Inexcusable – Weeknote #19 – 12th July 2019

St Nicholas Market stall
St Nicholas Market stall

Monday I was off to Lumen House, location of the Jisc offices in Harwell. This was for me, my first meeting of the Jisc Group Senior Leadership Team. In my new role I am now part of GSLT. We are going to be discussing strategy.

During a break I did read this article from BBC News.

Reminded me of last week’s weeknote, in which I said about the Guardian article on the same subject, Police face calls to end use of facial recognition software.

…independent analysis found matches were only correct in a fifth of cases and the system was likely to break human rights laws.

Relying on new technology for some stuff can be excused, but using unproven technology that could result in negative impacts on people’s lives is inexcusable. Actually relying on technology without a human element is also inexcusable. The number of times we hear the phrase “well the computer says…”.  We need to remember that computers and software are designed by people and people can be wrong, biased and will make mistakes.

Temple Way in Bristol
Temple Way in Bristol

Tuesday I was back in our Bristol office and had a few meetings across the day on various subjects from our student partner programme to the Twitter.

The meeting about the Twitter was interesting as it reminded me of the many blog posts I have written about using Twitter. My overall perspective after using the Twitter for over twelve years now is that I still don’t know how to use the Twitter and saying “the Twitter” really annoys people.

Wednesday with no meetings in the diary, I decided to work from home. The office when busy can be noisy and distracting. Sometimes that is a positive thing, and sometimes distractions allow you to interact and engage with people, sometimes though you just need to crack on and get the writing done.

One of the main things I have been working on this week is mapping the Learning and Research TCP to the SIFA Framework. This will allow us to have consistency across all the TCPs in Jisc. However one area which the SIFA is lacking in is the research side, so further work will need to be done in that space.

Despite having left the project six months ago, I still get the odd e-mail about the Intelligent Campus project, having been linked to the project for so long I am not surprised. It’s an area which still interests me and I do like to keep on top of what is happening in this space not just in the HE sector, but also wider as with Smart City developments.

The University of Bristol tweeted out this week

They have been awarded £100million by Research England to research and develop cutting-edge tech, which will benefit society and change the world, at the new Bristol Digital Futures Institute, which will be in Bristol’s new Temple Quarter development.

Lots of discussion about the recent announcement that Alexa will start offering NHS Health Advice.

People will be able to get expert health advice using Amazon Alexa devices, under a partnership with the NHS, the government has announced.

Certainly the use of voice assistants has been growing in recent years, but also concerns about privacy, and this will only add fuel to that fire.

On Thursday I followed my colleague, Lawrie, on Twitter as he attended an event on Microsoft Teams.

https://twitter.com/Lawrie/status/1149265591582253056

https://twitter.com/Lawrie/status/1149298660557164544

It certainly sounded an interesting event and from what I hear Teams is gaining traction with the sector.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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