Earlier this year OCC embarked on the sponsorship of the Fellow for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of Oxford’s Reuben College. To celebrate this OCC Directors and our Fellow, David Clifton, held a series of discussions exploring AI and David’s research.

OCC provides social care software technologies that allow local authorities, service providers and the public to interact efficiently. Over the past 6 years, the emphasis of our research has changed significantly due to social services policy changes. These encourage end-users (the public) to choose and drive activity, with local authorities having responsibility to monitor and manage the situation, allocate budgets, etc. Highly flexible and sophisticated systems are needed to allow individual user to effectively configure different services and workflows to[...]

Director John Boyle recently gave a talk on technology-led disruption and why a company must act as its own disruptor, continuously challenging the way it does things to remain innovative, efficient and an interesting place to work. Disruption is not a new concept in business. Disruption’s latest incarnation is the sharing economy, which is disrupting traditional business models, including those of the information technology age itself. Some argue that the zero-hour contract models of Uber and Airbnb are taking us[...]

If you’re more than 20 years old you will remember the annual delivery of your local telephone directory; the thud as it lands heavily in your hallway, often with a crumpled cover, a testament to the efforts of the delivery boy to fit the tightly published pages through your letter box. For me, this directory was my first exposure to search engine rankings, with its wonderfully named 001 Aardvark Taxis vying angrily with 001 Ace taxis for first place in[...]

Imagine you’ve been asked to think up a really difficult technical challenge. Well how about delivering health and social care on line, using self-service portals, to frail and elderly citizens? For good measure, imagine that those people need your services to be as simple and familiar as Amazon or Google and that the people funding you are Local Authorities, facing budget cuts in the order of 60%. Oh and you have to ensure accessibility – from PCs, tablets, mobile phones,[...]