CORE a global aggregator of open access content and UK’s national aggregator will be assisting the UK Research and Innovation’s audit for the REF2021 by supplying the deposit date information for all UK REF outputs. Compliance with the REF2021 Open Access Policy is established when an author deposits the post-print or Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository,...

Last week, KMi members were in two flagship events, spreading the word about the QualiChain project. The Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2019) took place on June 2-6 in Portoroz, Slovenia. QualiChain was represented by John Domingue and Allan Third from KMi, as well as Damien Graux from Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany. QualiChain was presented prominently at the opening and...

The Co-Inform consortium came back triumphant from Cyprus where the project's first review took place on June 7th in the beautiful historical public library building of Limassol.  Project officer and assigned monitors expressed their surprise of how much was achieved by Co-Inform in its first 12 months of life. These achievements included the organisation of three...

KMi researchers Dasha Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth win Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2019) for their paper titled: “Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance”. JCDL 2019 is an A* conference (highest rank) and the world’s highest ranking venue for digital libraries research, within the top...

Congratulations to Angelo Salatino for succeeding in his viva! Last Friday, Angelo Salatino successfully defended his PhD thesis on Early Detection of Research Trends. The thesis is a body of research work over the last three years leading to a successful system that identifies the emergence of new research topics up to two years before they emerge (i.e., at their embryonic stage). The work in...

CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content and Turnitin, a global leader in plagiarism detection software, have entered into a collaboration. Using CORE’s FastSync service, Turnitin’s proprietary web crawler will search through CORE’s vast global database of open access content and metadata—135 million metadata records from over 3,700 data...

The last few weeks has seen the KMi Director travel to give Keynotes, participate in panels and project meetings all related to KMi’s blockchain work. At the end of April there the Blockchain Expo took place at the Olympia Grand in London with over 8,000. John Domingue gave a Keynote on applying blockchains to lifelong learning. The event covered a wide range of areas with other...

The consortium of the QualiChain project has met in Lisbon, Portugal on May 9-10. This has been the first plenary face-to-face meeting of the project, after its kick-off meeting in January 2019. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The next plenary face-to-face meeting will be held on September...

A Nature article titled “Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career”, which discusses the importance of opening up research data and how data sharing could benefit researchers, mentions the FOSTER Open Science eLearning Portal, developed in KMI.   The EU funded “Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research” (FOSTER) and its continuation...

Nikolaos (“Nikos”) Nanas completed his PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at KMi in 2004. His research focused on Adaptive Information Filtering and its application to content personalisation. Inspired by the biological immune system, he developed an AI model (that he called “Nootropia") capable of learning and continuously adapting to an individual’s multiple and...

COMRADES project witnessed its final review at the European Commission in Brussels recently, bringing to an end the work of the project which started in January 2016. COMRADES is a €2 million European H2020 project, co-ordinated by Prof Harith Alani from KMi, and involves the University of Sheffield (UK), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Ushahidi network (Kenya), and Gov2U...

A study by Drahomira Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika, and Petr Knoth of KMI has been featured in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The study evaluated the time it took for academics to deposit some 800,000 papers in repositories in relation to when these papers got published. The bibliometric data for the study came from KMI's CORE. As the...

KMi was invited to present the Co-Infom project at the event "Why does fact checking matter?" which was organised by FactCheckNI as part of the Imagine! Festival in Belfast. The event focused on the importance of fact checking from the perspectives of fact checkers, data scientists, journalists, and academics.  The panellists in the event were Allan Leonard (Editor,...

We are very excited to announce that CORE has released a new front-end marking the end of Phase 1 of front-end improvements, which will continue with 2 more phases. The key highlights of the new UI are: A more modern yet functional look and feel. Support for mobile devices. A new and better presentation of CORE’s mission and services. Cross-browser support covering...

Earlier this week the KMi Director, John Domingue, was awarded a Fellowship of the British Blockchain Association. As stated on the British Blockchain Association website an award of the Fellowship is “recognition of exceptional achievement and contribution to Blockchain research and allied disciplines”. Additionally, recognition through a Fellowship demonstrates a...

KMi are part of a 40 partner EU project that has just be given the go ahead as part of the EU Horizon2020 research funding programme. The main objective of the Project is to create a GATEKEEPER that connects healthcare providers, businesses, entrepreneurs, elderly citizens and the communities they live in, in order to originate an open, trust-based arena for matching ideas,...

We are delighted to announce new research funding from the EPSRC to explore the potential for collaborative learning between humans and AI within the framework of environmental citizen science. A new collaboration between KMi (Siddharthan and Rüger) and STEM Deanery / EEES (Ansine), in partnership with Imperial College London, University of Aberdeen, Learning Through...

KMi was invited to give a presentation and run a workshop at the first Japanese Government run blockchain hackathon which happened in February in Tokyo. It was sponsored by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and tickets where by application only and limited due to the venue size. There were about 98 participants in the event and 22 teams entered the Hackathon competition. It...

The SlideWiki project has been formally concluded with its final review, which was held on February 27 in Hannover, Germany. The project has developed an open-source platform for collaborative authoring of educational content, where the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable content can be widely shared and crowdsourced. Similarly to Wikipedia for...

Our latest Blogging birds paper has just been published in the Communications of the ACM. Blogging birds is a novel artificial intelligence program that generates creative texts to communicate telemetric data derived from satellite tags fitted to red kites — a medium-size bird of prey — as part of a species reintroduction program in the U.K. We address the challenge of communicating...

CORE usage has increased dramatically in 2018 and has hit the 10 million monthly active users mark in January 2019 (10.41 million users). This is a 571% increase of users compared to January 2018. As of January 2019, CORE was the 5,448th most used website globally according to an independent Alexa Rank. This rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website...

Last week saw the final review of the HUB4NGI project in Brussels. Starting in January 2017, HUB4NGI was the first Coordination and Support Action dedicated to transforming the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative into an increasingly dynamic, collaborative, vibrant and participatory Research and Innovation Ecosystem. HUB4NGI has offered a collaborative platform capable of...

The latest OU STEM newsletter features the collaboration of the Open Networking Lab with the Watford college. The Open Networking Lab makes available introductory practical computer networking skills training, in order to service the needs of vocational learners (Further Education and Apprenticeship levels), educators, and industry. PT Anywhere is the underlying technology the project uses...

The new H2020 project QualiChain has had its kick-off meeting on January 22-23, hosted by the coordinator partner NTUA in Athens, Greece. QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project focuses on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology for disrupting the...

The Open University social media team organised a light-hearted Rubik’s Cube solving competition for the occasion of Brainteaser month in January.  The competitors were Jakub Kocvara from the Knowledge Media Institute, representing computer science field and Dr. Robert Brignall, Senior Lecturer and the Director of Research in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, representing...

  Congratulations on Trung Huynh's viva success! Last Friday, Trung Huynh successfully defended his PhD thesis Text Classification With Deep Neural Networks. The thesis is a body of research work over the last six years culminating in a successful system that identifies documents pertaining to Adverse Drug Reactions in corpora as diverse as tweets and MEDLINE case reports. The work...

Springer Nature and the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of The Open University are partnering to provide a comprehensive Computer Science Ontology (CSO) to a broad range of communities engaged with scholarly data. CSO can be accessed free of charge through the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide feedback on the ontology. Ontologies of research...

The SlideWiki project delivered an info day about “Open and Collaborative Tools and Open Courses”, which took place on December 15th in Athens, Greece. The info day was organised by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) and the Greek Ministry of Education. The event was attended by more than 100 trainers from higher, secondary and primary...

COMRADES team organised a 3 day exhibition at ICT 2018 in Vienna, to showcase the various technologies developed in H2020 COMRADES project. More than 5000 people attended the event this year, so the COMRADES booth was super busy! Visitors to the booth were able to see and use a crisis mapping platform that was powered with AI technologies to automatically filter, categorise, and...

Danica Greetham, KMI’s Senior Research Fellow went to the House of Lords on the 11th December 2018 on the invitation of Environmental Defense Fund Europe, to participate at the roundtable on the electrification of transport and the electricity sector. The meeting was chaired by Baroness Worthington and attended by representatives of several of the big 6 energy distribution network operator,...

The 2nd European Computational Social Science symposium held in Cologne, Germany hosted the 1st workshop on Reframing Research (RefResh) organised by the KMiers Dr. Mannocci and Dr. Osborne and Dr. Manghi from ISTI, CNR, Italy. The main objective of RefResh was to bring together researchers from both quantitative and qualitative...

KMi’s Alan Fletcher was asked by Universities in Wales to provide a presentation and workshop for a delegation of Vietnamese Universities visiting The University of South Wales in Cardiff this week. The delegation had asked to learn more about the development of the smart city movement in the UK and in particular the work done by the OU in Milton Keynes and Cardiff. Universities Wales...

The 11th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI) took place on November 12-14 in the beautiful city of Seville in Spain. This year, more than 700 participants from 75 different countries attended the conference. This was a unique occasion to meet new and old colleagues and share experiences on the conference motto: Meeting the challenges of 21st century...

The final plenary meeting of the SlideWiki project took place on November 7-8 in Amsterdam, hosted by project partner Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The meeting saw the conclusion of the project’s activities, the preparations for the project’s final review, as well as the final release of the project’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) platform. The SlideWiki platform is fostering open...

  KMi’s Senior Technology Officer Paul Alexander recently attended the Gartner Symposium/IPxpo 2018 in Orlando, Florida during the period of 14-18 October 2018. The conference is held annually and allows thousands of CIOs and senior IT executives to come together to explore and discuss strategic trends and technologies that are shaping the future of IT and business. These included...

The kick-off meeting of the new Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network took place on October 29-30 in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki. The project is led by the University of Macedonia (Greece) and the project consortium consists of The Open University (UK), Cyprus University of Technology (Cyprus), and Pixel (Italy). The project will build a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants...

Every year the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the main destination for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The 17th edition of the conference was held last week at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey, California, and it hosted around 500 researchers coming from all around the world. Many KMiers including John Domingue, Harith Alani, Miriam Fernandez,...

On October 4th, 2018 KMi hosted the first Misinformation Workshop for OU researchers working on the topic of mis/dis/information, education and information literacy. As part of our participation in Co-Inform, a European-funded project to create misinformation resilient societies (https://coinform.eu/ ), we hope to draw from interdisciplinary research conducted at our own institution to help...

The 48th IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference took place on October 3-6 in San Jose, California, USA. FIE is a major international conference sponsored by the IEEE Education Society and the IEEE Computer Society. It is an ideal forum for sharing ideas, learning about the latest developments and interacting with colleagues in the fields of engineering and computing education. FIE 2018 has...

CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content, and Naver, South Korea’s number one search solution, have entered into a collaboration that will see CORE’s content being made available to 42 millions Naver users.  As part of the collaboration, Naver ingests data collected by CORE to enrich its Naver Academic search system with millions...

  The Knowledge Makers recently took over the Berrill Theatre and Mezzanine for their fifth, and rather special event. Over 100 attendees from across all faculties took part on the day and joining them were two guests from The Raspberry Pi Foundation; Philip Colligan, CEO and Dr. Sue Sentance, Chief Learning Officer. The event kicked off with a ‘Raspberry Research’ showcase...

The Institute of Welsh Affairs is the leading think tank for the development and delivery of public initiatives that have real impact in Wales. IWA director, Auriol Miller, invited KMi’s Alan Fletcher to be part of the IWA Advisory Group that has just published “Our Smart Region”, a report on the Cardiff Capital Region City Deal. The report explores how the Cardiff Capital...

Monday say KMi’s Director give a talk entitled “Blockchains: Hope or Hype?” at the Royal Institution sponsored by the French Embassy. The Royal Institution is an independent charity, founded in 1799, dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. The lecture was conducted in the famous Royal Institution theatre where some of the most famous scientists and research...

The 25th annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) took place on 11-13 September in Manchester, UK. The conference brings together different critical perspectives in Learning Technology from across the community in order to examine the challenges ahead and question the shape of things to come. The event was very well attended, featuring lively discussions and...

CORE has received a mention in a Nature article titled: “How AI technology can tame the scientific literature.” The article discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) assists researchers, and in general those who are in need of scientific information, with discovering new knowledge from the vast amounts of available scientific literature.   It is estimated that up to two...

The best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) went to the paper authored by David Pride and Petr Knoth titled “Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis.” The paper conducted the largest analysis of REF2014 data so far (data of 145 thousand submitted papers, 7 million...

The human biology Augmented Reality (AR) application developed by Paul Hogan in KMi that is used by students studying the Open University SK299 module and is a collaboration between KMi and STEM partners has been featured in the August edition of the Vuroria Newsletter and links readers to the video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChHVnB-2olk Vuforia is the AR tool of...

On August 14th, the SlideWiki project organised a webinar, which was delivered by Alexandra Garatzogianni (L3S Research Center, LUH), Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University, UK) and Allan Third (The Open University, UK). In the first part of this webinar, Alexandra presented the H2020 SlideWiki project and its OpenCourseWare (OCW) competition. Alexander then presented SlideWiki’s...

Tracie Farrell successfully passed her PhD viva on Friday August 3rd. Her PhD thesis investigates the affordances of learning analytics for mediating learning. Tracie has conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups with Open University students and educators. Her findings suggest that domain-related epistemological assumptions and previous experience influence how and why an...

QualiChain - Decentralised Qualification Verification and Management for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation   The QualiChain project, involving KMi’s Blockchain, Knowledge and Learning group, has been successfully funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.  QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and...

Alexander Mikroyannidis presented the latest KMi work on educational applications of the Blockchain at the World Conference on Educational Media and Technology (EdMedia). The event was held in Amsterdam on June 25-29. Alexander presented a paper outlining a learner-centred approach for lifelong learning powered by the Blockchain. The paper explores the different aspects of lifelong learning...

The 10th anniversary of the annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN) took place on July 2-4 in the beautiful island of Mallorca. EDULEARN is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector. After 10 years, it has become a reference event, where more...

  The 1st edition of the newly branded International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS) was organised by STLab-ISTC National Research Council and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro between 1st and 7th July 2018. The Centre was located in Bertinoro, a small village on a scenic hill with a wonderful panoramic view. The school...

This year, three important conferences related to educational technology were co-organised within one week in London as part of the London Festival of Learning. These conferences included Learning@Scale, International Conference on Learning Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Education. This provided us with a unique opportunity to meet researchers across similar but slightly different...

The UK Government All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Smart Cities last night published its initial report on how government strategy can unlock the potential of smart cities in the UK.  KMi's Alan Fletcher has been a member of the APPG for a number of years and was engaged in the process of creating the report with other members through a series of round table discussions,...

KMi joined colleagues from STEM and the OU in Ireland to present keynote and workshop presentations at Ireland’s premier digital conference. Over two days in June, Digital DNA brought together 3,000 delegates from across a wide range of industries. KMi Business Development Manager, Alan Fletcher was on stage with Jamie Cudden from Smart Dublin and Deborah Colville from Belfast City...

A pleasant and warm evening saw the Institute of Coding (IoC) from the House of Lords. The event, hosted by Baroness McGregor-Smith CBE, was attended by over 200 supporters from the senior management of major technology companies such as Amazon, ARM, BT, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Raspberry Pi, Telefonica, a wide range of companies including Barclays, Channel 4, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Jaguar Land...

The SKM3 team, the KMi research group on scholarly analytics, will present three full papers at the 2018 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the premiere international venue for the Semantic Web and Linked Data communities, which will be held in October in Monterey, California. The SKM3 team succeeded in having a paper accepted in each of the main tracks of the conference: Research...

Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI has updated Chinese@OU, a mobile application to accompany The Open University course: L197: Beginners' Chinese, with the next block of 5 lessons.  The app now includes a total of 11 out of 36 planned lessons.  The application is being developed in collaboration with Dr Qian Kan at The School of...

This year was a very special edition of the WebScience 2018 conference. Not only because it was the 10th anniversary of the event, but because Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and recipient of the 2016 ACM A. M. Turing Award (also known as the Nobel Price for informatics) delivered his award lecture at the conference on Tuesday 29th of May. This lecture was open to the...

On the 30th May, the Knowledge Makers organised the first 3D printing workshop to take place at KMi. 23 people from all OU faculties attended and got hands on with an introduction to the software tools used to design 3D objects and also got to see some ‘live’ printing and a range of finished examples.  The attendees were given a brief overview of OpenSCAD, an open-source 3D...

KMi Director, Prof. John Domingue, was invited to give two keynote talks during May 2018 featuring the blockchain research that he is leading at the Open University. The first talk, “Experiments with Blockchains. The Open University and the emergence of new higher education models” was given at second Conference by the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning (3CL,2018). ...

KMi once again had a strong presence at The Web Conference, which this year was held in Lyon, France from 23-27 April, and was attended by over 2300 delegates. More than 7500 tweets were posted about the event, with 17000 retweets, reaching around 8.6 million twitter users. On the Program Committee were KMi’s Harith Alani, Emanuele Bastianelli, Gregoire Burel, Enrico Daga, Andrea...

KMi researchers Pinelopi Troullinou and Allan Third were among the presenters at the first ever Milton Keynes CryptoParty, held on 10th May. CryptoParty is a grassroots global movement which hosts free workshops to introduce practical internet security to the general public. The Milton Keynes’ public were invited bring along a smartphone or laptop (or both!) and learn...

The Knowledge Media Institute is delighted to be among the successful applicants announced by The Equality Challenge Unit for the November 2017 award round.  Our Athena SWAN Bronze Award will be presented at an awards ceremony to be held at Swansea University on 16 July 2018. Dr Miriam Fernandez, who led KMi’s submission said “This is fantastic news. I’d like to thank...

The Open Education Global Conference (OE Global) is where the global open education community meets to discuss how opening education helps us achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and...

Ilaria Tiddi and Emanuele Bastianelli were among 800 top European experts who attended the European Robotics Forum (ERF2018) in Tampere, Finland on 13-15th March 2018.   Under the theme "Robots and Us", ERF2018 covered current societal and technical themes related to the field of robotics. Interesting subjects being featured include human-robot-collaboration and how robotics...

The paper entitled " Linking students’ timing of engagement to learning design and academic performance" authored by Quan Nguyen (IET), Michal Huptych (KMi) and Bart Rienties (IET) has been awarded the best full paper at the Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2018 (LAK-18), held in Sydney, Australia. LAK is the most prestigious conference on Learning Analytics held...

    KMi are currently looking to fill a number of posts to work in the Open University’s Institute of Coding team, comprising academics and technology specialists in learning analytics and distributed ledger technologies. These are:      Systems and Network Administrator...

Staff joined Enrico Daga, Senior Project Officer in KMi’s Data Science Group, to celebrate the successful defence of his PhD Thesis: "Knowledge Components and Methods for Policy Propagation in Data Flows”. The Thesis examines data-oriented systems and applications which are at the centre of current developments of the World Wide Web (WWW). On the Web of Data (WoD), information...

The SK299 Human biology app is the second Augmented Reality (AR) application developed by Paul Hogan in KMi that is used by students studying an Open University module and is a collaboration between KMi and STEM partners. It is a unique application designed to support and enhance the learning of the structure and function of the heart as part of the Open University module, SK299, or as a...

Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI is currently developing Chinese@OU, a mobile and desktop application to accompany The Open University course: L197: Beginners' Chinese. The application is being developed in collaboration with Dr Qian Kan at The School of Languages and Applied Linguistics to provide both Open University students and any beginner learners of...

Within the SlideWiki project we have launched an open call, looking for external partners that will produce educational content in the SlideWiki platform and will evaluate the platform with learners. Each external partner will receive funding in the region of £25-50k. The selected candidates will receive funding, guidance, technical support and mentoring from the SlideWiki Consortium...

In the light of the societal and ethical risks emerging from the technological developments in Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things, AAAI and ACM joined their forces to launch a new conference series exploring ‘AI, Ethics, and Society’. The first edition of this conference was co-located with AAAI-18 on February 2-3, 2018 in New Orleans, USA. The organizers received an...

Due to the underlying mapping API OU Go currently uses being discontinued from 1st February 2018 an urgent update was required.  Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI has taken the opportunity to add some new features to the 3D campus map app: Social media sharing Off and on campus map use Custom route navigation when using off campus A new single generic...

The Open University (OU) has been announced as a major partner in the UK’s Institute of Coding. Led by the University of Bath, the world-leading consortium has been established to strengthen the UK’s position globally in computing and IT, address the UK digital skills gap and create opportunities for more computer science graduates. Funding is comprised of £20 million...

Great news for some KMiers! A paper authored by Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta, published last June to PeerJ Computer Science journal, was one of the top 5 most viewed in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Digital Libraries. The paper entitled "How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the...

A KMi research student Drahomira Herrmannova (Dasha) has successfully defended her PhD thesis titled: "Mining Scholarly Publications for Research Evaluation." While current research metrics evaluate the excellence of a publication based on the number of interactions in the scholarly network, such as the number of times it has been cited (Bibliometrics) or downloaded (Altmerics),...

The CORE service is working in partnership with ProQuest to deliver more content within their library discovery services (Ex Libris Primo and Ex Libris Summon).  What does this mean for the end user?  This means that search results will bring back more relevant content from OA repositories worldwide in addition to the existing library collection records.  The user will...

Alexander Mikroyannidis was in Berlin last week to present the SlideWiki project at the OEB Global 2017 conference. OEB (Online Educa Berlin) Global brings participants to the forefront of learning and technology developments, gives new insights on opportunities and challenges that are changing the world of learning, and shows the latest best practices from leading...

KMi continued its long association with the KAW/K-CAP series of workshops and conferences this week with a strong presence at the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture(K-CAP2017) held in Austin, Texas, USA the first week of December. The K-CAP conferences aim at attracting researchers from diverse areas of Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge representation, knowledge...

The European Big Data Value Forum 2017 took place on November 21-23 in Versailles, Paris. This event has served as a platform, as well as a business and technology oriented showcase and exhibition space for the Big Data Value ‘Public Private Partnership’ established by the European Commission and the European data stakeholders, represented by the Big Data Value Association. Among...

UK Autodrive is a project in which The Open University are a partner. One of the things we are doing is supporting the work stream understanding public attitudes towards driverless/autonomous vehicles, in advance of the deployment of the MK Pods in 2018. A key activity in the work stream is the running of workshops that explore attitudes and perceptions towards driverless/autonomous...

A new blog launched yesterday by Jisc focuses on their Open Metrics project which aims to support the development of new research metrics. Following the publication of The Metric Tide report in 2015 there is increasing awareness within the sector of a need for new research evaluation metrics that move beyond the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics.  The launch included a...

EIFL’s invitation to KMi’s CORE project to take part in a workshop for researchers from developing countries pays dividends for participants and for CORE. In June 2017, EIFL invited the global open access full text aggregator CORE to take part in an Open Science train-the-trainer course for universities and research institutions in EIFL partner countries. Read more on...

An interview with KMi Director John Domingue about KMi’s blockchain research at Open University is one of four use case studies featured in a new EU Policy Report: Blockchain in Education.  The Report exemplifies where the Blockchain is being deployed with an education context, and its potential for disruption in the education sector. Other case studies are from University of...

It was the turn of Vienna, Austria to host the International Semantic Web Conference, and once again KMi’s participation at the event was very strong.  Miriam Fernandez co-chaired the Research Track, while Harith Alani, Enrico Motta, Alessandro Adamou, Francesco Osborne and Ilaria Tiddi sat on various program committees.  KMi members organised two Workshops this year, namely...

Laworm, an aggregator of scientific online tools addressed mainly to scientists, has listed CORE as a top tool and resource, which helps science to become open and collaborative.  Related Links: Tools and Resources to make Science Open and Collaborative

  During 25 – 27 October OpenMinTeD participated in the FORCE2017 Research Communication and e-Scholarship conference that brings together a diverse group of people interested in changing the way in which scholarly and scientific information is communicated and shared.   On Friday October 27th the OpenMinTeD partners held two workshops, one on “How to improve...

1.    DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE AN OPEN ACCESS STRATEGY? AND HOW ARE YOU IMPLEMENTING IT? CORE is an Open University (OU) project and is jointly funded by the OU and Jisc. CORE is a global full text aggregator of Open Access content harvesting repositories, institutional and disciplinary, and Open Access and Hybrid Journals. Today, the CORE team at the OU runs the CORE...

After many months of infrastructure re-architecting, KMi Systems have deployed the University's first hyperconverged platform for its VMware vSphere estate. Hyperconvergence is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box...

The 13th Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning took place last week in the beautiful city of Aveiro in Portugal. This is an annual event, gathering PhD students from universities across Europe and providing them with opportunities to develop research skills, increase their knowledge base, collaborate with others in their own and complementary research areas, engage in...

Students studying U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world were the first to trial a new app being developed by Paul Hogan in KMi.   OU Check In allows students to log in with their University credentials and displays a QR Code that tutors using the same app can scan to record their attendance. The one time log in app displays the student's QR Code each time the...

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is a term that can be used to describe an individual’s ability to develop a skill set allowing him/her to learn in a number of different ways. According to the well-established literature in this field, SRL is an active and constructive process where learners set themselves goals that enable them to monitor, regulate and control their cognition, motivation and...

Prof Stefan Rueger of KMi presented Dr Ian Witten of Waikato University to Executive Dean Mary Kellett at Friday's Degree Ceremony. Ian received a honorary doctorate "Doctor of the University" from the OU for services to the educationally underprivileged. Ian Witten is a Computer Scientist who has contributed to the research in his discipline in different areas: throughout his...

The 20th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL 2017) took place last week in Budapest, Hungary. This interdisciplinary conference focuses on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in the fields of Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis was...

KMi’s Alan Fletcher gave one of two key presentations hosted by the UK Foreign Office and British Embassy in Thailand for the 2017 Digital Thailand Big Bang Conference. Opened by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, the Thai Prime Minister, Digital Thailand Big Bang 2017 is a national digital and technology exhibition that aimed to transform ideas and connect people to Digital...

Geoff Snelson, director of strategy and futures of Milton Keynes council presented the MK:Smart vision to the TM Forum 3rd Smart City in Focus Forum in Yinchuan, China. The MK delegation included leader of the council, Peter Marland and Alan Fletcher from KMi who were invited to the Forum to contribute to the wider debate and to showcase the work of MK to a global audience. The event included an...

The latest issue of the International Journal of Technology-Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) is a special issue on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning. This special issue has been edited by KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis together with external collaborators Milos Kravcik (DFKI Germany), Viktoria Pammer (Graz University of Technology, Austria), Michael Prilla (Clausthal...

Paul Hogan in KMi has finalised the Augmented Reality (AR) application that he has developed in collaboration with partners in Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELs) that will be made available to students studying E117 Introduction to Sport and Fitness starting in October 2017. The initial application was developed to provide students with a more emersive study...

Dr Ilaria Tiddi has just won the 2017 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for her Dissertation ‘Explaining the Data Patterns with Knowledge from the Web of Data’. This is the second year in a row that a KMi PhD student has won this prestigious award with Dr Hassan Saif picking up the award last year. Ilaria describes her work at the intersection of knowledge discovery and...

On Wednesday, July 19th, the Open University Library welcomed students from five local schools to celebrate their participation in a poster competition about fighting hate crime and hate incidents in Milton Keynes. The competition was launched by the Citizens:MK Fight Against Hate Campaign, to raise awareness and encourage young people to participate in building a more equitable society. The...

Since 2012, members of KMi’s CORE team, headed by Petr Knoth, have orchestrated the WOSP (Workshop On mining Scientific Publications) held each year as a part of JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Previously held in locations as diverse as London and Indianapolis, this year the 6th annual international WOSP workshop took place at the University of Toronto. Over 100 academics...

Paul Hogan in KMi has developed an Android and iOS application on behalf of Learning Innovation that will allow students to share fun photos edited with OU themed emojis on social media. Although intended for students the app is free and so anyone will be able to use the app and promote The Open University. Learning Innovation Senior Product Development Manager Elizabeth Ellis who champions...

Paul Warren successfully defended his thesis on 13th July 2017. The title of Paul's thesis was "Human Reasoning and Description Logics: Applying Psychological Theory to Understand and Improve the Usability of Description Logics". The examiners were Dr. Gem Stapleton (University of Brighton) and Prof. Marian Petre (Computing and Communications). A key contribution of the thesis...

FIT4RRI is precisely intended to contribute to bridging the gap between RRI and Open Science and promoting viable strategies to render institutional changes in RFPOs (Research Funding and Performing Organizations) FIT4RRI moves from the assumption that there is a serious gap between the potential role RRI and OS (open science) could play in helping RFPOs (Research Funding and Performing...

The COMRADES (www.comrades-project.eu/) consortium came back triumphant from Brussels where the project's mid-term review was held at the European Commission on July 5th. Project officer and reviewers were highly impressed by the exceptional quality of the work and achievements of the project partners over the first half of the project.  In these 18 months, the consortium developed...

  The Learn about Fair 2017 (LAF 2017) came back this year at the OU yesterday bringing something new to the table focusing around the theme of ‘Personalised Open Learning’. KMi participated as an exhibitor showing neat projects for future innovation in teaching and learning; AR/VR developments, Green Data & OU Analyse. Paul Hogan, in the continuum of last year...

A paper coauthored by new KMi member,  Advaith Siddharthan,  ex-KMi member Chenghua Lin and their PhD student Mohamad Barawi was awarded the best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems – NLDB 2017 (17% acceptance rate for full papers). The extended version of the paper below will be published in the Data & Knowledge...

Several members of KMi contributed to the 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference, which took place recently in Portoroz, Slovenia. In the research track, there were papers from Dr. Hassan Saif and Paul Warren, on "A Semantic Graph-based Approach for Radicalisation Detection on Social Media" and "Improving the Comprehensibility of Description Logics - Applying...

The Augmented Reality in Activism (ARIA) Project launched this week at KMi with the aim of improving inclusive participation in social protest and campaigning. ARIA will utilise Augmented Reality (AR) and Web technologies to enable people to remotely engage in social activism. AR allows digital and physical world to coexist in the same space. With the help of mobile devices and...

After spending almost 2 years at the lab, I am finally pleased to share my research with my friends. Last Thursday, 25th of May, I presented my work in NLP titled "Sentiment Analysis for Arabizi: A Multilingual Jargon". Arabizi is a transcription of the naturally-dialectal Arabic language in Latinscript, quiet common in mobile texting and social media. Similar to the Modern Standard...

The latest CALRG event on Personalised Learning took place on May 18th. The event was organised by the Open University's Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) and brought together researchers that have been working on personalised learning in order to share the outcomes of their work and move forward to shape the university's strategy in this area. Alexander Mikroyannidis...

The IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) 2017 has been the eighth in a series of conferences that rotate among central locations in IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and North Africa). EDUCON is the flagship conference of the IEEE Education Society. This year’s EDUCON took place on April 25-28 in the city of Athens, Greece. Alexander Mikroyannidis attended the...

The first workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers which was recently held at the World Wide Web (WWW) conference in Perth, Australia attracted a lively audience who came to discuss the relationship two fields. Linked Data research has a long pedigree at WWW whereas Distributed Ledgers (which include blockchains the technological underpinning of crypto-currencies such as BitCoin) are very...

The Open Educational Resources conference (OER17) took place on April 5th and 6th in London. In two days fully packed with paper presentations and interactive sessions, OER17 has presented an opportunity for open practitioners, activists, educators and policy makers to come together as a community to reflect on ‘The Politics of Open’ and discuss the following questions: What are...

As every year, KMi presented the current results at the top-level Learning Analytics conference, Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK17). This year, the conference was held in Vancouver, Canada (13-17 March) and co-organised with ex-KMier Marek Hatala. Even though the acceptance rate was quite low, KMi was proud to have 5 papers accepted: 1 full paper, 3 short papers and 1 poster in the research...

The ENGAGE project conference, at the Open University on March 11th, was a unique event designed to launch a community of innovative science teachers.  Funded by the European Commission (EC), this event brought together more than 80 Science teachers from right across England, as well as Russia and Brazil. The conference themes were chosen by the teachers themselves, who...

The CARRE project received its final written review this week, and was rated "Excellent" by the Project Officer and the review panel. The final review meeting took place in December and was attended by representatives of all CARRE partners.    CARRE was a 3-year FP7 project, working on a personalised risk prediction and planning tool for patients with, or at risk of,...

Last month John Domingue and I attended the first European Ethereum Development conference. Over 400 developers and researchers gathered in Paris at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris on 17-18 February 2017, to hear about the latest developments in Ethereum technology and research including proof of stake, Scalabilit and Privacy as well as to see demonstrations of Ethereum-based...

The Open Education Global conference took place last week in the beautiful city of Cape Town. KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who presented a paper on the European Data Science Academy (EDSA) project and delivered a workshop related to the SlideWiki project. Alexander’s paper on the EDSA project describes the project’s approach in using open courseware in order to...

The Open University (OU) is leading a £480,050 project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council in England, to address barriers to student success. In collaboration with the University of Leeds and Plymouth University, Dr Trevor Collins, Research Fellow in the OU's Knowledge Media Institute, is initiating the 'Embedding and sustaining inclusive STEM practices' project....

On Febuary 27th, the Up2University project held its face-to-face kick-off meeting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, hosted by the project coordinator Géant. KMi and the Open University were represented by Allan Third.   Up2U is a Horizon 2020 project seeking to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education by developing innovative and flexible tools for learning which can...

COMRADES project, along with the Nepalese Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM), organised a very successful workshop in Kathmandu, attended by local community leaders, NGOs, government officials, and even the Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal.  The workshop was on '‘Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation for Making...

Angelo, one of our postgraduate students, was recently in Bari (Italy) to attend the 3rd International Winter School on Big Data—BigDat2017. The winter school was organised by the University of Bari (IT) and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (ES). Big Data has recently gained a lot of interest in research and many believe that it will still play its leading role for many years. Nowadays, we...

ENGAGE is a winner of the 2017 OER & Project Awards for Open Education Excellence, which was announced by the global network of Open Education (OEC). Fourteen partners and more than 15.000 open educators in 80 countries members of ENGAGE are celebrating this award now, whose the ceremony will be presented at the upcoming OEC Global Conference in Cape Town, South Africa,...

An online editing and proofreading company, Scribendi, has recently put together a list of top 21 freely available online databases. It is a pleasure to see CORE listed as Number 1 resource in this list. CORE has been included in this list thanks to its large volume of open access and free of cost content, offering 66 million of bibliographic metadata records and 5 million of full-text research...

The Open Technology Enhanced Learning (openTEL) is a priority research area, bringing together researchers from across the Open University. The group runs regular Show and TEL events to share expertise among its members. The latest such event took place on February 9th. Alexander Mikroyannidis from the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) joined the event and presented some of the latest KMi TEL...

KMi has a long track record of co-designing innovative demonstrators and it’s always rewarding when we hear back from our collaborators about how our prototypes have evolved and continue to influence practice. In a recent article on the whitefox blog, Natalia Kucirkova, a Senior Research Fellow at University College London, talks about the challenges of designing the Our Story app for...

CORE, a harvesting service that aggregates open access content from open access journals and repositories from all over the world, currently provides 5 millions of open access full-text papers. “In the last year, we have managed to scale up our harvesting process. This enabled us to significantly increase the amount of open access content we can offer to our users. With more and more...

KMi's development team recently helped to launch the Open University’s new website for the Health & Wellbeing Priority Research Area. This priority research area brings together the impressive expertise of Open University researchers with their extensive network of local, national and international partners and collaborators across government, industry, policy, practice and the...

Developed by Paul Hogan in KMI, OU Go was originally designed to help staff find their way around campus.  The app has been updated and now includes a new user interface,  location information for buildings, events, car and cycle parking and the outdoor artwork exhibits. KMI and Estates are keen that this app be made available to visitors to the University so it has been decided...

The past month the French Association of Directors and Officers of University Libraries and Documentation (ADBU) released a report entitled “Text and Data Mining in Higher Education and Public Research”, which mainly explores the UK and French copyright exceptions for text and data mining (TDM). In more detail, the report lists the benefits of text and data mining in scientific...

OU Go has been developed by Paul Hogan in KMi to assist staff members to locate the various campus buildings and outdoor artwork on the go via their Android or iOS device. The app is designed in the Pokemon Go theme which adds some fun whilst seeking a building location and updates the users location in real time to make it easy to find the desired destination. Along with providing users...

During 2016 the Knowledge Media Institute has been involved in developing and presenting variations of how Augmented Reality can be used in the education sector. The KMi Noel mobile application is a festive fun app developed by KMi for Open University staff. The app uses Augmented Reality to display a winter wonderland with animated elves, Santa and snowmen...watch as the snowmen dance to a...

The Times Higher Education has published an article by Martin Hall, former vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, which considers how Web 3.0 could revolutionise the way higher education is delivered.  In the article, our Director, John Domingue, explains to Martin why KMi’s “student first” vision for blockchain-enabled provision is good news for those needing...

The FORGE project has been rated "Excellent" by the Project Officer and the review panel during the final project review, yesterday in Brussels. The review was attended by representatives from all project partners, plus external partners that have joined the project through its Open Call series. FORGE has been a 3-year FP7 project, led by John Domingue from the Open University. The...

On Thursday November 17th at the Town Meeting, the whole of KMi celebrated Zdenek's 25 years’ working at the Open University, within KMi. Petr Knoth led a tribute from Zdenek’s team, after which we commemorated the occasion with epicurean style, including a personalised giant cookie and an edible pie-chart made by the Analyse team! We reflected that Zdenek has done some great...

It should come as no surprise that KMi’ers once again gain recognition for their outstanding  work. Ilaria Tiddi, Emanuele Bastianelli, Enrico Daga and Mathieu d’Aquin won the Best Demo Award for their paper ‘DKA-robo: dynamically updating time-invalid knowledge bases using robots’ at EKAW (The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge...

The conference “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) IN ACTION” organised by RRI Tools project supported by the European Commission was held  in Brussels on the  21st - 22nd of November 2016.  This event brought together 200 experts in the field to discuss open science and innovation system that tackle the societal challenges of our world. RRI IN...

Today Paul Hogan presented his work on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to visiting delegates from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi. Dr Joshua Valeta - Open and Distance Learning Coordinator and Dr Tasokwa Vida Musa Kakota - Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Head of Basic Sciences Department were visiting the University primarily to...

The third plenary meeting of the SlideWiki project took place on November 17th-18th in Genoa, Italy. The meeting was hosted by CNR- IEIIT/School of Robotics. Alexander Mikroyannidis and Allan Third represented the KMi team and joined more than 30 representatives from 17 partner organisations. SlideWiki is aiming at increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in...

“Buy Bitcoins Now!” was one of the main messages from Chandler Guo – who owns one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines – in the recent Internet of Value workshop held at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. The event focused on how blockchains can be used to support the transfer of non-financial value. In his talk Chandler articulated how future citizenship...

Today Paul Hogan presented the first seminar in the Digital Humanities in Practice 2016/17 seminar series. Covering all his work to date in the field of Augmented Reality and Virtual Realty the presentation was a practical demonstration of each application detailing the ideas behind its development and possible uses where it could be applied. The seminar demonstrated conceptual...

Data is now seen in many sectors as a platform for the provision of operational services. For example, only recently Admiral announced that they would price car insurance based on Facebook post data. Within UK Higher Education sector through learning analytics – the application of data analytics to student data – is beginning to have an impact and is attracting widespread interest...

the 14th conference on ePortfolios, Open Badges, Personal Ledgers, Identities, Trust, Blockchains... Bologna 26-27-28 October 2016 Bologna is home to the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, so it was a fitting place for the Open Badge and ePortfolio communities to come together and discuss the future of Open Badges and “to think deeply about technology - not...

All members of KMi's blockchain group visited Jisc's London offices yesterday for a workshop on the use of blockchain technology in higher education, specifically in tracking a student's learning history. After a presentation by department director John Domingue, demonstrations of some of our research 'Ðapps' were given by Michelle Bachler (reputation), Kevin Quick (course...

The 15th International Semantic Web Conference took place recently in Kobe, Japan, and the KMi contingent had a very strong showing at the conference. Ilaria Tiddi and Allan Third presented papers in the highly selective research track, on "Learning to Assess Linked Data Relationships Using Genetic Programming", and "Integrating medical scientific knowledge with the semantically...

Today KMi's Paul Hogan gave a presentation on the augmented reality application he is developing for the October 2017 presentation of SK299 Human Biology.  The app uses augmented reality to display a 3D model of a human heart in the users view that they can interact with.  His presentation demonstrated the app in use along with some of the included features such as bluetooth...

Yinchuan is one of the world’s leading smart cities. This growing, modern city has much in common with Milton Keynes. Host to the TMForumInFocus international conference with over 1000 delegates from over 66 countries, Yinchuan already boasts a range of smart city initiatives that include air quality, traffic and healthcare. KMi's Alan Fletcher addressed this global audience in...

EDSA had a very successful first review last week in Luxembourg. Professor John Domingue and Keyur Dave represented the KMi team at the review and were also responsible for the overall project presentation as KMi is the project coordinator. A panel of two international experts, chaired by EC project officer Carola Carstens, assessed the project with the first year project outcomes being...

Members of the public are being asked what they think of self-driving vehicles as part of a series of surveys being conducted on behalf of the UK Autodrive programme. The surveys have been designed by experts from Cambridge University, and are intended to track any changes in public attitude towards autonomous vehicles during the remaining two years of the UK Autodrive project. As well as...

The recently held International Blockchain week in Shanghai was jointly hosted by the Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs. The event consisted of a unique three-segment format. The first three days saw the Ethereum DevCon2 where major developers of the Ethereum community showcased the most up-to-date research and development work. This was followed by a Demo day for startups and...

Yesterday saw the official launch of the OU’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) Faculty which KMi joined from 1 August. KMi had a stand at the showcase as part of a celebration of some of the researching and teaching that is undertaken by the faculty.   KMi’s stand included some of our projects focussed around the theme ‘Future Technologies for...

The 6th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (ARTEL) took place on September 13th in Lyon, France, in the context of the 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL). The workshop was chaired by Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University), Michael Prilla (University of Bochum) and Milos Kravcik (RWTH Aachen University). The theme of this...

The ESWC Summer School, this year moved venues and was held for the first time in beautiful Dubrovnik, Croatia last week (between 5-10th September). The year the students enjoyed the change of focus to look at ‘the rise of the data scientist’ which featured a mixture of fantastic invited talks and tutorial taught by specialist from Southampton, JSI and KMi including Carlos Pedrinaci...

The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the largest Natural Language Processing (NLP) annual meeting among other NLP conferences such as EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. The main conference took place in the heart of Germany, Berlin, at the Humboldt University between the 8th and the 10th of August. Other in-conjunction events, 8 tutorials and 15 NLP workshops, took place on the 7th, 11th...

KMi researcher Alessandro Adamou has been appointed as representative for the United Kingdom in the upcoming European Linked Data Contest. The ELDC is a fringe event of the SEMANTiCS 2016 international conference on semantic systems, to be held in Leipzig during September 12-15, 2016. After the success of last year's edition, this initiative once more seeks to gather the top European...

A book co-edited by Alexander Mikroyannidis has reached the top Springer download charts. Since its online publication on November 2014, there has been a total of 28,033 chapter downloads of the book on SpringerLink. This means that the book has been one of the top 25% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2015. The book is entitled “Responsive Open Learning...

Paul Hogan in KMI is developing an augmented reality app for colleagues in the STEM faculty that explores the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) to support students studying human biology.   The app allows the user to view and interact with an anatomically correct 3D model of a human heart.   To share this work with OU staff so that they can see and try for themselves this...

Dr Hassan Saif has recently received the 2016 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for his Thesis: “Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs”. The award will be presented during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), which will be held in Kobe, Japan on October 17-21 2016.   The competition this year was very tough with twice the number of submitted applications as...

The last plenary meeting of the FORGE project took place on July 11-12th in Athens, Greece. In a beautiful location by the sea, the FORGE partners met in order to wrap up the project and prepare for its final review. The main topics of discussion and planning had to do with the sustainability of the project’s outputs beyond its end. FORGE has been a 3-year FP7 project, led by John...

Drahomira Herrmannova and Petr Knoth have won the Best Poster Award at JCDL 2016 in Newark, USA with their contribution “Semantometrics: Towards fulltext-based research evaluation.” This was a very good timing as the full experimental report on semantometrics commissioned by Jisc was published in this announcement a week prior the conference.  The CORE team at KMi have also...

The WSTNet Web Science Summer School 2016 was held from Thursday, 30 June to Wednesday, 6 July 2016. The Summer School is the first edition of the oncoming WSTNet Summer School series on Web Science. It is organised by the Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST) at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Keynotes, tutorials and project work in...

The 2016 European Data Forum (EDF) which took place last week was a great success. This event which was setup by the European Commission supported by STI International and a number of prominent European researchers in 2012 has grown from under 200 participants to over 1000 registrations at this year’s event. EDF brings together key policy makers, industrial players and researchers to...

Last week, the CORE team attended the 11th Annual Conference on Open Repositories, an international conference addressed mainly to subject and institutional repository managers, focusing on open access, open data and open science tools, projects and services. At the conference the team had six submissions: 1. A workshop presentation on “How can repositories support the text-mining of...

Last Saturday Mobile Applications Developer from KMi, Paul Hogan gave a 45 minute presentation on KMi’s work with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to students attending the 2016 Open University Students Asscociation Conference. Paul's presentation was well received and gave a detailed insight into the applications he has developed allowing students to see how the...

Ilria Tiddi successfully defended her PhD on 16th June 2016. During the viva and in her thesis ("Explaining Data Patterns with Knowledge from the Web of Data"), she described her work at the intersection of knowledge discovery and semantic web research, using the Web of Data to generate explanations for patterns found in data through data mining techniques.  The examiners, Frank...

A new book written by KMiers Mathieu d'Aquin and Enrico Motta has just been published by Morgan and Claypool publishers, in the series "The Semantic Web: Theory and Technology". This book entitled "The Epistemology of Intelligent Semantic Web Systems" is a reflection of the evolution of the Semantic Web, a young discipline in comparison to other areas of computer...

The second plenary meeting of the SlideWiki project took place on June 9th-10th in the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. More than 30 representatives from 17 organisations across Europe travelled to Milton Keynes, in order to touch base on the latest project developments and plan subsequent collaborative actions. The meeting focused on the preparations for the release of the next...

As with past editions of the Extended Semantic Web Conference, the Thirteenth edition (ESWC2016), once again held in Anissaras, Crete, featured a significant KMi delegation and a host of former KMi-ers. Five researchers - Prof. John Domingue, Alessandro Adamou, Carlo Allocca, Mathieu d'Aquin and Hassan Saif - attended as KMi delegates, and even more contributed from afar to the success of the...

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) project has developed a new video introducing the main concepts behind the project to the general public. The video explains in simple terms what remote labs and online experimentation can bring to education and how FORGE is building on top of world-class experimentation facilities in order to close the gap between learners and...

On Thursday28 April the KMi team assembled to celebrate with a specially designed cake, the award to Harith Alani of the title Professor of Web Science. Professor Alani has been with KMi since 2009, moving here after beginning his research career at Southampton University.  Harith’s work centres on Social Semantics and Web Science, he has authored around 120 scientific articles,...

KMi's Stadium Live technology was used this week to support remote attendees to a STEM workshop on digital innovation, held in the Hub Theatre and hosted by Patrick Mcandrew (Director, IET), Doug Clow (IET), Hazel Rymer (acting PVC, (Learning and Teaching) and Andrew Law (Director, Open Media Unit). Initial ideas were prompted in response to a set of cue cards; then a set of learning...

As part of this year Learning Analytics and Knowledge(LAK16) conference in Edinburgh, the OU Analyse team from KMi organised The Data Literacy for Learning Analytics Workshop. The organisation of this workshop was motivated by the success of the Machine Analytics workshop at LAK14 in Indianapolis.   The workshop ran the whole day on April 26th 2016 and attracted around 30...

The 2nd annual NET FUTURES conference, which wishes to maximize the competitiveness of the European technology industry, took place last week in Brussels, Belgium. The aim of the conference is to bridge the gaps between research and innovation labs, businesses, marketing, entrepreneurship and policy-making communities, with the idea that innovations will more easily and effectively find their way...

KMi joined the celebrations of the OU’s Charter Day by being one of the chosen stands at the Learn About Fair (LAF) yesterday. In line with the fair’s theme ‘Innovation in Teaching and Learning: Putting Students First’ we showcased a selection of projects as part of our stand KMi:Future Technologies for Learning. These included:   OU Analyse - identifying students...

Every year the World Wide Web Conference provides an opportunity for many researchers from both academy and industry to discuss about topics that are centred around the World Wide Web. In its 25th edition, which took place in Montreal (CA) from 11th to 15th of April 2016, more than a thousand people from 55 countries joined together to present progress in...

The 7th IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON 2016) took place last week in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Alexander Mikroyannidis presented a methodology for the design, delivery and evaluation of learning resources for remote experimentation. This methodology has been developed in the context of the European project FORGE, which promotes online learning using Future Internet Research and...

Last week the Clipper team participated in an invited workshop at the British Library, organised by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) consortium. The purpose of the workshop was to collate use cases and start outlining a development road map for extending the IIIF to include support for Audio/Video annotation. This was a great opportunity to find out more about the IIIF...

The use Open and Linked Data associated with education has been growing steadily, in part thanks to efforts involving KMi, such as data.open.ac.uk, LinkedUniversities, the LinkedUp project and now the AFEL project. The book "Open Data for Education: Linked, Shared and Reusable Data for Teaching and Learning" is therefore a timely publication. Edited by Dmitry Mouromstsev and Mathieu...

In this year's Open Repositories 2016 Conference, an international conference addressed to the scholarly communications community with a focus on repositories, open access, open data and open science, CORE had 6 items accepted;  1 Paper, 1 Repository Rave presentation, 1 Workshop, 1 Poster and 2 showcases in the Developer Track and Ideas Challenge. In our presentations we will...

At this year’s Jisc DigiFest Dr. Petr Knoth was invited to sit on a panel discussing Responsible Research Metrics. This panel was organised in the context of the recently published Metrics Tide report commissioned by HEFCE, which looked into issues surrounding the use of quantitative research metrics in REF. The other two panelists were Prof. Stephen Curry of Imperial College and...

MK:Smart project was part of a select range of Open University projects showcased to parliamentarians, in the Atlee Suite of Portcullis House in Westminster on 9th March 2016.     The team comprising of Jaisha Bruce, Jane Whild and Mathieu d’Aquin from Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and Daniel Gooch and Annika Wolff from the University’s Maths Computing and...

Earlier this month, the Election Debate Visualisation (EDV) project  was the subject of a full-length feature as part of the Rethinking Debates project. This is the first of a series of reports on the impact of technology on electoral processes around the world, launched by Civic Hall, a US-based community centre for the world’s civic innovators. After interviewing KMi's Brian...

On 24 Feb. John Domingue, the Director of KMi, hosted a technical talk titled ‘Ethereum - A Blockchain Platform’  by Konstantin Kudryavtsev (Head of Technical Relations – Eth Core Ltd.) at the KMi Podium. It was well attended with representatives from several OU departments (i.e. Business School, MCT, Law etc.). The highlight of this talk was Ethereum (www.ethereum.org)...

The ebook "Text Analytics: 28 Experts Share How to Achieve Business Value" (download page) gives insights into how large industries are exploiting big unstructured data to drive business value. The free eBook was created to demonstrate the benefits of text analytics to a vast array of companies, customer intelligence professionals, and marketers.  In this ebook Dr. Petr...

On the 10th February KMi welcomed back one of our co-founders, Lady Kitty Chisholm.  Kitty is director of Boardwalk, a professional coach and facilitator supporting women in achieving their full leadership potential. Kitty has also recently co-authored a new book (published Nov, 2015) ‘Championing Women Leaders, Beyond Sponsorship’.   Kitty delivered an insightful and...

The Higher Education Commission is an independent body made up of leaders from the education sector, the business community and the major political parties   On the 26th January the Commission published their fourth report “From Bricks to Clicks - The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education” The publication event was held at the House of Lords and KMi Director,...

On January 18-19, the kick-off meeting of the SlideWiki project took place in Sankt Augustin, Germany hosted by the project ccordinator Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems. KMi and the Open University were represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis. SlideWiki is a new Horizon 2020 project, aiming at increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of...

Following input into a report compiled by the Higher Education Commission, From Bricks to Clicks: The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education Prof John Domingue spoke to the Guardian about how comprehensive use of learning analytics could transform the sector. John will also attend the launch event at the House of Lords at the end of the month. The report foresees a system in which...

Response to crisis often reveals organisational and technological shortcomings, which threaten community recovery and sustainable. Even though some technological solutions exist, challenges of communication, interoperability, and data analytics remain. The rise of social media as an information channel during crisis has become key to community resilience and response. This project will build an...

In December, the AFEL project had its first plenary meeting in the beautiful Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. The goal of AFEL (Analytics for Everyday Learning) is to develop methods and tools to understand informal/collective learning as it surfaces implicitly in online social environments. To achieve this, the project gathers a range of skills in a consortium funded...

On 17th December Simon Knight successfully defended his PhD thesis. Simon's thesis Developing Learning Analytics for Epistemic Commitments in a Collaborative Information Seeking Environment (supervised by Dr. Bart Rientes, Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum and Prof. Karen Littleton) draws upon diverse literatures to present an instantiation of a theoretically grounded analytic development arising...

This week saw a premier European event “Transforming Europe towards the Digital Age” held in Luxembourg. This event addressed with the digital skills gap which will grow from 335,000 to 825,000 unfilled positions in areas related to ICT by 2020.   The event was opened by the Prime Minister of Luxembourg Xavier Bettel, Jean-Luc Martino the European Chief Information Officer of...

KMi’s traditional Christmas party, always includes friends and family who are invited to our Podium to join the festive cheer. This year had a bit of a twist, we brought a tropical flavour to Milton Keynes all guests were dressed in Hawaiian theme. We had our KMi rules secret Santa, where choosing your present late in proceeding is a bonus as the chance for a ‘steal’ is...

Syllabuses in science are not known for being interesting. They are typically shopping lists, itemising every fact and concept. The problem is, with all those items to check off, teachers spend most of the time drilling kids’ heads full of content instead of filling them with enthusiasm.  The new KS3 Science Syllabus from AQA is different. Jointly developed by the Open University...

The Knowledge Media Institute's Paul Hogan has developed a mixed Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality mobile app to complement its Christmas card this year. Users can simply point their device at the card and see it come to life. They can also use the app with Google Cardboard and enter a virtual winter wonderland and take a sleigh ride through the snowy landscape. Although this is some...

RE.WORK caught up with MK:Smarts project director and KMi's Prof. Enrico Motta ahead of the presenation he is giving at RE.WORK Connect City Summit in March 2016 to hear more about MK:Smart, and how we can use technology to address challenges of our cities. Check out the full blog by clicking here. Related Links: http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/motta/

The FORGE iBook is now live on the Apple iBooks Store and available in 51 stores worldwide. This is a fully interactive eBook for iOS and MacOS. It introduces a range of Future Internet topics using FIRE facilities. Readers have the opportunity to study in depth various aspects of networking protocols and infrastructure, watch instructional movies and screencasts, as well as conduct experiments...

Stefan Rueger of KMi presented recent work on markerless motion capture at a landmark Conference for Visual Media Production that was held at BFI Southbank. The significance of this joint work with Frederic Fol Leymarie, Prashant Aparajeya and Vesna Petresin of Goldsmiths is that it will allow a practical way of capturing the motion of articulated moving bodies from a standard single-camera video...

The OUAnalyse team led by Prof. Zdenek Zdrahal has recently released the Open University Learning Analytics dataset (OULAD). This educational dataset is available under the CC-BY 4.0 license for everybody who wants to experiment with new ideas in Learning Analytics. The uniqueness of the dataset lies mainly in the richness of data describing student behaviour in the Virtual Learning...

The Barcelona based World Smart City Congress, a key annual event for Urban Innovation, has judged MK:Smart to be a great example of applied innovation derived from collaborative endeavour. Alan Fletcher, KMi business development manager, Peter Marland, Leader of MK Council and Geoff Snelson, director of strategy Milton Keynes Council were delighted to accept the nomination on behalf of the...

Dasha and Petr have participated in the challenge which is part of the upcoming Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) conference. The challenge, coorganised by Microsoft and Elsevier, was to assess the importance of scholarly articles, using data from Microsoft Academic Graph -- a large heterogeneous graph comprised of more than 120 million publications and the related authors, venues,...

Yesterday, Gregoire Burel successfully passed his viva to become the forth new doctor in KMi this year! Greg’s thesis entitled ‘Community and thread methods for identifying best answers in online question answering communities’, introduces the concepts of qualitative and structural design in order to investigate if features derived from community questionnaires can enrich the...

Representatives from all FORGE partners met on November 4th and 5th in Trinity College Dublin. This plenary meeting offered an opportunity to check on the progress of the individual work packages of the project, as well as prepare a work plan for the third and final year of the project. Denis Gillet, technical coordinator of the Go-Lab project, joined the meeting in order to present...

As a prelude to European Utility Week an invitation-only networking reception was held on 2nd November in the centre of Vienna. KMi's Professor Enrico Motta, project director of MK:Smart, took this opportunity to discuss the key issues related to smart cities within the context of utilities.   Following an introduction by HMA to Poland Robin Barnett, Professor Motta led the first...

The middle of October saw the European Data Science Academy (EDSA) at ICT 2015. ICT is the major European Commission event in the communications and computing area and this year had over 7,000 registrations. The opening talk included speeches from Günther Oettinger the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society and Anibal Cavaco Silva the President of Portugal.   EDSA...

The Knowledge Media Institute's Paul Hogan has developed an augmented reality mobile application for the Open Media Unit to be used in conjunction with their HUNT poster campaign, that compliments the new OU/BBC series 'The Hunt' which begins on 1st November on BBC 1.   The app, available on both Android and IOS, provides the user with an augmented reality enhanced view of the HUNT poster....

Every two years the ACM conference highlights significant research on the extraction of knowledge from diverse information sources. Main themes this year included capturing Scientific Knowledge, acquisition of complex Logical Knowledge, Knowledge Processing  with Big Data and Semantic Web Technologies such Linked Data, Knowledge Extraction from structured and unstructured sources,...

The International Semantic Web Conference this year witnessed another populous KMi delegation, with 8 people from the lab attending the conference, which took place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA, on October 11-15. The KMi contributed in a variety of ways to the main Semantic Web conference, both with a significant presence in the organising committee and by presenting a keynote, a research...

We have a new doctor in the house: Thomas Ullmann passed his viva today with flying colours, defending his thesis on 'Automated detection of reflection in texts'. Thomas investigated in his monograph, how natural language processing and machine learning techniques can be utilised to support the automated recognition of reflective writing, thereby developing a new unified model of...

We're pleased to announce that the MK Data Hub has received two prestigious awards in an event run by a global leader in Virtualisation and Cloud Computing. The MK Data Hub received awards for "Best virtualisation and disaster recovery project" and the top prize of "Best at show" at the VMworld Europe User Awards 2015. The event held in Barcelona,...

We would like to express our sorrow at the sudden death of Al Selvin. Al worked with us here from 2003-2011, when he wrote his PhD thesis "Participatory Knowledge Creation as Facilitated Art: An Investigation into Practitioner Ethics and Aesthetics." As a member of Simon Buckingham Shum’s team, Al also made key contributions towards numerous projects which...

At the request of the EU Commission FORGE, an EU project coordinated by KMi, ran a workshop at the headquarters of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) unit in Brussels on Digital Skills and the Future Internet. The workshop was attended by senior FIRE representatives including the unit’s Head and Deputy Head as well as representatives from the eSkills unit in Luxembourg...

We gathered at the Town Meeting today to celebrate promotions for Carlos Pedrinaci and Mathieu d'Aquin. Both members of staff are now officially "Senior Lecturers." Director, John Domingue congratulated the pair, and with a glass of bubbly and a slice of cake, they each gave a brief speech. Mathieu admitted that, although he had put in the hours and the effort to get to this...

The FORGE and Go-Lab projects have jointly organised the hands-on workshop “Building Remote Labs for Online Scientific Experimentation”, which was collocated with the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL) and the International Conference on Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP). The workshop took place on 20...

The FORGE project has organised the 5th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (ARTEL 2015), which was held in the context of the EC-TEL 2015, in Toledo, Spain on 15 September 2015. The workshop aimed at: Providing a forum for presenting and discussing research on awareness and reflection in TEL. Creating an interactive experience that...

“Definitely would recommend ESWC Summer School not as a regular event you can visit, but as a unique part of my life” Just a statement from one of our 24 students who attended ESWC Summer School in Kalamaki, Southern Crete last week. Prof John Domingue, Director of the School and President of STI International lead a very successful 5th ESWC...

The Knowledge Media Institute have built The Open University’s first Apple Watch app to help you keep up-to-date with KMi’s news. The mobile version is also available for the iPhone.   KMi's Paul Hogan has ensured that it is easy to use on the Apple Watch – you simply tap on the news story which interests you and scroll down to read. Return to the list with a quick...

Once again, the lab has been successful in winning significant sums of funding from Horizon 2020. As a result, we are pleased to announce four new projects due to begin in January 2016.   The lab won funding for four of the six successful ICT projects at The Open University. These projects will be pushing the boundaries in terms of moving analytics into the everyday, helping to deliver...

The TCBL project kicked off last month – What’s it all about?   Textile & Clothing Business Labs (TCBL) aims to create a transformational ecosystem capable of constantly innovating with the business and process models of the European Textile and Clothing (T&C) industry. The latter sector shows the greatest dependence on price based competition (a race to the bottom,...

On Tuesday 28 July the BBC posted a news story about how students at the OU are going to have their progress monitored by software to spot if they need any extra support. This related to Zdenek Zdrahal's project - OU Analyse. KMi's new Director, John Domingue and Ruth Tudor, President of The Open University's Students' Association represented the University and explained...