Survey shows role for robots in government
Two-thirds of UK citizens believe that robots will eventually work in government, with a third thinking this could happen within the next five years according to a new survey.
The result has emerged from an exercise run by software company OpenText that involved questioning 2,000 people in the UK as part of a broader survey taking in 15,000 in Western Europe and North America.
It revealed that 17% in the UK believe robots could be working in government as soon as 2019 or 2020.
New fund for smart energy systems
Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSCR) have set up a new fund for the development of smart energy systems.
As a first step the bodies are planning to make up to £41.5 million available, as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, for projects that provide cleaner, cheaper energy using advanced IT and storage that link with low carbon power, heating and transport systems.
The first round will focus on localised energy system demonstrators and projects to develop novel concepts that could revolutionise local energy provision.
DWP completes move to hybrid cloud
The Department for Work and Pensions has completed its migration of applications to a combination of government owned data centres and the public cloud.
A blogpost by James Barton, head of transformation for technology services at DWP, says the nine-month project has given it capability to create, test and run new digital services on a pay-as-you-go basis.
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