Martin Porcheron (2013 cohort) : Horizon CDT

Martin’s PhD research has resulted in the collection of over 200 hours of audio of naturally unfolding Amazon Echo use in the home. He has been awarded a CDT impact grant to carry out indexing of the audio clips to ready the smartspeaker usage data for open-access publication.

Martin will be using this grant to:

Produce and disseminate an indexed open access audio dataset of Amazon Echo use in the home, to enable further research and product development.
Design a deck of cards from the findings in his PhD and corpus, that can be used in the design of future conversational user interfaces.
Promote and demonstrate the corpus and design cards to academics and UX design practitioners through outreach talks, collaborative workshops, and online resources.

The Science of Blade Runner

Martin was also able to engage the public with the Amazon Echo audio at a special Blade Runner-themed event at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema on 18 October. Both Martin and Professor Steve Benford (pictured below) spoke at this event which was organised by STEM Outreach Nottingham, the team behind the highly successful Pint of Science festival.

Above: Prof. Steve Benford, Martin Porcheron and Giulia Tomasello from the Nottingham Trent University.

The Science of Bladerunner brought together speakers whose research and expertise related to themes present in the films (and the original novel) such as synthetic biology, genetic engineering, biotextiles, artificial intelligence and machine learning.