BBC North East Tech Hub Meet Up #9

Background

The BBC has been broadcasting from Newcastle for over 100 years. Now it's also the base of our North East Technology Hub and home to teams from the BBC's Product Group, responsible for developing world-beating services like iPlayer, Sounds, Sport and Bitesize.

The event is informal, and will start around 17:30 and run through to 20:00.

Agenda

From words to meanings - how LLMs are changing search (Hollie Johnson - BBC)
In the age of language models, search engines are undergoing a revolution. Search technology is moving from traditional lexical methods to advanced semantic models, offering a more intuitive user experience. In this talk, we will look at the impact of this transition, and consider possible future directions of search technology.

Innovation Adoption and New Technologies (Dan Petrovici - Newcastle University)
The presentation overviews the research projects on innovation adoption at consumer and business level. Factors that facilitate or inhibit innovations of new technologies amongst consumers are discussed. From a B2B perspective, will outline critical factors in successful innovations in the UK grocery sector. Finally, marketing strategies aimed at fostering innovation adoption are discussed. Such strategies will include examples from AI and AR with the goal of facilitating a discussion regarding potential future avenues of innovation adoption of new technologies.

What's so Special About Spatial? (Andrew Blance - Waterstons)
Spatial Computing devices - like the Apple Vision Pro or the Meta Quest 3 - have been on the market for years, but for some reason have never become the super-mainstream devices many people expected. Why is that? They provide a totally unique way of interacting with the digital world - so why aren't they more ubiquitous in our lives? Let's try find some answers to that! Specifically, lets take a look at how good UX decisions for traditional "flat" software (like a phone app, or a website on a traditional browser) can result in terrible experiences in 3D, and what are some developments that are happening right now that might make future devices more widespread.