Rochdale to upgrade roads survey
Rochdale Borough Council is planning to be one of the first organisations to use the new YAV02 survey vehicles run by Yotta, in a video survey of 130km of principal and classified roads.
The survey will involve extracting assets such as pedestrian guard rails, safety fences and road markings, then providing the data, together with raw video images, for the council's visualised asset management platform.
Paul O'Gorman, team leader for highway maintenance at Rochdale, said: "The new specification offered by the YAV02 will allow for greater efficiencies in data capture as well as improved quality and accuracy."
Yotta said the YAV02 has been designed to collect detailed data at regular traffic speeds in difficult urban environments, and includes multiple, very high definition video cameras and an onboard integrated power system.
NHS Confederation backs digital awards
The NHS Confederation has joined the sponsors of the unAwards for digital health and wellbeing products.
The awards have been set up by: Victoria Bretton, mHealth programme director at Leeds & York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; Anne Cooper, clinical informatics adviser at NHS England: and app creators Mark Brown, Kat Cormack and Michael Series. The winners will be announced on 3 July at the People Driven Digital Health and Wellbeing unConference in Leeds.
Nominations can be made through the mHealthHabitat website.
Dundee and Lancaster Unis deploy Box
Two UK universities have begun to use the Box enterprise software platform for file sharing and collaboration between staff and students.
University of Dundee has deployed the cloud platform to 25,000 users to give them access to content and run collaborative projects. Its director of ICT, Paul Saunders, said it has transformed the way it works on projects and created a more productive environment.
Lancaster University has made Box available to 18,000 staff and students as part of its digital transformation strategy.
Bluesky uses supercomputer for 3D maps
Aerial mapping company Bluesky International has begun using a supercomputer facility to create 3D maps for environmental applications such as monitoring the effectiveness of solar panel installations. It has been working with HPC Midlands, the regional centre for excellence in high performance computing, and the Karlsruhue Institute of Technology in Germany to create region-wide maps of sun shadow, and on scaling up workflows to create and maintain datasets such as the National Tree Map and air pollution models.
The company says the dataset created by the new shadow analysis could theoretically be used to accurately predict the effectiveness of solar panels as small as those attached to parking ticket machines, or monthly and annual sun exposure for agricultural areas.
"Having invested in the very latest survey equipment, we are now generating more detailed data covering larger areas than at any other time in the history of aerial surveying," said James Eddy, technical director of Bluesky. "Our nationwide annual programme of data capture results in around hundreds of terabytes of raw data every year."
Pictured: The A627 on Rochdale. Michael Ely, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
