A busy 6 months

Speaking at "Handheld Learning" in RL

NHS Confederation at the National Health Service Auditorium

Over the past 6 months I’ve spoken about virtual worlds at the following events:

Feb 19 2009: Design London at Imperial College Business School: Accelerating Innovation Cycle Time Through Innovation Technologies (IvT) Workshop where I introduced Second Life as a disruptive technology for design prototyping and visualisation; whereby anyone can experience and share 3D visualisations around the globe instead of needing to visit a particular high cost installation. I likened this to the democratisation of print that occurred with the advent of desktop publishing and of online publishing with Web 2.0.

Feb 11 2009: British Library: Digital Lives Research Project. Here I followed my frequent fellow panelists Ian Hughes and Ren Reynolds by introducing the SciLands and International Spaceflight Museum to ask the question “what do you archive if you wish to preserve the current social phenomenon of Second Life?”. The key here is that these are venues and despite the grandeur of their interactive architecture they serve as a (very effective) context for the rich social interactions and events that occur there. Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois followed on by speaking about their project to archive the International Spaceflight Museum and other game/virtual worlds, and drew the conclusion that archivists need to engage with the virtual world communities and provide their users with the tools needed to preserve the culture.

On the same day, Feb 11th, Kate, Vishal, Robin, Ani and I ran a Second Life event for the NHS Confederation and the NHS Technology Adoption Centre, entitled Embracing Healthcare Technology and Innovation. I ran 800m after facilitating the SL breakout session at BMA House over to the British Library where I finished writing up the session while I was waiting to speak at the Digital Lives event (above). Given another 100 years of development I might be able to teleport that distance in RL. Delegates at this normally closed meeting were joined by over 70 virtual delegates from Finland, Singapore, USA, Canada, Norway, Italy, UK, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey and Serbia. Whereas the RL audience attended the whole of the day long event, our virtual delegates were able to come and go at will. Only 50% were present at any one time, but 35 people clocked up almost 1 hour’s attendance each. A poll of the RL audience revealed that just over half had heard of Second Life prior to the event, and that two thirds would like to see more NHS events use Second Life. Good news for the National Health Service Auditorium.

December 2008: I spoke at a conference on Government and Serious Games, organised by Futurelab and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). Here is a video of my presentation at the event.

The conference focussed on the role that serious games and virtual worlds might play in education, public services, and government policy. One outcome was to help stimulate new ideas for policy, business development and research to ensure that serious games and virtual worlds are recognised as a distinct cultural form with a role in public services. The day featured speakers from BERR and Futurelab as well as senior staff from Becta, DIUS, the Technology Strategy Board, Immersive Education, Caspian Games, Blitz Games, and the MoD. Keynote presentations were provided by Lord Puttnam of Queensgate and Tom Watson MP, Minister for Transformational Government, who argued that it is time to bring games to the heart of government. It was attended by key government departments and agencies, research centres, serious games companies, and the entertainment games industry.

November 2008: The American Medical Informatics Association in Washington DC hosted a featured panel titled ‘A Virtual World as a Healthcare Information Platform‘ to introduce members to the wonders of our projects in Second Life. James was in Washington and presented some of our work, then I led a tour through our Virtual Learning Hospital from the comfort of my living room in London. The session was run primarily within SL itself, and the audience in Washington were also treated to live presentations by Pathfinder Linden, Dan Hoch, Ramesh Ramloll and Dan Sands. After the conference Hibiscus Hastings (who blogged the SL conference) requested an interview and tour for an ‘onCNN’ article (vetted for use in CNN News coverage).

October 2008: The Handheld Learning Conference is billed as the international signature event for learning using mobile or ubiquitous technologies. This year I was invited to speak on a panel to help attendees understand the implications of Virtual Worlds and Social Networks for teaching and learning. Fellow panelists included Alan Welsman of Disney who spoke about the significance of virtual worlds for Disney’s family demographic (for example young kids playing on club penguin with their grandparents), my metaversangelist friend Ian Hughes/ePredator of IBM, Forterran Ron Edwards of Ambient Performance and Kurt Squire. We were joined for the panel discussion by dana boyd, fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society whose insistence on lower case typography for her name, reminded me of my Letraset days. dana’s research on youth’s use of social networking is insightful and her keynote presentation is essential viewing.

October 2008: Virtual Worlds Forum Europe in London

September 2008: Serious Applications of Virtual Worlds (Imperial College Internet Centre)

September 2008: Serious Virtual Worlds Conference 2008

For more presentations see my Presentations page in this blog.

Imperial College home to UK’s greatest concentration of world-leading and internationally excellent research

Imperial College London was judged as being home to the greatest concentration of world-leading and internationally excellent rated research amongst all multi-faculty UK universities in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), whose results were published in December 2008.

Not only did 73 per cent of the College’s staff have their research judged as world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*), the highest percentage of all UK multi-faculty universities, but the College also increased both the number and the percentage of staff submitted to the assessment compared to the preceding RAE which took place in 2001. Ninety-three per cent of Imperial’s academic staff, a total of 1,225, were selected for inclusion in the 2008 RAE compared to 87 per cent in 2001, representing a 6.7 per cent increase in terms of actual staff numbers.

Growth in Virtual World events predicted

The need for physicians to attend International events has been debated in the British Medical Journal. See for example: Surgeons have held conferences in Second Life; Leong, Kinross, Taylor, Purkayastha; Imperial College London; BMJ 2008 337: a683 where we reported that all of the delegates at the 1st meeting of the newly formed international Virtual Association of Surgeons (iVAS) agreed or strongly agreed that they would attend another meeting in the same medium. iVAS is a group of surgeons and scientists who want to change the way scientific communications are currently conducted. Their conferences are held entirely within the virtual world. This lowers the cost of attending, negates the need to travel and creates novel surgical research networks across the world. See http://ivas.wordpress.com/

Originally posted as a comment by Nanodave on The Metaverse Journal using Disqus.

Naked scientists in the corridors of Second Life

One of my favorite Science shows is the Naked Scientists podcast by Dr Chris Smith so last November I contacted Dr Chris and asked him if he would be interested in having a studio audience in the SciLands. By happy coincidence Chris had been thinking along the same lines and so the idea of Naked Scientists in Second Life was born. This weekend Gordon Clark and I headed to Cambridge while colleagues in Second Life tested the audio link. The resulting podcast included an interview with us both. I described the ISM’s tour of the planets and our joint nuclear experiments with University of Denver while Gordon spoke about his recent trip through a biological sim. You can read the transcript or download the podcast here. During the show I said that innovations often come out of different disciplines meeting and having corridor discussions. Whereas there aren’t corridors for the podcast audience to meet up in the real world we’ve built new corridors in Second Life. I had that firmly in mind when we established the SciLands in late 2006 – that we could create a place for International science and technology communities to meet and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, two organisations that don’t often cross paths in real life, the University of Denver and the UK National Physical Laboratory, but are neighbors in the SciLands decided to build a nuclear reactor in Second Life. That’s an Anglo-American collaboration I first mooted in June 2007 and started whilst at NPL and will be the subject of another blog article. Please listen to the podcast and if you decide that you like it why not join the studio audience at this slurl every Sunday at 6pm UK time (thats 10am SL time). 

A quick piece of knowledge transfer

I recently told Vlad Sokhan, a Strategic Research Fellow in molecular modelling at NPL about Amazon’s amazing new hardware-on-demand service, called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), that I’d heard about from Jeff Barr’s speech at a recent conference in Brighton (I listened to the podcast as the conference was full!). Vlad needs computing power for his molecular modelling work and currently uses the NPL grid.

He showed me a short movie segment that had taken over 30 hours of PC time to render. The movie showed methane molecules flowing through a carbon nanotube and had led Vlad to discover a kind of super-flow, which was 100 times faster than expected.

In view of these and other amazing properties carbon nanotubes are expected to underpin future developments such as new energy sources and miniature chemical factories that could help remove greenhouse gases from power station emissions.

Within the space of an evening Troy McLuhan and I had finished an exhibit of a 3D carbon nanotube and the movie with an explanatory information card. It took rather longer to decide where to place it at the new Science Center on Info Island. Here’s a picture of the final exhibit which was there for the Science Center opening meeting on October 12th.

Watch the movie here: Hi-res / Lo-res

Here comes the science: Carbon nanotubes continue to amaze scientists with their unique and unusual properties. How does the super-flow work you ask. Well, traditional models of fluid flow do not work well with nanotubes since they either use a fixed volume of fluid containing a changing population of particles or a continuous flow that is slower near the edges. Vlad’s approach accurately models the molecules behaviour as they encounter the inside surface of the nanotube. For a variety of reasons they actually speed up and travel further and faster along the tube walls than previously thought, and spend longer close to the walls instead of bouncing back into the main flow.

Further reading: There is a readable description of the possible use of nanotubes as highly efficient membranes for separating carbon dioxide from power plant flue gases in this article:
Science 19 May 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5776, pp. 1003 – 1004
Making High-Flux Membranes with Carbon Nanotubes
David S. Sholl and J. Karl Johnson

For the more technical readers, here is Vlad Sokhan’s original work:
Journal of Chemical Physics Volume 117, Number 18 8 November 2002
Fluid flow in nanopores: Accurate boundary conditions for carbon nanotubes
Vladimir P. Sokhan, David Nicholson, and Nicholas Quirkea

And a recent Nature paper where this finding was experimentally verified:
Nature 438, 44 (3 November 2005)
Nanoscale hydrodynamics: Enhanced flow in carbon nanotubes
Mainak Majumder, Nitin Chopra, Rodney Andrews and Bruce J. Hinds

Visit the exhibit (requires Secondlife client).