Imperial welcomes leading business thinkers to major conference

The Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy, Ed Vaizey MP, will open a major digital conference at Imperial tomorrow.

Mr Vaizey will join Imperial’s President, Professor Alice Gast, to welcome delegates to Digital Exchange 2014 (DE2014). DE2014: The Application of Digital Innovation is the fifth annual meeting of Research Council UK’s Digital Economy Programme and the first time the event has been held in London.

The conference, which runs from Wednesday until Friday, will be hosted by Digital City Exchange, a five-year Digital Economy multi-disciplinary, multi-departmental research programme at Imperial College London.

Featuring speakers from leading companies — including IBM, Huawei, Microsoft and Thomson Reuters — DE2014 will explore the concepts at the heart of the global digital economy; from the cutting edge in digital economy research, the technical challenges, and user engagement, through to latest thinking on privacy and data sharing to exploring how to create value from digital data.

Professor Eric Yeatman, from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Principal Investigator at Digital City Exchange, said: “On behalf of the Digital City Exchange programme at Imperial College London, I am proud to be welcoming so many existing and future research colleagues and industrial collaborators to join us at DE2014. The event provides an excellent opportunity for us all to share and celebrate the quality and diversity of the UK’s Digital Economy research, to make new contacts, and to go away inspired by what is being achieved.”

Most existing cities have evolved without strategic planning. Thus urban services are not efficiently connected and configured. Digital City Exchange offers the first cross-sectoral investigation of city resources and services, exploring the opportunities of integrating data-flows across traditional boundaries. 

Digital City Exchange’s Advisory Board Chairman, Kulveer Ranger, said: “From my former role as transport and technology advisor to the London Mayor, I am acutely aware of the need for open, plug-and-play data platforms working at the city level. Technologies, such as those to be demonstrated at DE2014 will enable cities to efficiently exploit the potential of intelligently linking big data. These efficiencies are already leading to improvements in the delivery of public services and utilities in terms of resilience, cost, and even service quality; and will provide the backbone for future improvements that will ultimately, benefit of all of our lives.”

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