A new info-graphic

This visualisation of Nobel Prizes won by colleges and other affiliates of Cambridge University between 1905 and 2020 shows that the University has won Prizes more than any other institution in the world.  It also demonstrates the importance of pure research and the world-changing impact of unbridled curiosity and speculation. Along with the power of accidental collisions with people and information this is perhaps something that successful entrepreneurs have in common with Nobel Prize winning academics – the ability to see the world as it is and ask ‘why?’ or to see the world as it could be and ask ‘why not?’.

But what of the future? What might a physics prize be won for in the year 2040 and how might such research eventually be applied to real world problems? Moreover, how might the Nobel Prizes themselves evolve? Could there be a new category created in 2029 for data modelling or data ethics perhaps? And why is there still no suitable accommodation made for aspects of environmental science, artificial intelligence or philosophy relating to tech?

With some luck, a future Nobels graphic is on the cards….

Back to the Future of AI

I think I’m getting somewhere with this. I often find that before looking forwards at the future of something, artificial intelligence, for example, it’s often worth going backwards to the start of things. This is a draft of a visual looking at the history and influences of computing and AI.

It needs a sense check, contains errors and is somewhat western-centric, but then I am all of these things. It’s also very male-heavy, but then that was the world back then – and in AI and IT possibly still is. Perhaps I should do a visual showing women in AI – starting with women at Bletchley Park, NASA and so on. I may spin this off into a series of specific maps looking purely at robotics or software too.

History of Computing and AI – Richard Watson, April ’21

Entreprenerial Mind Map

This one has been a while coming. It’s a visual exploration of some of the traits and states associated with an entreprenerial mind. Obviously not everyone will possess all of these traits or states and neither are they static – these will change over time too as a start-up grows and new people join the business. Perhaps a question is which states work best throughout an organisations lifecycle?

Bibliography:

Peta Levi, ‘Flourishing in the Cambridge parkland’, Financial Times, November 1980

Segal Quince Wicksteed, The Cambridge Phenomenon: The Growth of High Technology Industry in a University Town, 1985

Lyle M. and Signe M. Spencer, Competence at work: models for superior performance (Chapter 17, Entrepreneurs), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993

Sally Caird, What do psychological tests suggest about entrepreneurs? Journal of Managerial Psychology, 8(6) pp. 11–20, 1993

Tom Byers (Stanford), Heleen Kist (Stanford) and Robert I. Sutton (Hass), Characteristics of the Entrepreneur: Social Creatures, Not Solo Heroes, Handbook of Technology Management, Richard C. Dorf (Ed), CRC Press, October 1997

Yin M. Myint, Shailendra Vyakarnam and Mary J. New, The effect of social capital in new venture creation: the Cambridge high‐technology cluster, John Wiley & Sons, June 2005

S Kavadias, SC Sommer, The effects of problem structure and team diversity on brainstorming effectiveness, Management Science, 2009

T Miller, M Grimes, J McMullen and T Vogus, Venturing for others with heart and head: How compassion encourages social entrepreneurship, Academy of Management Review 37 (4), 616-640, 2012

J Hutchison‐Krupat, RO Chao, Tolerance for failure and incentives for collaborative innovation, Production and Operations Management, 2014

The Cambridge Phenomenon: 50 Years of Innovation and Enterprise, Kate Kirk and Charles Cotton, Third Millennium, 2012

M. Frese & M. M. Gielnik, The psychology of entrepreneurship. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 413–438, 2014

M. J. Gorgievski & U. Stephan, Advancing the Psychology of Entrepreneurship: A Review of the Psychological Literature and an Introduction. Applied Psychology, 65(3), 437–468, 2016

Lynda Applegate, Janet Kraus, and Timothy Butler, Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful, HBR Working Knowledge, June 2016

Dean A. Shepherd and Holger Patzelt, Entrepreneurial Cognition: Exploring the Mindset of Entrepreneurs, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Nicos Nicolaou, Phillip H. Phan and Ute Stephan, The Biological Perspective in Entrepreneurship Research, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, November 2020

Early roughs…

The Future of Urban Air

All good things come to those that wait. Here, finally, is the future of air info-graphic. Tomorrow (hopefully) I’ll post a link to the static map (PDF). Today, here is a rather spendid interactive version. (Click to enlarge and reveal hidden content).

Sometimes these maps are quite quick to create (e.g. the Future of Space) other times they take forever. This started out as a scribble almost 2-years ago. I then looked at weather maps, ancient cartographic maps and stylised images of sails, even breathing and wind, but eventually the scribble morphed into a street map. At this point I stumbled upon the work of an illustrator called Ed Fairburn and the scene was set for what I hope will become a great example of art/science collaboration.

The visual is a fictitious city street map with the face of a child hand-drawn by Ed over the streets. (the child was a quite deliberate choice, because children are linked to the future and, more importantly, it is far more provocative than if we’d used the image of an adult). Visually based tends, inventions and ideas then cluster around the eyes, sound-based thoughts cluster around the ears, smells around the nose and so on. But before I go on to explain what’s on the map, why does it exist at all?

I did a map looking at the future of water with Imperial some time ago. I’ve done food in the past too, so air felt like an obvious theme. Various people at Imperial were looking into air (as was Davos) and a quick Google search found there to be next to nothing about the future of air or the future of air in cities, which is always a good sign. Why urban air? Because most of the big problems and opportunities surrounding air in the future will be found in cities and mega-cities in particular. Of course, conveying ideas about something that cannot be seen (air) is challenging, but hopefully the map itself will help and there are a couple of entries of the map itself that might solve this too.

Maps generally are a powerful way to convey information, messages, arguments or ideas and hopefully this one will provoke some conversation about what is, after all, the most precious and perhaps most threatened resource of them all.

So, what’s on the map? Here’s a list. It’s not the final one, but it’s close and it does show some of the thinking that went into the map (things that got removed, debated etc.).  BTW, ‘head’ is a cluster that comprises some cerebral thoughts, along with things that frankly didn’t fit anywhere else.

Credits for the map belong to yours truly, Richard Watson, Maria Jeansson and Graciela Sainz de la Fuente with academic input provided by Dr Audrey de Nazelle.

Head

Clean air as a fundamental human right

Smog refugees

Natural airflow architects

Air quality activism

Artificial thermal cloud management

Urban Wi-Fi free zones

Google smell maps

Memory enhancement during sleep via diffusers

Use of smell to influence public mood

Street misting to reduce temperatures

Databases of smell landscapes

Rising awareness of indoor air quality

Pollution as a business opportunity

‘Prescription’ of nature to address illnesses

Artificial noses to treat anosmia

Cognitive decline caused by air pollution

‘Open air’ movement

Atmospheric water generators

Socio-economic clean air divide

Clean-air lawsuit on behalf of future generations

Identification of terrorist threats using smell

Pollution harvesting ignites circular economy

CRISPR to increase CO2 adsorption by plants

Eyes

Solar power generating windows

Artificial moons to replace street lights

Drone blocking around buildings

Artificial clouds

Printing of light using nanoparticles

Augmented reality to visualise pollution

Lasers to monitor air quality

Passenger & delivery drones

Nano-bionic plants to indicate pollution

Smart dust storms

Go away cloud machines*

Paramedic drones

Micro-wind harvesting

Proliferation of low-cost quantum sensors

Dark sky movement

Moss facades turn buildings into air purifiers

Indoor particulate sensing

Nose

Fresh air kiosks

Personal nose-plug air filters

Authentic smells movement

Taxation of unnatural smells

Digital scents

Breathable alcohol

Homes with air quality scores

White smells to mask odours

Air quality forecasting using HPC

Use of nootropics to influence productivity

Artificial noses for disease discovery

Artificial nose to treat anosmia.

Fresh air tourism

Rain ‘bombs’ to clean air

Mouth

Windows that separate fresh air from noise

Open window legislation

Obligatory air-filtering for all buildings

Vaping of fresh air

People ‘snacking’ on fresh air shots

Pollution absorbing clothes

Outsourcing of air quality to private contractors

Air provided by utility companies

Sound ‘seasoning’ of food & drink (cusp of mouth)

Pollution protected pushchairs

Ears

Silence as a class issue

Silent fireworks

Use of metamaterials to reduce noise

Narrowcasting of sound

CRISPR for auditory augmentation

Addition of fake noises to silent technologies

Crowd sourced noise pollution maps

Sound sensing proteins

Quiet road surfaces

Conversation cloaking devices

Individual noise taxes

Silent cities movement

Ubiquity of EVs

Increase in noise due to voice interfaces

Sensorial interventions to influence public behaviour

Use of sound to influence public behaviour

The link to the interactive map once again. (click to enlarge and reveal hidden content).

Finally, some of the early scribbles….