Orchid Project

Smart grids are electricity networks that intelligently monitor, communicate, and control the actions of generators and consumers in order to deliver sustainable, economic, and secure electricity
supply. This vision poses technology challenges in core areas such as powersystems engineering, telecommunications, network security, and artificial intelligence (AI).
The AI challenge is to deliver...

British Gas has demonstrated its commitment to bringing innovative products and services to homes in the UK, inviting 26 startups to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges representing Venture Capitalists, British Gas executives, and internet entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox.
The winner, which now receives £30,000 and the opportunity to trial...

If you were to travel back in time twenty or thirty years and tell the first person you saw that machines in the future could read your checks, deposit them, and dispense exactly the amount of money you needed whenever you needed it, you probably would get a few raised...

Do new technologies such as 3D printers and self-driving cars promise to relieve us of the humdrum of work, or to relieve us of our employment altogether? We speak to Michael Osborne, from Oxford’s Machine Learning Research Group and his colleague Carl Frey from the Oxford Martin School, who claim...

A start-up business which uses memory sticks to improve energy efficiency in homes has won £30,000 in a competition run by British Gas.
MyJoulo gives free, personalised energy saving advice to users who register online to get a free Joulo data logger that looks and works like a conventional memory stick.
They...

A PIONEERING project by the University of Southampton, which aims to improve energy efficiency in the home, is to be trialled by a major energy provider after winning a top award.
Dr Reuben Wilcock and Professor Alex Rogers, from electronics and computer science at the uiniversity, won first prize for...

A pioneering project by the University of Southampton, which aims to improve energy efficiency in the home, has won the British Gas Connecting Homes Startup Competition.
Dr Reuben Wilcock and Professor Alex Rogers, from Electronics and Computer Science, won first prize for MyJoulo at an event which saw 25 companies from...

A pioneering project by the University of Southampton, which aims to improve energy efficiency in the home, has won the British Gas Connecting Homes Startup Competition.
Dr Reuben Wilcock and Professor Alex Rogers, from Electronics and Computer Science, won first prize for MyJoulo at an event which saw 25 companies from...

For the 33 million adults in the UK who use the internet on a daily basis, it is almost impossible to remember what we did without it. How did we book a flight, look up directions to a restaurant or send a document to a colleague?
When Brent Hoberman and...

If computers become as smart as humans, will they do our jobs better than we can?
A recent study [pdf] out of Oxford University found that almost half of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to being taken over by computers as artificial intelligence continues to improve.
The study, based on 702 detailed job...