11 March 2013
Dundee researchers team up with NASA at SXSW 2013
How can we help people touch the stars? That's the question University of Dundee researchers will be wrestling with when they join with colleagues from NASA and the Northumbria University at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.
The University's Dr Jon Rogers, Programme Director of Product Design, and Dr David McGloin, Head of the Division of Physics, will team up with Ali Llewellyn (NASA Open Government Initiative) and Northumbria's Dr Jayne Wallace for a discussion entitled, "Get Physical: Making Space Data Real on Earth".
SXSW is one of the world's biggest music and technology festivals, and attracts tens of thousands of delegates to Austin, Texas, each year. This year's event will be held from 8th-17th March. The 'Get Physical' panel takes place on Monday, 11th March.
Space exploration is a subject of continued fascination for millions of people, largely because the experience is unimaginable to all but the few who have experienced it for themselves. Rather than seeing space as an overwhelming succession of facts and figures, the panel hope to identify ways of making people feel, rather than think, space.
While commercial space travel remains some years off - and even then some millions of pounds over most people's budgets - they will examine how data extracted from space can be used on earth to allow people to gain an understanding of the experience.
Ali Llewellyn explained that working on the NASA Open Government Initiative enabled her to live out childhood fantasies while working to advance the bank of human knowledge.
"From the time I was a child, I wanted to touch the stars," she said. "I wanted to walk on other planets with my own feet and fly a spaceship with my own hands. While I am not an astronaut, and there isn't yet a human presence on Mars, making space data physical enables me to get closer than most humans can yet get to those opportunities.
"My work at NASA is dedicated to exactly this: enabling everyone on Planet Earth to contribute directly and substantially to the exploration mission. In the time it takes to read this sentence, NASA will have gathered approximately 1.73 gigabytes of data from our nearly 100 currently active missions.
"We do this every hour, every day, every year - and the collection rate is growing exponentially. Handling, storing, and managing this data is a massive challenge. Our data is one of our most valuable assets, and its strategic importance in our research and science is huge.
"We are committed to making our data as accessible as possible, both for the benefit of our work and for the betterment of humankind through the innovation and creativity of the over seven billion other people on this planet who don't work at NASA.
"What would become possible if everyone could not just access but remix and reuse the images, maps, metrics and lessons learned from this amazing trove of observation?"
Dr Rogers added, "Making data physical means that more people can access it in more ways. Taking data from the screen and making it do things in the real world dramatically increases the potential impact of this data. We'll look at a variety of real space data and the international, cross-disciplinary collaborations that can discover its secrets."
SXSW is seen as one of the most important international showcases for emerging musicians and bands, and its significance to other creative industries such as film and technology continues to grow each year.
The 2013 exhibition takes place from 8-17th March. 'Get Physical: Making Space Data Real On Earth' is part of Interactive 2013, and will be held on 11th March in Omni Downtown, Austin, Texas.
More information is available at http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP5183.
More information is available at http://productresearch.dundee.ac.uk/sxsw-2013-make-space-data-physical/.
For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
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