On Monday 27th April the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC are jointly hosting an event to showcase the outcomes of projects from our co-funded Knowledge Exchange Programme. We will also be exploring the wider implications of the projects' findings and their recommendations for our respective communities as well as the future of the partnership itself. The event is being held at Wallacespace in St Pancras, London.

To find out more about the Knowledge Exchange Programme and this event visit our blog at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange.

THE EVENT IS FREE but places are limited. Refreshments and a light lunch will be available. If you wish to reserve a place and find out more about the day please contact Louise Elliott at the AHRC (l.elliott at ahrc dot ac dot uk).

Cheers, Brendan

We're very excited to announce that today we are launching R&DTV, a pilot project that we've been working on with our colleagues in RAD. I've been working on this as producer, with co-producer Hemmy Cho, as well as Ian Forrester and George Wright.

So what is R&DTV? It's a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable BBC developers, BBC project experts and external experts from around the world.

We're looking at how we can use off the shelf technology, various codecs and different methods of distribution to create and share content - it's a voyage of discovery, so watch out for news on how this project develops. This is our first pilot episode, we'll release another in May and hopefully (if you like it) we'll make some more! In Episode 1 we have interviews with The Digg guys, Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC as well as Graham Thomas, Ant Miller and George Auckland talking about their work for BBC R&D & Learning Innovation.

The content comes in 3 forms.

* A brief 5 minute video, containing all the very best bits
* A longer 30 minute video, containing deeper conversations
* The Asset Bundle, containing everything we used and didn't use to make the videos above

We're pleased to announce the launch of Homura, an Open Source Java game engine and IDE, developed by BBC Research and Development with Liverpool John Moores University. We've been waiting for this one for quite a while.

Homura produces natively 3d games that can be exported to Java WebStart for deployment over the internet. The IDE is a plugin for Eclipse, which provides the Homura libraries and tools for game development. The game engine code is derived from JME.

The whole project is being run in conjunction with Liverpool John Moores University and the British Broadcasting Corporation Research and Development. The full project is hosted on Google Code.

So what you wanting for????
Go and download it and start building...

As you might have noticed BBC Backstage was in Las Vegas for Microsoft's Mix 2009 conference. The experience of a conference on this scale was impressive, but the talks even more impressive. Luckily we didn't have to run around with a camera and tripod. Instead Microsoft filmed every talk and put it on-line for everyone to see a few days later.

He's our picks for videos which you shouldn't miss. You will need Silverlight to watch them on the site or you can download them in Windows Media and other formats.

Ask The Gu - Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow.com) and Jeff Sandquist (Microsoft DPE get down and intimate with a load of questions from Twitter.

Bill Buxton's keynote - Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design, in particular.

Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote - Johnny Lee covers several interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and explains how you can develop your own applications

Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience - How Microsoft go about evolving pieces of UI that haven't seen major change since 1995? This video shows the design process and see the evolution of the design through sketches and prototypes

Standards for Aggregating Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services - panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area

The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Dan Roam talks about persuading people with pictures. Whether convincing leadership to back a project, getting a VC to fund a business, building consensus on a project team, or selling a new technology platform within an organization

Touch and Gesture Computing, What You Haven't Heard - early lessons from applied knowledge of touch applications, devices, and design methods

Overview of Windows Azure - about the essential concepts of Windows Azure, including what's new

Today (March 24th) is Ade Lovelace day.

Today 1600+ people will write about an influential woman in technology, thanks to Suw Charman-Anderson who setup the idea via pledge bank. But why? Well Suw explains why...

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

The best way to get a feel for all the blog posts currently is via a the Mash-Up - The Ada Lovelace Day Collection