Congratulations to the FdIT workplace projects team who finished runners up in the Microsoft "DesignIT for a charity" 2006 competition. The project was Rural Focus on village communities - Learn 'n' Train Trailer. The team will receive £1000 to spend on software. Further details.

Sara de Freitas chaired the conference Lifelong Learning for all: e-learning from concept to practice held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London.

The Foundation Degree in IT programme is the first programme in Birkbeck to have a unified WebCT portal enabling students to access all their computer science and management modules plus programme information and news from the portal. All FdIT students in 2006-7 will have access to all management and computer science modules within their MyWebCT portal. Electronic submission of coursework is supported but is an option for the lecturer.

Many thanks to the staff who have made the effort to provide this improved learner support. This is a particularly important achievement where modules are team taught and for programmes which run in more than one department.

Niki Trigoni has been awarded £17,000 by the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development for a project entitled "Robust and Real-Time Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks"

JISC has awarded approx £30,000 to George Magoulas, Alex Poulovassilis, Ian Harrison, Dave Wilson, Sara de Freitas and George Papamarkos, to continue our work on the "L4All - Lifelong Learning in London for all" project for a further 7 months.

Mark Levene, in collaboration with University College London and other partners, has been awarded a grant from the DTI. The project is entitled "Process Envelopes for Cement-based Stabilisation/Solidification (ProCeSS)". Birkbeck will receive funding of £61,947 for this project.

Personalizing Learning in the 21st Century (PDF) - a new book edited by Sara de Freitas and Chris Yapp is now available.

Congratulations to Michael Zakharyaschev who has been awarded two grants from the EPSRC:

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning about Distances (£134,517)

Dynamic Ontologies: a Framework for Service Descriptions (£94,885)

Roman Kontchakov and Mikhail Sheremet will be the Research Associates working on these projects at Birkbeck from 1st February. A warm welcome to them.

George Roussos, Mark Levene and several collaborators are working on the ubicomp google, a navigation engine for the emerging ubiquitous computing world. Users moving through ubiquitous computing enabled spaces, that is environments constructed by physical objects augmented with computational, sensing, auto-identification and wireless communication capabilities, create trails of information that must be archived, managed and subsequently retrieved. The navigation engine being developed by the Birkbeck team offers such facilities and thus plays a role in the ubicomp world akin to that of Google on the web.

The Department is a partner in the Robotic Feral Public Authoring project funded by the EPSRC Culture & Creativity Programme. George Roussos, Dima Diall and Dimitris Airantzis are working on the project which aims to design and create practical applications from commercially available technologies for social and cultural public benefit such as adapting a remote control toy car into a powerful sensing device for locating and identifying chemical pollution and radiation.