New research grant to develop online discussion platform for the US Navy

An OU academic has received a prestigious research grant to deliver a new online discussion platform for the Office of Naval Research of the US.

Dr Anna De Liddo, Senior Research Fellow in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) is leading a project which received £273,000 from the Office of Naval Research Global Office of Naval Research Science and Technology.

The aim is to deliver the next generation of technological solutions to work for the navy’s teams, which deal with vast amounts of data and are dispersed around the world.

Dr De Liddo said: “This is an ambitious project which aims at devising the next generation of technological solutions for discussion-enhanced collective intelligence and decision making.

“We believe that groups that discuss better act smarter, but the discussion media that we use today are flawed. Hence, new socio-technical spaces for conversational interactions are urgently needed and can revolutionise how we think and act collectively and collaboratively as a society."

The project will run from 1 May 2019 to March 2021.