Acquiring and managing large research projects: Lessons from the frontline
Professor Enrico Motta will discuss how he has successfully managed over 30 research projects and his experiences of the project life-cycle.
Location: Room C/2.07, Queen's Buildings, School of Computer Science and Informatics
Date: 21 February 2018 at 14:00
Chair: This seminar will be chaired by Helénè de Ribaupierre.
Abstract
In this talk I will share some of the lessons learnt developed through acquiring and managing over 30 research projects in the course of my career.
Since 2000 I have received about £10.5M in external funding and led R&D projects for a total budget of over £30M, including the flagship £17.2M MK:Smart project. These projects cover a range of categories, including large collaborative R&D collaborations, ‘blue sky’ research, applied research, innovation support etc.
In the talk I will cover the whole project life-cycle, including setting up a consortium, writing a proposal, and managing a project. Needless to say, by and large I will not consider the technical and bureaucratic elements of bid writing and project management but I will focus instead on the key elements which can maximise the chances of success: how to choose collaborators, how to decide which funding programme to bid for, how to approach bid writing, how to manage performance, how to handle the inevitable tensions and trade-offs – eg academic vs industrial priorities in collaborative projects etc.
The talk is meant to be an opportunity for reflection and debate, hence audience participation will be encouraged.
Biography
Professor Enrico Motta has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Open University, where he is currently a Professor in Knowledge Technologies.
In the course of his academic career he has authored over 300 refereed publications and his h-index is 65, an impact indicator that puts him among the top computer scientists in the UK.
His research focuses on large scale data integration and analysis to support decision making in complex scenarios. Among his recent projects, he has led the MK:Smart initiative, a £17.2M project that tackled key barriers to economic growth in Milton Keynes through the deployment of innovative data-intensive solutions. He is also currently working on a novel environment for exploring and making sense of scholarly data, Rexplore, which leverages innovative techniques in large-scale data mining, semantic technologies and visual analytics.
In addition to his professorial position at The Open University, he is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, which is ranked as one of the top journals in HCI by both Microsoft Academic Search and Google.
Over the years he has advised strategic research boards and governments in several countries, including UK, US, The Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Finland, and Estonia.
