Chapter 1 Cancer
Chapter 2 Changing bodies
Chapter 3 Living in the natural world
Chapter 4 Living in the virtual world
Chapter 5 Getting to the heart of things
Chapter 6 Changing Behaviour
Chapter 7 Working Together
Generally speaking, the more specific a drug is for its target, the fewer unwanted side-effects there are. The huge potential of monoclonal antibody therapy, pharmacologist Roger McFadden argues, may provide the magic bullet that will enable us to tackle currently intractable diseases because of its highly targeted potency.
Roger McFadden, author of Introducing Pharmacology: For nursing and healthcare, is a Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology in the Faculty of Health at Birmingham City University.
Whether or not the Turing Test is actually a good or even sufficient test of artificial intelligence, is a moot point. That the Turing Test is passed within the next few decades, however, is highly likely, so says creator of virtual worlds David Burden.
But the real opportunity of artificial intelligence, of a virtual world is that it gives bots an environment in which to live, grow and evolve — including evolving intelligence.
David Burden is a Chartered and European Engineer. His career started in army communications managing a range of mobile and wireless systems before joining Ascom, a Swiss telecomms company and then Aseriti, the IT arm of Severn Trent plc. During the dot com boom, he founded a wireless data company developing both WAP and Voice XML systems. In 2004, he set up Daden Ltd, a virtual worlds and information 2.0 consultancy.
Dr Kathleen Maitland suggests that the world today’s children inhabit is qualitatively different from the world of previous generations, where the interface between humans and computers has evolved to the point where current distinctions are more difficult to sustain. Moreover, they — and we observe and interact with evolving digital worlds run, not by humans, but by computers themselves.
Dr Maitland is a lecturer in the Department of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks at Birmingham City University. Her research interests are requirements engineering, information systems evolution, fuzzy logic and other non-classical logic systems, human-computer interaction and e-commerce.
Humans naturally use speech, gestures and 3D interactions with touch, smell and taste capabilities to interact with the real environment. Professor Vinesh Raja of the Warwick Manufacturing Group believes that at least some of these modes of interaction between us and computers in the near-future — and playing a major role in healthcare applications such as stroke rehabilitation, as well as the more obvious applications in the games industry.
Professor Raja is currently interim Director of the Institute of Digital Healthcare and Head of the Informatics and Virtual Reality Group, part of WMG’s International Digital Lab. His main research focus is on digital healthcare with projects including remote patient monitoring, assistive technologies, virtual surgery and digital human anatomy.
Editor Keith Richards in his Introduction to The New Optimists says Jeremy Foss gives stimulating but disturbing revelations about quantum information.
The future Net, digital technologies expert Jeremy Foss says, will be a Net that knows you better than you know yourself. Interactivity and more efficient interfaces are encouraging us to betray more and more of our behaviour and preferences.
Jeremy Foss, as well as being a lecturer and researcher at Birmingham City University, has over 30 years’ industry experience with GEC, GPT and Marconi Communications in distributed computing, broadband development (including IPTV triple play services), network strategy, intelligence agents and collaborative virtual environments.
You may never have heard of NFC (Near Field Communications), but almost certainly you have used it. NFC, a branch of RFID, has many actual and potential uses, including systems for the visually impaired, the deaf and others who might benefit from assisted living, so says Garry Homer, Professor of Technology Transfer and Director of the IT Futures Centre.
A recent project, for example, integrated NFC into an application to aid visually impaired people to navigate their way round an unfamiliar environment.
Computer games, like all fiction, engage people by suspending their disbelief. This window into another world, says Stuart Slater, Director of the Institute of Gaming and Animation, allows the user’s imagination to be put on hold whilst experiencing the game designer’s imagination instead, a novel experience that engages emotional and cognitive capabilities in unexpected situations.
Dr Slater’s research in this emerging field is wide-ranging; his particular interests are in the interaction between the virtual world, including Second Life, and its inhabitants and how they react to agents in that environment, and the the real world. As well as directing the Institute of Gaming and Animation, he also teaches games programming at the University of Wolverhampton to both students and to developers in several leading games companies.
Dr Sue Charlesworth proposes a simple but radical transformation of the urban scene. The incorporation of sustainable drainage (SUDS) into the cityscape could provide a flexible and efficient means of mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Dr Charlesworth is Reader in Urban Geography at Coventry University. She began her career as a Medical Laboratory Technician, then took at OU degree followed by a PhD investigating the sediments collecting in urban lakes and rivers.This began her research interest in sustainable drainage (SUDS), an applied multidisciplinary area of work involving engineers, town planners, social scientists, ecologists and pure scientists.
If a financial value were placed on the environment, then it would be established as a national and global resource at a time when capitalist markets drive societies. But how to do this is a different matter, argues Veronica Lawrie, a professional ecologist working for a commercial enterprise, the global consultancy Atkins and a member of the Institute of Ecology and Environment Management WM Committee.
In reality, how do you assign a figure to a species, or a habitat, or an ecosystem? What really is the financial value of crop pollination by bees? Is it the sum of the honey, vegetable and fruit market values? Or should we take into account that fact that without bees to pollinate our crops, we will starve within a few years?
Urban ecosystems are important for two major reasons, says Dr Lucy Bastin of Aston University. First, the urban environment is where most people spend most of their time, Secondly, urban areas have a huge undervalued resource in all those scruffy patches of derelict land; biodiversity on urban brownfield sites is often surprisingly impressive.
Dr Bastin is a lecturer in GIS (Geographical Information Systems) at Aston University. She applies spatial analysis techniques to health, environmental and socio-demographic research challenges. She started out working for the Birmingham Urban Wildlife Trust, and then studied for a BSc in Zoology (Nottingham) and a PhD in the population ecology of urban plants (Birmingham). She has also worked as a researcher on fuzzy classifications of satellite imagery, and spent several years as a senior software developer at Tadpole-Cartesia.