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SSC Bloodhound Development Back on Track

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SSC Bloodhound Development progress has resumed after pending for 10 months.

SSC Bloodhound development had been on hold in recent months because of a shortage of cash, but new sponsorship deals mean engineers can now resume their work.

October 2017 will mark the 20th anniversary of the current land speed record – 763mph (1,228km/h), which was set by Thrust SSC in the US desert.

Bloodhound intends to raise this to 800mph, running in South Africa.

The new sponsors are not immediately being identified, but their support puts the British project on a solid financial footing.

“We now have the most vision of forward-funding that we’ve ever had,” said components chief Conor La Grue.

“In the past, we’ve only ever really had funding to plan two to three months ahead.

“We’re now in a position to go all the way through to taking the record.”

Engineers that were let go during the hibernation are being brought back; outstanding components needed to fully finish the vehicle are being ordered.

The near-complete car was showcased at Canary Wharf in London last September.

Since then it has been sitting largely untouched at Bloodhound’s technical HQ in Bristol.

Now, it will be stripped down from its initial “dry build” and then reassembled, with fluids, ready to go racing.

A key task is to complete the development of the vehicle’s rocket system.

Bloodhound will be using a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine to get itself rolling and to reach speeds in the low hundreds (mph), but it will need a booster to take it through the sound barrier and on to 800mph.

The rocket itself is being sourced from the Nammo company in Norway, but it will use a Bloodhound-designed gearbox and pump driven by a Jaguar V8.

Testing of these elements all operating together will be conducted in the autumn.

The team intends to employ the rocket in a monopropellant configuration. This means no fuel grain is burned in the motor.

To produce thrust, concentrated hydrogen peroxide is merely pumped at pressure across a catalyst, where it decomposes into steam and oxygen. The hot gases are then directed out through a nozzle at high velocity.

It is the simplest way to use the rocket. Only if Bloodhound attempts to run faster than 1,000mph – something it still hopes to do in 2018 – will the Nammo technology need to burn a rubber propellant.

The new schedule calls for the race-ready car to be doing some trial runs at the Newquay aerohub in Cornwall in May or June of next year.

These runs will only get up to about 200mph but should be very instructive for the engineers, enabling them to check, for example, that all the software has every system working in unison.

“Fortunately, we don’t have the millions of lines of code that they had in the space shuttle,” said chief engineer Mark Chapman.

“We’re talking now about being in South Africa in August/September 2017. This would give us a few weeks of running to shake the car down, increase the speed and then go for the record around October.

“The date would be quite poignant because it would be exactly 20 years since Thrust SSC.”

Bloodhound is the direct descendant of Thrust. The project director (Richard Noble), the driver (Andy Green) and the aerodynamicist (Ron Ayers) have reprised their roles.

The big difference this time around is the supporting education programme.

Bloodhound was conceived as a way to enthuse young people into STEM subjects.

More than 5,000 schools have now taken part in learning programmes based on the science of land speed records.

– Jonathan Amos

I’ve Graduated…What Next?

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I’ve Graduated – What do I do now? 6 reasons why you don’t need to panic!

It’s that time of year again! You have done all the hard work; you have received that really expensive piece of A4 paper that states you have officially entered into the adult world. Employment is looming and inspiration has yet to strike about your future plans, it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of despair. All of your friends are starting fancy grad schemes or tracking off around Europe, while the only thing you’ve got lined up is a Game of Throne’s Marathon and scheduled panic attacks about the graduate job market, while mum and dad breath down your neck about getting a job!

Your student discount card is about to expire, and if another family member asks you about your career plans then you might just have a breakdown. Sound familiar? These six points might help to reassure you.

1. You’re still young

Those who started a three-year course straight from school will have only just turned 21, so there’s no rush to accept the first 9-5 job that you’re offered. Becky Williams, a recent graduate from Cardiff University, turned down several graduate jobs in favour of continuing with bar work.

She says: “I don’t see the point in accepting a poorly-paid graduate job that I’m not even sure I want to do, just because I’m expected to. I’d rather save up until I’ve had time to decide what I really want to pursue.”

2. Comparing yourself to other people is a waste of time

Just because your housemate has secured their ideal job doesn’t mean that you’re a failure by contrast.

3. You can’t discover who you want to be until you find out who you are

Personalities often change at university, which can be daunting beyond the bubble of campus life. Challenge yourself by experiencing something new, while you still have the chance. Chris Jenkins of Southampton University has just returned from Southeast Asia, in time for his graduation:

“I had wanted to travel and experience different cultures for a while, and the summer before starting work provided that opportunity. It was the best experience of my life. I thoroughly recommend going out into the world and seeing it for yourself, regardless of whether you have a job lined up for your return”, he said.

4. Many successful career-people have ‘fallen into’ their line of work

Recent statistics from the New College of the Humanities found that 19 out of 20 graduates had switched jobs within three years. Be confident enough to accept that your dream career might not be as you had hoped, and devise a new plan according to the aspects that you enjoyed.

5. Your degree won’t go to waste

Deciding that you don’t want to be a psychologist doesn’t necessarily mean that the three years and thousands of pounds spent on a psychology degree was all for nothing – any university education teaches a desirable skill set. According to Prospects, many graduate employers seek degree-level candidates rather than those disciplined in a specific subject.

6. You’re not alone

Marcus Zientek, a careers adviser at Sheffield University, says that many students are unsure of their plans after graduation:

“How uncertain they are does vary, from those who have an interest in a general area of work but have not yet decided about it, to those who describe themselves as not having any ideas at all.

“Panicking doesn’t help and is unnecessary anyway. Don’t let things drift – keep calm and make a plan. Realise that you’re not deciding what to do with the rest of your life, but choosing a good next step for you.”

What to do next – Keep you options open, and get yourself out there!

Graduate careers fairs are an important resource for graduate appointments – even if you don’t get a graduate placement as a direct result of the fair, you’re still taking steps towards your chosen career and moving closer to recruitment in your perfect job.

A suitable graduate placement can be difficult to find, and with the amount of competition vying for graduate appointments you have to use every avenue you can to maximise your chances of finding the right graduate placement for you.

Careers fairs are one of the best ways to find graduate appointments in your area of interest. A careers fair is an excellent opportunity to meet potential employers face to face and market yourself to your chosen industry. Even if you haven’t finished your course and are still in further study, careers fairs are still worthwhile as a source of information, contacts and interview experience.

If you are interested in attending a graduate recruitment careers fair, the upcoming ‘National Graduate Recruitment Exhibition’ may be the ideal opportunity for you. It will be taking place on the 4th and 5th of November and will be held inside the NEC in Birmingham. Check it out by clicking here.

 Job recruitment at careers fairs

Job recruitment careers fairs offer a multitude of benefits to graduates. If you’re ambitious and organised you can get a lot out of a career fair, including;

Honing your interview skills – Even if you aren’t offered a job, talking to prospective employers about graduate appointments gives you valuable confidence and experience of interviews.

Expanding your network – Meeting job recruiters and even fellow graduates helps you build useful contacts for future reference.

Learning industry information – Speaking to job recruitment professionals in your chosen sector is a great way to learn about the industry.

Gathering information about companies – Investigating the kind of graduate placements offered by a company tells you a lot about that organisation as a whole.

Job Hunting

It’s rare to fall straight into a job after you’ve graduated. Job hunting can take several months so it’s important to stay motivated in your job search and make the most of the opportunities and support out there. These jobseeking tips and tricks will help you choose your ideal career, search for job vacancies and stay focused on your career goals.

  • Research industries and companies that interest you
  • Get out there and speak to companies proactively at exhibitions etc..
  • Sign up to recruitment consultancies. Let them help and identify your next career move
  • Stay motivated. It can take a while to find that right job role. It will be worth it!
  • Graffiti Recruitment can give sound industry advice hints and tips on your next move.

If you are interest in IT Technology roles then be sure to check out some of our latest jobs by clicking here!

Need advice on employability? Look no further.
www.graffitirecruitment.co.uk

AI Fighter Pilot wins in Combat Simulation

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An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation.

The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft – and did not suffer any losses.

Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot.

One military aviation expert said the results were promising.

In the simulation, both attacking jets – the blue team – had more capable weapons systems.

But Alpha’s red team was able to dispatch the enemy planes after performing evasive manoeuvres.

‘Deadly opponent’

In their paper, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and defence company Psibernetix describe Alpha as “a deadly opponent”.

Reporting on simulated assaults against retired US Air Force colonel Gene Lee, the researchers wrote: “Not only could he not score a kill against it, he was shot out of the air by the reds every time after protracted engagements.”

Alpha uses a form of artificial intelligence based on the concept of “fuzzy logic” – in which a computer considers a wide range of options before making a decision.

Because a simulated fighter jet produces so much data for interpretation, it is not always obvious which manoeuvre is most advantageous or, indeed, at what point a weapon should be fired.

Fuzzy logic systems can weigh up the significance of these individual pieces of data before making a broader decision.

The researchers’ key achievement here was to do this in real-time with computational efficiency.

“Here, you’ve got an AI system that seems to be able to deal with the air-to-air environment, which is extraordinarily dynamic, has an extraordinary number of parameters and, in the paper, more than holds its own against a skilled and capable, experienced combat pilot,” said Doug Barrie, a military aerospace analyst at think tank IISS.

“It’s like a chess master losing out to a computer.”

Ethical questions

But Mr Barrie also stated it might not be easy or appropriate to translate the system to real-world combat environments.

If such a system were ever used in a live setting and decided to attack a non-military target, the results could be dire, he said.

“The public furore about that would be immense,” he said.

However, at the very least, Mr Barrie said, Alpha had potential as a simulation tool or as a device to help develop better systems for assisting human pilots in the air.

– Chris Baraniuk

Could a House Cleaning Robot be Developed?

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Elon Musk’s openAI project says it is working on a robot to clean people’s Houses

Building a robot that can help people in their homes will be a good way of testing the future of AI, Musk’s research group says – and so to ensure that they don’t take over the world and kill us

Elon Musk’s $1 billion artificial intelligence group wants to build a robot to clean people’s houses.

OpenAI – which is funded by the billionaire maker of reusable rockets and electric cars – hopes to build a domestic robot as a test of its research into how to build artificial intelligence that won’t kill us.

Building such a robot isn’t just a way of getting rid of household chores. It would also be a neat way of testing whether or not its work in artificial intelligence is progressing in the right way.

There are already ways of creating a robot that can carry out specific tasks, the researchers note. The difference is that Musk’s team hopes to create “learning algorithms” that would allow the creation to serve as a “general purpose” robot – meaning that it can be left around the home and be clever enough to work out what it needs to do to clean.

Creating such a robot is a “good testbed for many challenges in AI”, the team note. The robot won’t be built by OpenAI, but instead use components from elsewhere that are programmed by the group.

Creating a household robot is the second goal of the OpenAI group. It has already detailed its work in meeting goal one – “Measure our progress” – when it laid out plans for a special gym that can help train artificial intelligence programs.

The goals that follow are building an agent that can understand natural language and creating one that could solve a “wide variety of games”. OpenAI hopes that the different goals capture different kinds of problem-solving and together can progress towards its goal of building smart AI systems that don’t also wipe out life on Earth.

– Andrew Griffin

The Future of SEO, Online Advertising and Social Media

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What does the future hold for SEO, online advertising and social media?

Today’s marketing landscape reflects predictions made in science fiction films from the 80’s. We have predictive technology, machine learning and computers that can perform complex actions at nothing more than a voice command.

Put simply, we are living in a new age of internet capability where every discovery leads to more endless possibilities than the last.

The impact this is having on the marketing world is immense as brands look to keep a pace with their customers, the adopters of this technology.

In this 140 character and 15-second video era, it is evident that consumers’ attention spans are decreasing and with it, so are the windows of opportunity for brands to connect with them. It is no longer about “sell sell sell” but “engage engage engage”.

So what does the future hold for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), online advertising and social media and how can marketers effectively use these tools in order to continue to engage audiences?

Why SEO will continue to boom

Given the advances in technology, it’s hard to look more than a few years into the future with huge predictability. However, it’s likely that SEO will continue to grow in popularity, in one form or another.

According to a recent study by Borrell Associates, companies are going to spend $65bn on SEO in 2016. What’s more, the same study found the SEO industry will continue to grow to an estimated $72bn by 2018 and $79bn by 2020.

It’s not hard to see why. There is more of everything. There is more searching as older generations, averse to technology, are making way for younger generations, who use it regularly.

Brands have moved from trying to make their content go viral to focus on creating content that resonates with their audience

There are more users as the internet becomes more affordable and available to different demographics. There are also more outlets for search visibility. When traditional advertising methods finally cease to exist altogether, businesses will have no choice but to look to inbound marketing campaigns in the online world.

Although it won’t all be plain sailing. We’ll see competition increase as more people get involved, which is likely to put up costs.

SEO will adapt with the times and so will how people using it. In the short-term there is much out there to help businesses keep up to date and incorporate a best practice SEO strategy – we do it regularly to support our users.

Looking further ahead, technologies such as self-driving cars will give users more time to perform searches at times when they previously couldn’t. These changes will make it possible for almost anyone to search for anything at any time.

Digital assistants will bridge the gap between online and offline search and as more and more brands get to grips with big data, we can expect to see search engines specific to individual platforms like the app store.

Social Media

While all of this is going on we will see a new age of social media that goes beyond the consumer dominated landscape it is today. It will become a business battleground, particularly centered on metrics and engagement.

Metrics such as likes, followers, retweets, unique views, total story completions or even screenshots, but most importantly click-through rates and the actions taken after that are what marketers will be looking at in more detail.

The goal of every marketer is to have a reliable social ROI (Return of investment) in order to be able to connect social efforts with real world results.

Alongside with metrics comes engagement. Brands have moved from trying to make their content go viral to focus on creating content that resonates with their audience, particularly video, and we will see a lot of developments in this space.

By producing content that is valuable and interesting to their audience, the most likely it is for it to be shared. This might seem an easy task, but it’s not. The only way to get it right is by constantly learn and understand what your audience expects from your brand and your business.

– Li-at Karpel Gurwicz

If this is of interest to you, be sure to check out our latest marketing roles here!

How Wimbledon will use IBM’s Watson to serve up Data

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If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket to this year’s Wimbledon tennis championships, be prepared to be scanned by a supercomputer: IBM Watson.

Cameras linked to IBM’s Watson “machine-learning” platform may be monitoring your facial expressions and trying to work out what emotions you are displaying.

If Watson learns quickly enough over the fortnight, it will apparently be able to work out which player you are supporting just by reading your face.

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and its tech partner IBM are remaining tight-lipped on the details of the new technology – not least because it needs legal approval and raises privacy concerns.

But it is another example of how sport is becoming increasingly digital, for fans, players and venues alike.

Even if Watson isn’t tracking your every cheer and grimace at the championships – which begin on Monday 27 June – it will be digesting millions of conversations on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and using natural language processing to identify common topics – not necessarily just about tennis.

“During last year’s final we were analysing about 400 tweets a second,” says IBM’s Sam Seddon. “Expand that out into Facebook, Instagram and more long-form content, and that’s a lot of data.

“We can come up with insights much faster than humans can and inform the media team so they can decide what kind of content they should be offering.”

Wimbledon’s digital team has a global audience to serve – the website received 71 million visitors last year – and a window of just a few seconds to persuade people to read its social media content rather than that of other publishers.

So, armed with IBM’s social media analysis, the team will be able to entice people chatting about their own country’s performance in the current Euro football championships, say, towards Wimbledon content about a tennis player of the same nationality.

“Social media is growing exponentially and is increasingly becoming the primary voice with which we communicate with our fans,” says Alexandra Willis, Wimbledon’s head of communications, content and digital.

Data-driven sport

On top of this social analysis by IBM’s “cognitive command centre”, sensors and computers at the venue will be collecting about 3.2 million pieces of data from 19 tennis courts across the fortnight. The tech company claims a sub-second response time and 100% accuracy.

This performance-monitoring data – everything from live scores to fastest serves to the number of backhand winners – is made available to fans via smartphone apps, the website, and now Apple TV.

You can personalise the app and receive every piece of relevant content on your favourite players, using data going back eight years.

But, to the surprise of many tech commentators, Wimbledon still has no plans to introduce wi-fi in the grounds, so visitors will have to rely on an imperfect mobile network to access all this data and content.

It will be interesting to see if this limited connectivity – and potentially higher mobile data costs – mars the user experience, particularly for international visitors.

While the tennis players can also use sensors inside tennis racquets and wristbands to monitor their own performance, under current International Tennis Federation rules the data is not allowed to be used for coaching purposes during matches.

But is there a danger players will become too reliant on detailed data analysis of their opponents and end up cancelling each other out?

“The great players know how to understand and react to what’s happening on the court – no amount of data analytics can prepare for that. It’s only one element of a sportsman’s preparation,” says Mr Seddon.

Super Bowl economics

The increased use of smartphones and apps is giving sports venues reams of valuable data about the way fans move around, the things they buy, and the content they want to watch.

For example, during February’s Super Bowl final at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, data analytics helped improve the fan experience and drive up sales of drinks and merchandise.

Tech firm VenueNext developed an app on behalf of the NFL (National Football League) and nearly half the stadium’s 71,000 capacity used it on the day to make purchases and access game stats.

“By offering an in-seat beverages delivery utility orders increased 67% during the Super Bowl,” says John Paul, VenueNext’s chief executive. “Delivery times averaged less than 10 minutes.”

A crack team of 200 ushers delivered the drinks and fed back data to the app on how long the queues for the toilets were, for example, and where the quickest place to buy a hotdog was at any time during the event.

“We also implemented express pick-up of merchandise after ordering online via your mobile,” says Mr Paul. “We ran out of inventory because it was so popular – we could’ve sold five times more than we did.”

The average spend was $212 (£145) and the most popular item was a woman’s Denver Broncos jacket costing $225, he says.

Horses for Courses

Mr Paul admits that the many breaks in play during an American football match make in-seat ordering practicable, but it wouldn’t be suitable for other sports and venues.

Indeed, Wimbledon’s Alexandra Willis says that’s the last thing they want during an intense tennis match. Nevertheless, location-based app data does help them improve signage and navigation for visitors across the complex site, she says.

During a summer of sport that includes the current Euro football championships, Wimbledon, and the Olympics, global audiences are set to grow and digital will be the main way most people access the action.

Andrew Chant, head of networks at cloud services firm Exponential-e, notes: “Since the Uefa European Championship began on 10 June, an average of 30% extra traffic has been added to networks.

“Excited by real-time intensity, we predict that the reach of this year’s biggest sporting events – from the Euros to Wimbledon and the Olympics – will extend far beyond the stadium and into the workplace, as connected sports fans live every second of the game, wherever they are.”

– Matthew Wall

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