Tag Archives: Climate Change

Waiting for the Fat Lady

The UK government has just announced that it isn’t going to make a decision on further relaxing Covid-19 restrictions for another two weeks, just as many people were, quite reasonably hoping that the fat lady was, if not in full song, at least warming up for her aria.

Flippancy aside, let’s be clear: delaying a decision like that is utter nonsense, at multiple levels: whether it’s driven by the use of lagging data, the continuing failure to adopt and use effective forecasting (ours or anyone else’s), the pursuit of political dogma, or any combination of these, they’re once again delaying decision making until it’s too late.

Worse, they seem to be relying on the success of the vaccination program to try to pull a largely fictional rabbit out of their hat – the hat that comes with a large label saying, “Wishful Thinking”. But now for the data and analysis… Continue reading Waiting for the Fat Lady

Intelligent Reality at EIE2021

We are pleased to announced that our new company, Intelligent Reality, has been accepted into EIE’s 2021 cohort, which showcases the most innovative, data-driven tech companies from Scotland, the UK and beyond. EIE’s (Engage, Invest, Exploit) annual conference features the the most promising high-growth companies who are seeking funding, from seed to series A.

Over the last 18 months we have successfully developed both our generic platform and environmental and geospatial applications, with an SBRI-funded R&D programme for Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot) and, latterly, with three rounds of funding from InnovateUK. These have led to the successful development of inferential tools for exploratory, analytic and predictive modelling of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as enhancing our core platform.

We have not only developed our analytic and predictive pipeline, but have further developed our relationship with udu, the revolutionary, discovery-based data intelligence platform, itself co-founded by Two Worlds.

With academic and industrial partners, we have also explored real time applications in precision agriculture and pollution monitoring.


Intelligent Reality,  with staff in Scotland and Germany, has been formed to exploit the successful outcomes of Two Worlds’ incubation of its adaptive, self-organising approach to data analytics, providing insight and predictive intelligence for real world applications in dynamic environments.

EIE, which is run by the Bayes Centre at Edinburgh University in partnership with the DDI (Data-Driven Innovation) initiative, is a year-round programme highlighted by a day of pitching to investors from across the globe. EIE21 takes place on 10 June.

From Smart Cities to Rural Communities

I spend much of my time working on various Smart City programmes: anything from modelling need and opportunity to designing architectures for the fusion of large and diverse data sets with live sensor and device data (IoT) and the analytics needed to make the results coherent, timely and relevant. I also live in a very small community, where I was founder of a community company whose efforts have led to our little corner of the Scottish Highlands being in the top 1% of global broadband connectivity. We’re now starting to use that infrastructure to create opportunities for new services and means of service delivery, applying the principles of Smart City programmes to the needs of rural and remote communities, based on the tripod of providing the tools (in the form of the infrastructure), helping people acquire appropriate skills and then nurturing the ideas that then emerge.

Continue reading From Smart Cities to Rural Communities

Paris, Climate and the Ironies of Trump

This is aimed, in no small part, at my many friends in the US, who I see alternating between despair at their own ‘government’’s behaviour and angst-laden apology to the world for their current Liar-in-Chief. Please, folks, relax, a little at least.

Yes, the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement will do damage – indeed, it already has – but that damage is less to the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change than to US influence in the world.

Continue reading Paris, Climate and the Ironies of Trump

BlueGlobe: Making a Difference

I’ve spent most of the last few years consulting in the areas of dynamic and emergent knowledge systems, interaction and communication. That encompasses everything from arm-waving vision generation through strategy development to procurement, configuration and training. And, where I couldn’t badger someone else into doing it, the coding too. Much of the work has been based around the Ubiquity principles of trusted collaborative interaction mediated by the core tetrad of association, value, knowledge and identity. That’s a very useful model, but one that is oft easier to communicate when a specific example is used: starting with the original architecture and roadmap for h2g2, I’ve also been using a slightly hypothetical scenario of creating a collaborative knowledge-centred community around communicating a global issue, one which brought together organisations, communities and individuals of many different types around knowledge related to a need that had a universal context: in subject, location, time and intent. That’s generally worked well for me and my clients.

But now it’s time to put my money (what there is of it) where my mouth is: to create just such a service, in an area I feel passionately about – maintaining the richness and diversity of culture and life on our planet in the face of human activity driving fundamental changes to the world’s climate, at a rate which looks to exceed the ability of ourselves and other species to adapt. It’s also one which brings together my alternate lives as biologist, computer scientist and social entrepreneur: Full circle into the future.

So here’s BlueGlobe (http://www.blueglo.be/) – a placeholder for the start of an intelligent, emergent online service designed to bring together the core constituencies of Climate Change: Businesses, governments, scientists, the media, educators and individuals and communities. It’s very early days yet – I’ve managed to accumulate a wonderful team of thinker-doers and we’re getting stuff together as fast as resources permit. Although if I have to spend very much longer training a Bayesian RSS filter NOT to tag anything that mentions Al Gore as Irrelevant, I may live to regret it. So please take a wander over there and sign yourself up for news of developments as they happen – it won’t be long.