Sharing world-class research with new app

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science have developed a new app to help share world-class research and to find out the latest research news through your phone or tablet.

One of the biggest problems facing researchers is the best way to share their research. In fact, it’s this important part of research impact, or how academic research makes a contribution to wider society, that is used as one of the yardsticks to judge the success of a research project.

The Software Sustainability Institute, a collaboration between the Universities of Southampton, Oxford, Edinburgh and Manchester, aims to spread the word about its work in promoting greater use of software in research.

The Institute’s website, features regular blogs written by researchers from across a wide range of disciplines, all of whom have used software to enhance and develop their work. To make all this fascinating material and the researchers’ output even more accessible, the Institute’s Software Consultant - Devasena Inupakutika, ECS researcher within the Web and Internet Science group - has developed an Android phone app, which is available to download free from Google Play.

Content available includes blogs about making dinosaurs and ancient spiders walk again, Google Glass in the operating theatre, tracking the spread of epidemics through social media, artificial intelligence and simulating the brains of bees, and even treating blindness in the developing world with a smartphone.