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Continue reading →: How to Fail
It’s that time of year, a time of renewal, of promises… of revision. Yes, spare some thoughts for the poor students, still nursing their New Year hangovers as they consider the exams awaiting them this January. For some of them it will be the first time they have been assessed…
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Continue reading →: Reflections on the Web Science MOOCWeek Two of the Web Science MOOC has ended, and the MOOCsters move on from my material to Craig Webber’s week on crime and security online. So do I feel like Frodo and Sam in Return of the King, collapsing in relief as the sweeping gaze of Sauron moves of…
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Continue reading →: Building the Web Science MOOCThis week at the University of Southampton we launched the Web Science MOOC with FutureLearn, the course is a dizzying whirlwind of interdisciplinary coolness that acts as a primer for Web Science and includes a wide variety of topics from cybercrime to digital democracy. My week is on Networks, and…
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Continue reading →: Pacific Rim: Suspension of Disbelief Suspended
I am getting old, and I am worried about my suspension of disbelief. When I was younger my suspension of disbelief was in fine form – I remember watching the original Star Wars as a boy and barely wondering why massive super-tech star ships bothered with dogfighting (later Iain M.…
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Continue reading →: Canyons, Deltas and Plains
I’m not a hard-nosed computer scientist. I’m more interested in people than algorithms, and that’s why my research has taken me in the direction of hypertext, UX and narrative. That’s also why earlier this month I was so sad to hear about the death of Douglas Engelbart, the American Scientist…
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Continue reading →: The Sublime Iain M. BanksIain Banks died yesterday. He was 59. He announced in April that he was suffering from terminal cancer and expected to live less than a year. The announcement was made with all the grace and black humour that you may have expected from the author of The Wasp Factory and…
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Continue reading →: The Email Heresy
Let’s just say it. Email isn’t working. In fact its got to the point where ‘not working’ doesn’t describe the problem anymore. Email has moved beyond not working, it has become anti-work. Technology often benefits from Network Effects, a phenomenon where something becomes more useful the more people adopt it.…
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Continue reading →: In Praise of the Ephemeral
There is a creeping view in our society that data is forever. For some reason whilst we are happy for our spoken words to vanish into the ether, our written words and media must be hewn in stone (or at least backed up at an off-site data centre). Judge of…
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Continue reading →: The Batman #Wins!
This Summer three collosal superhero franchises came to do battle in our cinemas. The Amazing Spiderman, The Avengers and the Dark Knight Rises. Looking back at the three films it’s interesting that they all took different approaches at making the ludicrous entertaining. Spiderman took the low road, rehashing old action…
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Continue reading →: Danny Boyle’s Neverland
Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London 2012 olympics was a triumph. An absolute triumph. I would normally hesitate to lavish such uncritical praise in public, but the potential to get this wrong was so strong, such a whirlpool of possible failure, that to steer such a certain and confident…
Welcome,
I’m David
I am Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK within the Data, Intelligence, and Society group in ECS. I am also Head of the Education Group within ECS with the goal of improving education across the whole of Electronics and Computer Science in a meaningful, healthy, and sustainable way.
My research roots are in Hypertext, but my current interests are in Interactive Digital Narratives, Mixed Reality Games, and AI Knowledge Interfaces.
David Millard 