This news item on PublicTecnhology.net reports that the European Commission has launched a public consultation to search for the best strategies to boost Europes ICT research and innovation until 2020.

The Commission believes that Europe is underperforming in both the level and intensity of its research and innovation investments, with only 33% of research and innovation in developed economies worldwide being in ICT.

The three main questions asked within the consultation are:

1. What are the main challenges ahead for ICT research and innovation? As the ICT revolution continues, what are Europe's key priorities for research and innovation?

2. How, and in what fields, should Europe aim to lead? Europe has world industrial and technological leaders in key fields such as telecommunications and embedded systems. How can advances in these areas be reinforced and what new areas should a leadership profile be sought?

3. What is the role of public policy in putting Europe at the forefront of ICT innovation? How can research policy be consolidated to create a European market for ICT innovation? How can complementary policy fields such as standardisation, licensing and intellectual property regimes be adapted to support the early commercialisation of research results?

If you would like to contribute, visit the consultation site - "Shaping the ICT research and innovation agenda for the next decade" and have your say!

Labels: consultation, EU, futures, ICT, IT, researchmethods, strategy

There's been lots of UK media coverage over the weekend of a Microsoft research study that used traffic on Microsoft's Instant Messenger (IM) to investigate global communication (See articles in the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC.)

The study captured anonymised data from June 2006 - specifically properties of 30 billion IM conversations (not messages, conversations!) among 240 million people. Of interest to the media is the global investigation of 'six degrees of separation' - the idea that everyone is just six steps away from anyone else. In fact, the researchers found that the average separation among IM users was 6.6, or seven in terms of whole people!

The original study was published in June 2007 - which perhaps says something about the degrees of separation of journalists from up to date research.

Even though those with (reported) ages in the 15-35 age group are strongly overrepresented, there are other findings that are interesting in terms age and gender.
For example, a series of hot and cold graphs plotted against age, show that younger users have more conversations made of up more quickly generated messages, but they are shorter than older users who tend to send more messages per conversation. In terms of gender, the researchers note that "cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender".

Leskovec, J., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network.

Labels: digitalnatives, networks, researchmethods, sms

This article by Iain Barker of Step Two Designs discusses the technique of doing paired interviews whereby the two interviewees are encouraged to compare and contrast their experiences to provide a quicker but meaningful comparison of practices.

Labels: researchmethods, userexperience