Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my first blog post about Claude. We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ which are AI summaries of … Read more
After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot … Read more
I’ve been using ELM at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t had a look at it, … Read more
I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually enjoyed it – it helped … Read more
As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and … Read more
This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us … Read more
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to … Read more
Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up with a few people we … Read more
I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people … Read more
Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an even more packed schedule than … Read more