EPSRC Connect It seems that there is hope. A short while ago I was a member of an EPSRC ICT Panel, this was my second research panel, the previous being around two years ago. At that time we tried to rank around 35 good proposals and of those only a very small amount (if my memory serves me correctly) just 5 were funded. At this most recent panel, I’m very pleased to say that of the 24 proposals being ranked around 10 were funded.

I was recently asked by Research Councils UK ‘What are the key future challenges that UK HCI researchers can address and how can the UK research be better placed to contribute?’ Well apart from RCUK actually funding some research I thing it is by providing the research to inform industrial development; instead of often trying to build an industrial product ourselves as a demonstrator, or indeed, as the whole project.

Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need.