WMG at the University of Warwick have secured £1.2m grant funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) to explore how decentralisation, personal data, and our Internet-connected possessions come together on the Hub of all Things (HAT) platform. The first focus of the WMG team’s project will be issues of privacy and trust in children’s e-books.

The WMG team’s Dynamic, Real time, On-demand Personalisation for Scaling (DROPS) project is a collaboration between academics at the universities of Warwick, Surrey, and the West of England. It will examine the privacy, trust, and identity issues that arise from the development of personalized e-books for children's reading. The researchers’ focus on children's reading is motivated by evidence that shows that despite the value of personalised e-books for learning and reading enjoyment, there is a lack of research that engages with the range of privacy issues that these technologies introduce.

Working with the HAT Community Foundation, a non-profit promoting the use of HAT micro-servers for decentralized, person-controlled personal data, the DROPS project will investigate the technology, business, economic, and legal models of personalisation in a newly decentralised digital economy.

 The WMG SME Team is offering FREE Lean Six Sigma Assessments to assist SME manufacturing businesses seeking to improve their processes, for better efficiency and productivity gains.

Onur Eren, Technology Transfer Engineer and qualified Lean Six Sigma practitioner, at WMG, is leading the project which will help businesses evaluate their current operations and receive ideas on how they can transform current processes for the better.

The first stages of the project usually involve collecting data and gaining a better understanding of specific business issues, prior to applying a range of technologies and methodologies to develop and implement the necessary solutions.

Projects are being allocated on a first come-first served basis, email wmgsme@warwick.ac.uk to register your interest in receiving a free Six Sigma assessment.

 A multi-disciplinary digital economy research project by WMG at the University of Warwick has developed a multi-sided market for personal data known as the HAT.

This will now be taken forward by a new HAT Foundation which aims to roll it out globally to revolutionise how we all handle the vast amounts of personal information we are simply pouring online using research developed at WMG at the University of Warwick.

WMG Professor Irene NG said:

“We hand over vast reams of personal data to online shopping and search engines, and the growing internet of things is about to create vast new databases of personal data which our own household possessions will hold and share with external suppliers and agencies.”

“Now is the time to wake people up to just how much personal data they pour online and empower them to use that data to benefit them as much as it’s benefiting the businesses that are harvesting it.”

“With the internet of things growing as a concept people need to get as much utility out of their own data as the product providers and utilities that will increasingly be taking that data.”

Neil Carmichael MP has joined forces with Gloucestershire suppliers to launch a national research study at the Frocester George Inn which is playing a key role in the study.

The study led by researchers from WMG at the University of Warwick is examining the importance of supply chains. The research team chose the local Inn as a core part of the study because it uses so many local suppliers and is a perfect example of the chain reaction in the supply chain that occurs within the local economy when a new business flourishes.

In addition to serving local beers, the Frocester Inn sources many local ingredients for its menu, including local Cheese, meat products from Frocester Fayre and fruit and vegetables from Bramleys Cirencester. But their recent refurbishment has also benefited many other local businesses including phone contractors and builders, a local window cleaner and linen company.

The 2nd annual WMG Doctoral Research and Innovation Conference, entitled ‘Innovation through Collaboration’, is an excellent opportunity to showcase research from both academia and industry across themes in design, materials, manufacturing, systems and business transformation.

Organised by doctoral students, the conference will be held in the International Digital Laboratory on 30th June - 1st July, with an evening social event on the 30th.

Papers and poster presentations will take place across a wide variety of topics and awards will be presented in each theme.

Abstracts should be submitted online by 31st March.

At an event, earlier this week, Professor Irene Ng announced registration for the HAT personal data platform (HATPDP), which allows individuals to collect, use, share and trade their own data amongst themselves and with firms, will be open for people in the UK, giving them the opportunity to become the world's first 1 million HAT beta users.

In 2015, the HAT will first be launched in the Midlands and then later in the year in Singapore. The HATPDP was demonstrated for the first time at the 2nd Mad Hatters' Tea Party in London's Digital Catapult, with the release of the technical specification of the HAT APIs for developers and firms to build applications and devices around the use of personal data. The event also saw the release of the economic model of the HAT ecosystem, and new potential business models for the use of personal data of the future.

Announcing the HAT project's collaboration with Enable iD, to become the first HAT Platform Provider (HPP) in Europe, Professor Irene Ng, Director of the International Institute for Product and Service Innovation at WMG, University of Warwick and the Lead Investigator of the HAT project said:

We are very pleased to be working with Enable iD to scale up the HAT. We believe that the next stage of the Internet is that of data-driven human decisions enabled by the Internet of Things and data intensive services and we are really pleased that it will begin in the Midlands, the birthplace of the industrial revolution. We think the HAT will create an economic system that is more democratic in terms of data exchanges as well as incentivising more innovation, business opportunities and will create a whole new economy with new jobs and skills”.

Developers will be invited to be amongst the first to view technology to help support the next phase of the Internet's evolution when the Hub-of-All-Things (HAT) platform is revealed at a “Mad Hatters' Tea Party” later this month.

Professor Irene Ng, from WMG at the University of Warwick, will announce this forthcoming opportunity while speaking at the Innovate UK event in London on Wednesday 5th November.

The 2nd Mad Hatters' Tea Party on November 24, 2014 will be demonstrating the HAT, a technology and market platform for individuals to collect, use, share and trade their own data amongst themselves and with firms.

The event, hosted by the Connected Digital Economy Catapult at its new Digital Catapult Centre in London, will mark the first round release of the inbound and outbound APIs of the HAT with the aim of helping developers and firms prepare themselves to participate in the next wave of the Internet – an internet of data-driven decisions, empowering individuals to make smarter decisions in their day to day lives.

The HAT enables individuals to reclaim and control their own data for their personal use. Crucially, this digital data repository is owned by the individual and preserves their privacy. This is particularly important in today's increasingly connected world, where much of our lives is being captured digitally as data, giving rise to concerns about security, privacy, confidentiality and trust.

WMG at the University of Warwick and the Midlands Assembly Network (MAN) have announced that by working together they have boosted sales by over £1m and are set to create more than ten new jobs.

The dedicated SME team at WMG and MAN, a consortium of ten world class manufacturers based in the West Midlands, have been working together on a number of research led innovation projects, including the development of novel prototypes, materials analysis and the capture of funding for capital equipment.

They have now agreed to collaborate on a long-term innovation strategy that will also encompass leadership support to equip the management teams with the skills and know-how to implement their growth plans.

Birmingham households will be first to pilot new technology being developed by WMG at the University of Warwick that aims to create the next generation of 'Smart' homes with “smart” things working together in a “smart city”.

WMG has secured funding from the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Digital Economy Theme to partner with Birmingham City Council to create the HARRIET (HAT Resource Integration and Enabling Tool) project. This will equip homes with technology and software to create a HAT (Hub-of-all-Things), which aims to assist individuals to better understand their household behaviour and make “smarter” money saving and time saving decisions based on the data they then share on how they act as consumers within their homes see http://hubofallthings.com

The 18-month £485,000 project will work with volunteer households and individuals in Birmingham to collect, analyse and transform the “big data” about product and service consumption produced by modern households on a daily basis that will be stored in individuals’ personal HAT database.

A recent report by the House of Lords European Union Committee has called for the development of a policy framework, within the EU, aimed at tackling the issue of food waste. One of the key recommendations picked up in the media, was the issue of incentives and promotions such as ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ (known as BOGOF) deals. The report suggested that actions such as BOGOFs can pass food waste on to the consumer and encourage them to buy in larger volumes than required, and has proposed that such tactics should end.

This recommendation has been supported by Professor Jan Godsell, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Strategy at WMG, who has told the Birmingham Post that BOGOF offers ultimately don’t benefit customers, even though they appear to be good value at the time.