news 2016

The University of Nottingham is the world-leader in research that uses the analysis of primary healthcare data to drive improvements in primary care, according to a study in the journal BMJ Open. The investigation shows the University produced the largest number of research publications using primary care databases of any institution in the world and is second in the world for citations.

Professor Jim McElwaine of the Department of Earth Sciences talks about new research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface , which has given some of the first detailed measurements of what takes place inside an avalanche. Tell us a bit about the research? The aim of the project was to understand what processes are taking place inside an avalanche as it travels down a mountain.

The majority of updates to mobile apps don't have a significant impact on user ratings, suggesting developers might release updates too frequently, according to a new study by UCL researchers. They found free apps were less likely to make an impact when their developers release an update compared to paid apps, although among the impactful releases, the impact was more likely to be positive for free apps.

The judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have been predicted to 79% accuracy using an artificial intelligence (AI) method developed by researchers at UCL, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania. The method is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analysing case text using a machine learning algorithm.

An algorithm which models how proteins inside cells interact with each other will enhance the study of biology, and sheds light on how proteins work together to complete tasks such as turning food into energy. Being able to predict these interactions will help us understand how proteins fit and work together to complete required tasks.

Making an assistive robot partner expressive and communicative is likely to make it more satisfying to work with and lead to users trusting it more, even if it makes mistakes, a new UCL-led study suggests. But the research also shows that giving robots human-like traits could have a flip side - users may even lie to the robot in order to avoid hurting its feelings.

Making an assistive robot partner expressive and communicative is likely to make it more satisfying to work with and lead to users trusting it more, even if it makes mistakes, a new study suggests. But the research also shows that giving robots human-like traits could have a flip side - users may even lie to the robot in order to avoid hurting its feelings.

An Imperial engineer talks about her work on an international project to understand how the brain is wired. Dr Emma Robinson , from the Department of Computing at Imperial, talks to Colin Smith about her work in brain imaging and how it is contributing to The Human Connectome Project. What is a connectome? A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain.

An international team of researchers has developed a website to help answer long-standing questions about the forces that shaped human cultural diversity. D-PLACE - the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment - is an expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1,400 human societies.

Think talking on your hands-free while driving is safe? Think again, says new research Think talking on your hands-free while driving is safe? Think again, says new research. Driving while talking on a hands-free phone can be just as distracting as talking on a hand-held mobile phone, psychologists at the University of Sussex have found.

Dazzle camouflage, as used on World War I battleships to fool U-boat commanders, has been modernised for the twenty-first century with moving patterns. New research from the University of Bristol, published in PLOS ONE, has found that these moving patterns can cause a marked change in perceived speed.

Scientists and engineers from the Universities of Bristol and Western Australia have developed how to efficiently simulate a "quantum walk" on a new design for a primitive quantum computer. Quantum computers have significant potential to open entirely new directions for processing information and to overhaul the way that we think about and use the science of computation.

Computer scientists at Lancaster University are working on smarter 'privacy setting' algorithms to prevent embarrassing photos being shared on social media. Currently, when updates and photographs are posted on sites such as Facebook only the person that posted is able to set the privacy settings - even when there are other people in the image, mentioned in a comment, or invited to an event.

New research has found, for the first time, a scientific solution that enables future internet infrastructure to become completely open and programmable while carrying internet traffic at the speed of light. The research by High Performance Networks (HPN) group in the University of Bristol's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering is published in the world's first scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A .

It may be possible to assess the risk of developing dementia by analyzing information gathered during routine visits to the family doctor, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine. Researchers from UCL have developed an algorithm that uses routinely collected data to predict a five-year risk of dementia as part of an NIHR-funded study.

Computer-based games can have a beneficial effect on learning, according to ground-breaking new research from the University of Bristol. The brain-imaging study shows that - contrary to popular belief - technological game-playing can involve brain activity that positively supports learning. The research, with students at Bristol, is linked to a bigger classroom study which will involve 10,000 secondary school pupils across the UK - and for which participants are currently being recruited.