Projects

Fixing the Future

This 2 year interdisciplinary project will investigate how the lack of repairability in consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products and ecosystems will adversely impact equity, inclusion, and sustainability in the digital economy.

Not just about the present, but focus is on the future and impacts of IoT defaults to envision and address future inequalities. [ Universities of Edinburgh, Nottingham & Lancaster, BBC R&D ]

Adaptive Podcasts

Podcasts are a major area of media consumption and development. Over 1.3 billion podcasts were played by BBC listeners in 2021, up 25% from 2020. In collaboration with the European Broadcasting Union and partners, BBC R&D is developing an open-source platform for producing ‘adaptive’ podcasts. This allows broadcasters to personalise podcasts based on data implicitly provided by listener devices (e.g., location). Next wave challenges to widespread adoption include a) making data use explicit to give listeners greater control over and trust in personalization and b) responding to the sociality of the listening experience to enable group engagement with adaptive podcasts. [ Universities of Nottingham & Lancaster, BBC R&D ]

MIDAS

Existing systems for managing user identities are service oriented: identities are siloed within a single service, assumed to refer uniquely to a single individual where relationships are tied to one identity. People must manipulate services to manage multiple identities for a single person between and within different services, select which identities should be used to publish information and collaboratively manage identities on behalf of others within a group. We seek to understand the socio-technical complexities here from the perspectives of different stakeholders and translate these findings to recommendations and design patterns that contribute to alleviation of concerns in this landscape. [ Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge, BBC R&D ]

Other projects include the New Forms of Public Value at the Edge ( PETRAS & BBC R&D ) and Design of Data Dialogues in Media Recommenders ( HDI+ Network & BBC R&D ).