Substantial Award to Support Serendipitous Discovery

PRESS RELEASE

Substantial Award to Support Serendipitous Discovery.

Helping researchers find what they didn’t know they needed to know.

Published: 3rd Aug 2010

A multidisciplinary project that aims to understand the role of serendipity and design technologies, to support innovation in research, has been awarded a grant of £1.87 million by the RCUK Digital Economy programme.

The project, entitled SerenA – Chance Encounters in the Space of Ideas – will be led by the University of Dundee in collaboration with the Universities of Goldsmiths College, Heriot Watt, Lancaster, Nottingham and University College London (UCL). The project includes involvement from Vodafone, Media City and Dundee Contemporary Arts.

We live in an age of burgeoning information, and increasingly fast information access. The WorldWide Web has allowed us to make many positive changes in our society and environment, for example through social networking and e-publishing, but it also presents problems, by its very nature. There is now so much information being spread so quickly that it is becoming impossible for individuals to be aware of enough of it, or to take full advantage of it.

What is more, because of the information overload, we are having to rely more and more on search tools to find what we want. While with practice we can use existing search tools to reasonable effect, they are only able to give us information directly matching the keywords that we search for. This is clearly useful, but its down side is that we are less likely than before to notice peripheral or tangential things, situations, knowledge or people who are relevant to us. For example, a search for a specific book in the library often results in a different title being selected; here unanticipated connections can transpire to be more interesting or relevant. It is this “happy accident”, known as Serendipity, that led, for example, to the discovery of penicillin. As we move into the age of digital publishing and archiving, it’s becoming harder to notice such connections, partly because we are more narrowly focused in the way we use digital searches, and partly because the search systems we use are very literal and unimaginative.

The team aims to design, deploy and test a Serendipity Arena, called SerenA, which, will proactively search information available from individuals, both physically and virtually, to identify knowledge and connections related to their research and their local environment. The aim is not to promote shared keywords, as existing systems do, but to use state-of-the-art technology to identify things that users did not know they needed to know. SerenA will be implemented as a physical presence in spaces within Dundee Contemporary Arts and Media City, Salford via personal technology, such as smartphones, and by public facing technology embedded in those locations. Outcomes of the project will be theory and applications, which will augment and inspire creative behavior.

SerenA aims to draw human and machine closer together than ever before, enhancing its users’ knowledge and their ability to interact with people likely to be important to them. The impact of the research will not only be of benefit across disciplines: it will be relevant to everyone interested in learning and discovery, of whatever kind.

Notes to Editors:

•SerenA is a 36-month £1.87m, Digital Economy Research Councils UK funded research project (June 2010- May 2013).

•SerenA is a collaborative research project run with Heriot-Watt, University College London (UCL), Nottingham University, Goldsmiths College, Lancaster University with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee (DJCAD) acting as the lead organisation. For more information on the research partners visit: www.hw.ac.uk/; www.notts.ac.uk/; www.dundee.ac.uk/;www.ucl.ac.uk/; www.lancs.ac.uk

•The multidisciplinary team is made up with expertise in Art and Design, Human Factors, Computing and Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction, Musicology, Robotics and Mobile Devices.

•The definition of  Serendipity: The faculty or phenomenon of making fortunate accidental discoveries.

Origin: The word serendipity was formed by English author Horace Walpole (1717-1797) from Serendip (also Serendib), an old name for Sri Lanka, in reference to a Persian tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “discovered, quite unexpectedly, great and wonderful good in the most unlikely of situations, places and people.”

•The grant was awarded through the RCUK Digital Economy programme. Digital Economy is defined by the Research Councils as the novel design or use of information and communication technologies to help transform the lives of individuals, society or business.

Information about the project is available through the website

http://www.serena.ac.uk

http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk

For further details contact:

Mhari MacDonald, Mel Woods (Principal Investigator)
Marketing Officer University of Dundee

University of DundeeDJCAD,
Perth Road
Dundee,
DD1 4HT

M.S.MacDonald@dundee.ac.uk m.j.woods@dundee.ac.uk