The project’s Commercial Manager, Rajinder Sharma introduced our Smart City work on 7 July 2015 at the Transport Catapult in Central Milton Keynes. This was followed by an interactive demonstration delivered by Dr Paul Sant, Associate Dean at University Campus Milton Keynes who leads the Enterprise element of the MK:Smart.
Photo courtesy of Gilles Betis, EIT Digital
Over 50 Masters and PhD students from a range of international backgrounds and academic disciplines visited Milton Keynes to learn more about MK:Smart. The visit was organised by EIT Digital, a Knowledge and Innovation Community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Since 2010, EIT Digital has been mobilising talents, ideas, technologies, investments and business across Europe and beyond to stimulate disruptive digital innovation and technologies. It brings together entrepreneurs from a partnership of over 130 top European corporations, SMEs start-ups, universities and research institutes. The headquarters are located in Brussels with co-location centres or nodes in Berlin, Eindhoven, London, Helsinki, Paris, Stockholm, Trento, Budapest and Madrid.
The London node was launched last year, and is currently an anchor tenant in a major development project known as Imperial West, a new £3 billion research quarter being delivered by Imperial College in West London . Its founding partners include UCL, Imperial College, University of Edinburgh, BT, IBM, Intel Vodafone, the Digital Catapult and the Institute for Sustainability.
The students, accompanied by Chris Coleridge, professor at UCL, and Gilles Betis, Urban Life and Mobility Action Line Leader at EIT Digital, raised pertinent questions around privacy and how data is managed. This was a great opportunity to enter into a stimulating discussion on these topics which our work focuses on.