ForeSight

Foresight's Fifth Project - Brain Science and Drugs

In the last edition of e-sight we announced our latest Foresight project on Brain Science and Drugs. The project's broad scope is to explore the implications and contribution of future science, including social sciences, on addiction and drug use. Areas of science that will be included are:

• a. genetics: looking at the hereditary nature of addiction. Over the next 50 years the genes involved in the various aspects of addiction are likely to be identified;
• b. brain science: will it be possible to develop molecules to block or destroy the relevant receptors and what might this mean? What type of pharmacological or other interventions may become possible?
• c. behavioural change: what is our best understanding of and framework for considering addictive behaviour and successful interventions? This includes the social context;
• d. cognitive enhancement.

In early 2004 we will be bringing together experts in these fields to discuss and identify scientific issues pertinent to addiction and drug use. If you are interested in becoming involved or finding out more about the project please contact us.

Cognitive Systems - The brain in the machine

Cognitive Systems Project home page

The Foresight Cognitive Systems Project has already influenced the researchers working together

It won't be long before the personal computers we carry around with us have the computing power of the human brain. The trouble is that today's computers are still pretty dim. And it will take some clever research to find computers anything approaching intelligence.

The Foresight Cognitive Systems Project set out to provide the IT research community in the UK with an opportunity to borrow ideas from brain scientists. Put formally, the project "set out to provide visions for the future of research in natural and artificial cognitive systems".

A particular quest was to look for opportunities where different disciplines could work together more effectively than in the past. When the project started, in April 2002, there was only a limited exchange between the life science and physical science research communities looking at cognitive systems. Could IT researchers find common ground with brain scientists?

This was by no means obvious when the project started. In the first few meetings the two "sides" had to get to grips with their respective languages. Physical scientists and life scientists often use the same words, but sometimes in subtly different ways.

Professor Wendy Hall, current president of the British Computer Society and head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, made the point at a meeting that took the message out to Venture Capitalists. "Why didn't we hear about this earlier?" said the VCs. "We are very comfortable about talking to each other now, if you had been around at the beginning of the process it would have been very different."

The VC event was one of series of 'report back' events, to the research community and to various stakeholders. The meeting for finance world, at the Design Council and in association with Library House, happened the day before a major event hosted by IBM at its Hursley Park research centre near Winchester. This brought together heads of research councils, industry representatives and researchers.

The formal stage of the project has come to an end, but there is continuing activity to carry the message out to important audiences. For example, the two project coordinators, Professor Lionel Tarassenko and Professor Richard Morris, have carried the message to meetings with the Council of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. They also expect to meet other funding agencies over the next six months.

At one stage the coordinators believed that they might have to point some effort into encouraging the creation of networks of researchers. These would build on the various technical reviews of where life sciences and IT could work together. In the event, the networks came into being of their own accord.

Various groups now plan to hold specialist workshops where they will further refine and develop the 'grand challenges' that arose from the meetings held throughout the project. Over the coming months the workshops will bring together researchers in real and artificial cognitive systems to review and refine research manifestos on a number of promising areas that arose during the project.

There are many reasons for researchers to work together across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The most important is that there are areas of research where traditional strategies are running out of steam. In IT, for example, we will not be able to move from speech recognition to natural dialogue with machines simply by throwing computer power at the problem.

The Foresight Cognitive Systems Project will live on through these workshops, and the research proposals. As the first project in the third phase of Foresight, it has shown that researchers can, when given the opportunity, tear down the barriers between previously isolated areas of science.

The project's continuing activities, including some of the workshops, will receive support from learned societies and other groups that have agreed to act as "foster parents" for ideas that came out of the Foresight Project until they are mature enough to be selfstanding. When the details are available we will post more information on these activities on the project's web site

Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention

CTCP Project home page

The last 3 months have been intensely active for the Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention project. We commissioned 11 reviews of the state-of-the-art of science, covering social learning and social risk management as well as the technology of information systems and software agents. These are being peer-reviewed and we expect to announce the publication date in the next edition of e-sight. We are also preparing a "Technology Forward Look", which seeks to summarise the major technology developments that we anticipate over the next 10-15 years. We ran a series of expert workshops in the autumn, anticipating information and communication technology uptake, crime opportunities/prevention and the societal impact of technology over the next 10-15 years. All of this material is being used in the development of scenarios and of systems maps, which we will use to engage a broader range of people in the issues around cyber trust and crime prevention. We will be able to tell you much more in the next edition of e-sight

Flood and Coastal Defence

FCD Project home page

The project's interim report provides the most up-to-date estimates of the impacts of future flood risk in the UK in 2050 and 2080. Even in the mildest scenario coastal flood damage could double by the end of the century. The worst case showed coastal flooding increasing by 30 times in the same period. However, some under some scenarios some areas may get less flooding, especially in the summer. The project is now looking at flood management responses and will publish an assessment of these options in spring 2004 along with a plan of further actions to be taken forward by our key stakeholders.

Shortly to be launched is "Flood Ranger," an innovative tool for helping people to understand the trade-off and uncertainties surrounding the impact of flooding in the UK over the next century. Flood Ranger is an expert simulation which has been described as a kind of scientific Sim-City