Posts by Timothy Hill
Research Tool Review: Learning to Loathe the Livescribe Echo – and Why You Might Love It
August 13, 2018
My difficulties with the Livescribe Echo begin before I’ve even started writing: what, I find myself wondering, am I supposed to do with the cap? Full disclosure: I have repeatedly demonstrated the Echo to staff across the University of Nottingham, and urged them to give it a try. And yet somehow, the problem of the …
NHS Hack Days: Big Data on the Frontlines
August 3, 2018
“The future” William Gibson famously declared, “is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” Nowhere does this feel more evident than in the NHS. In one part of the building where I’m writing this – the Queen’s Medical Centre – research oncologists are experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to diagnose cancer from …
Fear and Loathing on the Pokémon Go Trail. Also, Some Cautious Optimism: An Afternoon at the ODI
July 16, 2018
It’s 2 o’clock on a sultry summer afternoon; outside, London is still dreaming of a win against Croatia in the match that night. But here at the Open Data Institute Data Ethics seminar in EC2, things are going deep, fast. I’m thinking out loud about medical records: patient data, researcher data. On my right, a …
Heads I Win, Tails Don’t Count: Negative Results, Open Data, and the Curious World of Research Publication
May 14, 2018
In Tom Stoppard’s famous absurdist drama Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (well, famous, at any rate, to people who like absurdist drama) the first act opens with the title characters betting on a coin toss. Rosencrantz is quite happy with how this has been going: he is betting on heads, and the toss has indeed …
First Month on the Job: Small Problems. Big Questions. Tiny Salamanders
May 4, 2018
Four weeks on the job already, and this is only my first blog post as a member of the Digital Research team. I haven’t even got my staff profile set up yet: LinkedIn will have to do for the moment. Apologies for that: there just hasn’t been the time. I joined the team on April …
