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21 October 2010

£1.87million to Support Serendipitous Discovery

A £1.87million multidisciplinary project - led by the University of Dundee - has been launched to help researchers innovate by finding out what they didn’t know they needed to know.

Many great technological and scientific breakthroughs have come about as a result of fortunate accidental discoveries, with valuable insights being attributed to the phenomenon known as serendipity.

With the increasing use of the world wide web, we rely on search tools to find what we want amongst the sheer volume of information available. However, for research purposes there is a danger that search results are too narrowly focussed, and researchers are less likely to notice potentially valuable peripheral or tangential things, situations, knowledge or people.

With this in mind, the project - entitled ‘SerenA - Chance Encounters in the Space of Ideas’ - aims to understand the role of serendipity to support innovation in research. The team will host a workshop to develop their project at a major conference on the digital economy to be held next week.

The RCUK Digital Economy programme has provided funding worth £1.87million for the three-year project, which will see researchers from Dundee collaborate with the Universities of Goldsmiths College, Heriot Watt, Lancaster, Nottingham and University College London (UCL). Vodafone, Media City and Dundee Contemporary Arts will also be involved in the project.

The team aims to design technologies for digital and physical spaces, deploy and test a Serendipity Arena, called SerenA, which will proactively search information available from individuals, to identify knowledge and connections related to their research and their local environment.

Mel Woods, Principal Investigator from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (part of the University of Dundee) and the person who will be leading the workshop, said, SerenA aims to draw human and machine closer together than ever before, enhancing its users’ knowledge and their ability to interact with people and ideas 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,' she said.

'We live in an age of burgeoning information provision, and have increasingly fast access to it. The World Wide Web has allowed us to make many positive changes in our society and environment, for example through communication, social networking and potentially e-publishing, but it also creates problems and challenges.

'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 valuable or stimulating. 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 aim is not to promote shared keywords, as existing systems do, but to use state-of-the-art technology, and user experiences, 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 behaviour.

As part of the SerenA project a full-day workshop entitled ‘Mediating Connections: The Role of Emerging Technologies in Transforming and Presenting Information and Ideas’ was held at the RCUK 'Digital Futures All Hands Conference' in Nottingham on last week.

More information about the RCUK 'Digital Futures All Hands Conference' can be found at https://www.horizon.ac.uk/news/digitalfutures/. The project can be followed on Twitter via @i_serena.

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; www.gold.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 www.serena.ac.uk.

http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk.


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