I have been challenged to talk about innovation in the light of Open Research today. This blog post is a write-up of some ideas as I prepare my slides. Looking at my blog, I have only written about innovation once in the past, in connection to a presentation in Brussels about Open Innovation. Then, I highlighted how my fundamental music research led to developing a medical tool. That is an example of “classic” innovation, developing software that solves a problem.

I was challenged to say a few words about improving their personal web pages at the University of Oslo. This led to a short talk titled 23 tips to improve your web presence. The presentation was based on experiences with keeping my own personal page up to date, but hopefully, the tips can be useful for others. Why should you care about your employee page? Some of my reasons include:

Recently, I have been engaged in an internal discussion at the University of Oslo about our institutional web pages. This has led me to realize that a university’s web pages are yet another part of what I like to think of as an Open Research “puzzle”: Cutting down on web pages The discussion started when our university’s communication department announced that they wanted to reduce the number of web pages. One way of doing that is by unpublishing a lot of pages.

It has been fairly quiet here on the blog recently. One reason for this is that I am spending quite some time on setting up the new Music, Communication and Technology master’s programme. This is an exciting collaborative project with our colleagues at NTNU. The whole thing is focused around network-based communication, and the students will use, learn about, develop and evaluate technologies for musical communication between the two campuses in Oslo and Trondheim.

I participated in the opening of the Guild of Research Universities in Brussels yesterday. The Guild is a transformative network of research-led universities from across the European continent, formed to strengthen the voice of universities in Europe, and to lead the way through new forms of collaboration in research, innovation and education. The topic of the opening symposium is that of Open Innovation, a hot topic these days, and something that the European Commission is putting a lot of pressure on.

On Thursday we are organising the first Norwegian Championship of standstill at University of Oslo. This is part of the University’s Open Day, a day when potential new students can come and see what happens on campus. Besides the competitive part, the championship is (of course) a great way to gather more data about how people stand still. The art of standing still is something that has been a great interest of mine for the last year or so, and I have been carrying out different types of smaller experiments to understand more about the micromovements observed when standing still.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that University of Oslo now openly supports RSS- and Twitter-feeds from the official employee web sites. Now I see that social linking has also been embedded in the new profile, as can be seen for example here. These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.

The new University of Oslo contract with Springer means that staff and students get access to all Springer books (~15 000) published since 2005 (titles available here). Now I just need to get an iPad to start reading…

Today the Norwegian government decided on the following standards to be used in all public communication: Video: Theora/Vorbis/Ogg or H.264/AAC/MP4 Sound: Vorbis/Ogg, MP3 or FLAC/Ogg Image:.jpg or PNG Documents: PDF or ODF Character encoding: ISO10646 - UTF8 It is great to see that they encourage to use (mainly) open formats and standards. Now it will be interesting to see how long it takes before these standards are actually widely used. Asking Google for help, I see that it will probably take some time before the University of Oslo is following the new guidelines:

The last few weeks have been quite busy here in Oslo. We opened the new lab just about a month ago, and since then I have organised several workshops, guest lectures and concerts both at UiO and at NMH. I was planning to post some longer descriptions of what has been going on, but decided to go for a summary instead. {height=“150”} First we had a workshop called embedded systems workshop, but which I retroactively have renamed RaPMIC workshop (Rapid Prototyping of Music Instruments and Controllers).

A couple of weeks ago we had an excursion to an anechoic chamber in the basement of the physics department at the University of Oslo. This room is a remainder from back when there was an acoustics group in Oslo (which later moved to Trondheim), and it was a pure coincidence that we discovered that the old room is still intact, largely thanks to Arnt Inge Vistnes. He also happens to be the person that first introduced me to the Fourier transform back in the days when I studied physics, so he got the challenge of holding a guest lecture for our students in sound theory on the topic of (…) the Fourier transform.

To help spread information about various things related to music technology at the University of Oslo (and around), I have started the blog Musikkteknologi @ UiO (in Norwegian). It may be of interest also to people outside of UiO.

I am happy to announce that my dissertation entitled “ACTION — SOUND: Developing Methods and Tools to Study Music-Related Body Movement” has been accepted for public disputation for the degree Philosopiae Doctor (Ph.D.) at the University of Oslo: Trial lecture: Wednesday 30 January, 16:15-17:00, Salen, ZEB Disputation: Thursday 31 January, 10:15, Gamle festsal, Sentrum The dissertation will be available to download from this website in a couple of weeks, and a couple of weeks before the disputation you may also get hold of one of the printed copies (for free) from the administration office of the department.

I have been complaining about the poor support for eLearning solutions at the University of Oslo for some years. I have tried Fronter, but find it too closed and rigid for what I want to do. I like that course information is open and easily available for everyone, but so far the standard course pages have been very much focused on basic information only. I recently discovered that things have improved a lot under the surface, and that it is now possible to give students access to add information to folders under the course web sites.