York’s key role in advancing digital creativity

Posted on 6 November 2014

The University of York is to play a key role in the Digital Catapult, a new national project to advance the UK’s best digital ideas.

The University is part of a consortium in Yorkshire which will establish one of three Connected Digital Economy Catapult (CDEC) centres across the UK.

The Yorkshire based consortium, proposed by York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Local Enterprise Partnership and its counterpart in the Leeds City Region, includes academic and commercial partners as well as a local authority.

With a united aim of generating thousands of new jobs, driving innovation at a local level and creating millions in linked investment and future funding by 2025, the three local centres will support the London King’s Cross Digital Catapult Centre which was opened by the Minister for the Digital Economy Ed Vaizey.

The project will be led by the University of Bradford and will have a specific focus on digital health innovation and will bring together start-ups, small and large businesses and the academic community to develop new healthcare products and services.

From next Spring, the University will help to co-ordinate events to link small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with academics in areas of big data, with a particular focus on healthcare. Academics from the departments of Computer Science, Theatre, Film and Television, Electronics, Health Sciences and the Centre for Health Economics at York will aim to provide a range of specialist support to the commercial sector.

Immediate plans include helping to translate the creativity of games developers into innovative digital advances by building on York’s growing expertise in games and the application of games into new sectors from the recently launched EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (IGGI) and the EPSRC/ ESRC New Economic Models and Opportunities in digital Games (NEMOG) project.

Departments at York are addressing challenges around big data, bringing together diverse data sets, interacting with, understanding and interpreting the data to deliver increased value.

The Digital Catapult Centre Yorkshire will host a high bandwidth connection linking it with two additional centres planned for Brighton and Sunderland, and also with the Digital Catapult Centre London.

Other partners include the University of Leeds, BT, Science City York, Leeds Beckett University, City of Bradford Metropolitan Council, University of York St John and University of Huddersfield.

Mr Vaizey said: “It is an exciting time to be a tech business in the UK. Our digital economy is already one of the strongest markets in the world, valued at more than £100 billion. Growth areas including the Internet of Things and digital creative industries are opening up a range of new opportunities for companies in the sector.”

Professor Peter Cowling, Director of the IGGI Centre for Doctoral Training and the NEMOG project said “We are only just starting to harness the enthusiasm that people have for digital games to provide powerful new tools to understand and change behaviour. The potential to use terabytes of gameplay data in diagnosis and therapy is immense.”

The consortium will

Initiating and collaborating with the Digital Catapult on a range of innovative projects, designed to be accessible to start-up and SME businesses to use and learn from.
Creating links between universities and the local business community that enable university led R&D in the Digital Catapult challenge areas to be converted into commercial market opportunities which can be prototyped and piloted by start-ups and SMEs.
Helping to develop the higher level skills needed to realise and exploit new data and media capabilities.