We have been working away on implementation and have been a bit quiet on the blog.  We have just posted an updated website at www.visiblelegacy.com, which has an interactive demo and a look at the updated interfaces.

The new site has a registration mechanism, behind which you will find more information about our invited alpha offerings.

Tracing innovation : Agilent to Solazyme

I've posted on YouTube a video screen capture of my experiments using Visible Legacy to explore the collaboration between Agilent Technologies and Stanford University's professor Fritz Prinz.  This interesting activity is a research program designed to explore a new class of nanoscale devices using a combination of the scanning probe microscope and atomic layer deposition.  Interestingly, I also found papers from within Professor Prinz's lab describing the search for electrical current stemming from plants, and that a couple of co-authors are part of an emerging firm in San Francisco named Solazyme that is developing fuels from algae.  Solazyme's strategic advisory board includes Donald Kennedy, Bing Professor of Environmental Science and President Emeritus of Stanford, and former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.  I believe there are several hotspots of innovation to be found in Professor Prinz's lab!

posted by Will Snow

Mapping an illustrious career : the Roger Summit collection

Visible Legacy can be used as a way to navigate through the career of an illustrious luminary as a case study for teaching and learning.  This short informal screencast walks through the profile for Roger K Summit, pioneer in the information retrieval industry.  It shows in particular how his published and unpublished papers can be viewed in the context of projects and collaborators.

posted by Will Snow

Finding an expert : Stanford Mimir

I explored the Stanford MIMIR project using Visible Legacy, and posted an informal screen capture video on YouTube and above.  This project sounds very interesting from their website: "Our interdisciplinary team will apply new computational techniques to study the spread of ideas and methods across disciplines, to contrast the success of virtual and ephemeral versus formal and physical organizations, and to understand the complex behavior of a large-scale intellectual enterprise, and what attributes are important for successful innovation."

The video shows navigation with our prototype and gives an idea of where we are going.  We start with McFarland and his study of language in social networks, and discovered connections to joint projects by using the map, leading to unexpected new areas of study in computer recognition of natural language. In so doing it implies some of the reasons that the MIMIR project could be a hotspot of innovation!

posted by Will Snow

The global campus : the best universities now have worldwide reach | Economist

I found this Economist article very motivating.  Universities are unique hubs of ideas, people, and resources where more patient money can tackle challenges of large scale.  Nurturing talent to cross domain boundaries, and offering tools to make it easier do so will yield a payback in fostering innovation.

  

The global campus : the best universities now have worldwide reach

It is not just meetings of the rich and powerful that are getting increasingly cosmopolitan. Global universities are “reshaping the world”, argues Ben Wildavsky, the author of “The Great Brain Race”. Because big problems often transcend borders, many ambitious students demand a global education.

…

The best American universities are nothing like the stereotype of isolated ivory towers. Take the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded in 1861 to accelerate the industrialisation of America. Its ties with business are now intimate and global. Companies fund much of its research. Staff and students collaborate with established firms and set up a prodigious number of their own. A study in 2009 by the Kauffman Foundation, a think-tank in Missouri, estimated that MIT alumni had founded 25,800 companies that were still active, employing 3.3m people and generating annual sales of $2 trillion. “It’s a very entrepreneurial culture,” says Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president.

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Ms Hockfield, a neuroscientist, is excited by the potential of collaboration across disciplines. In the 20th century technological progress was driven by the convergence of engineering and physics, which yielded electronics. In the 21st century the hot area will be the convergence of engineering and biology, she predicts. For example, MIT’s cancer-research centre is staffed by a mix of biologists and engineers. Its projects include making nanoparticles that can destroy cancer cells. Another team at MIT, led by Angela Belcher, has found a way to make genetically modified viruses synthesise the cathodes and anodes of lithium-ion batteries at room temperature. This saves energy and uses no harmful organic solvents.

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“All the interesting problems cross boundaries,” says David Ellwood, the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some straddle borders. Some straddle disciplines. Some require co-operation between business, government, academia and non-profit groups. “So you have to train people to cross boundaries … leaders need “an incredible curiosity”.

posted by Will Snow