“The digital age is proving to be as transformational as the industrial age of the past”

This was the opening thought presented by Ken Eastwood, Director of Digital Nomads and Chair for the Mobile Government 2014 conference. The conference took place on the 6th March 2014 at the Victoria Park Plaza, London.

Chris Ensor, Head of the National Technical Authority for IA at CESG delivered the opening keynote presentation, which focused on the cyber ‘frontline’. He stressed the unprecedented scale, diversity and complexity of the cyber security threats presented by an increasing move to digital and mobile working. This was followed by a talk on ‘mobility reimagined’ presented by Richard Shipton and Richard Fulford from Microsoft. They stressed the importance of balancing control with choice and freedom, and promoted choice and interoperability.

Continuing an efficient, agile working environment in the cloud was the subject of discussion for Tonino Ciuffini, CIO at Warwickshire County Council. He detailed the benefits found from Cloud work, in particular the use of Google Apps for Business for 5,000+ users, which has achieved a cost saving of well over £250,000 pa. He stressed that the benefits of cloud are not theoretical and have been demonstrated over an 18 month period.

Katherine Morgan, RiO Project Manager and Helen Reading, Associate Director of Information and Technology from Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust looked at driving forward mobile working across the NHS. As important it is to focus on successes, it’s also important to learn from mistakes along the way; rushing to use laptops, false expectations that laptops would connect anywhere and implementation coinciding with the establishment of new technical services were a outlined as key stumbling blocks.

The final speaker of the morning was Ian McCormack, Technical Director, Public Sector Services for CESG who gave technical insights into the security considerations surrounding BYOD and platform security.

The afternoon keynote presentation was delivered by Derek Hobbs, Head of Digital Services for the Department of Work and Pensions. He explained the DWP’s new approach to Digital Service Development through agile working. The keys to success, he suggested, are constant feedback, collaboration and inclusion, transparency and trust and finally challenge and debate.

Other speakers in the afternoon included Gregg Hardie, Head of Public Sector Sales for Blackberry. He raised the interesting question of BYOD, CYOD or COPE?  Dr Simon Rice, Group Manager for Technology at the ICO, then stated that 47% of UK adults use their personal device for work in his presentation which outlined new regulations, minimising penalties and maximising compliance.

The final speaker of the day was Ed Bullock, Head of Technical Support at Halton Housing Trust. His inspirational talk detailed the work undertaken by the housing trust to radically transform the working environment through closing 3 offices and introducing hot-desking, a paperless office, flexible working and mobile working. With an aim of having 90% of customers accessing services online by 2018 it’s clear, as with many public and wider sector organisations, that the next few years will see even more radical change.

“To out compute is to out compete”

The High Performance Computing and Big Data conference took place on Thursday 6th February at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Westminster. All attendees left the day with plenty of food for thought and buoyed by the Government’s announcement of a significant investment in this increasingly recognised sector.

Anni Hellman, Deputy Head of Unit eInfrastructure, Director General Communications Networks, Content and Technology at the European Commission started the day’s proceedings with a presentation outlining the European HPC strategy and how it will boost research and innovation in the sector. She emphasised the importance of the Horizon 2020 programme; the EU framework for research and innovation for 2014-2020, with its €77billion budget.

Joe Duran, Director, HPC Systems at Fujitsu gave a presentation on human centric intelligent society and how big data and HPC is driving transformational opportunities for industries and the world as a whole. This was followed by a discussion on e-infrastructure capability, with its £160million investment from BIS, delivered by Cliff Brereton, Director of the Hartree Centre.

Peter Haynes, CORE Director at Imperial College London gave insights into CORE, a shared HPC service between Cambridge and Imperial. The University of Cambridge has one of the largest R&D
budgets within the UK Higher Education sector and HPC forms a key part of the research strategy, with investment of over £1M per year in capital equipment alone. These levels of investment demonstrate the recognition of the importance of HPC and Big Data, a fact that was even further demonstrated later in the day by David Willetts.

Dr Steven Kenny, Director, HPC Midlands and Reader of Mathematical Sciences at Loughborough University took to the stage to discuss the theme of accelerating innovation across the engineering and energy industries using supercomputing.

Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance and Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science from Warwick Business School gave an outstanding presentation on predicting behaviour using data from the internet. The example of predicting stock markets led to questions about the feasibility of predicting genocide and other such phenomenon. This was definitely a ‘get-you-thinking’ presentation.

The afternoon keynote presenter was none other than the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. He announced £14 million to fund the second phase of investment into Big Data in the UK. You can hear his full presentation at www.govnet.co.uk/Speech/WilletsSpeech.wav. This announcement was very well received and sparked many a discussion about what the likely outcomes of this will be.

The final two presenters of the day were Jonathan Mitchener, Lead Technologist on ICT at the Technology Strategy Board and Andrew Houghton, Deputy Head of Unit Flagships, DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology for the European Commission who talked about increasing investment through energy efficient and high performance computer systems and how future and emerging technology research will boost excellence in research and innovation in Horizon 2020 respectively.

For more information on this jam-packed programme or other conference details, please visit http://ukhpc.co.uk/