Author: Leigh Dodds

CTO at EnergySparks (https://energysparks.uk), previously Director of Delivery at the Open Data Institute. Proud Dad.

Reflecting on Energy Sparks as a “Community Tech” project

I recently attended the launch event for the new Power To Change Community Tech Fund and have been reading through the essays and report on the Community Tech network website. It's great to see this topic getting some attention and much needed funding. It's also prompted me to reflect a bit on my own experience … Continue reading Reflecting on Energy Sparks as a “Community Tech” project →

It’s just a spreadsheet, but it’s still data infrastructure

I've found my new favourite example of a well documented, tiny slice of data infrastructure. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's probably the simplest dataset that is designated as national statistics. If you can think of one simpler, then let me know. It's the weekly road fuel prices data on gov.uk. This data … Continue reading It’s just a spreadsheet, but it’s still data infrastructure →

Notice of plans to erect…another big database

This privacy notice went past in my twitter stream earlier. It announces that the UK government is planning to create a new database that will some quite detailed data about every electricity meter in the UK. In particular it'll combine together information about the meter, the energy consumption and billing details associated with that energy … Continue reading Notice of plans to erect…another big database →

Improving access to non-domestic energy consumption data

I recently wrote a post describing the data ecosystem for non-domestic energy consumption data in the UK. In that post I summarised my current understanding of the different actors involved in that data ecosystem, and some of the challenges of trying to access data from the perspective of a third-party service provider. In an earlier … Continue reading Improving access to non-domestic energy consumption data →

The data ecosystem for non-domestic energy consumption data in the UK

Since joining Energy Sparks I've started investing time in trying to understanding the UK energy system and, in particular, the parts of its data infrastructure and broader ecosystem that we work with. It's a big, complex system so lots to wrap my head around. I looked at one part of that data ecosystem in a … Continue reading The data ecosystem for non-domestic energy consumption data in the UK →

A prompt to condition a Positronic Brain to follow the Three Laws of Robotics

Gopher is Deep Mind's new language model. I saw a tweet that highlighted the text prompt that the researchers used to prepare the model for having a conversation with users. The prompt is taken from the Gopher paper (see Table A30, page 114). The paper says that: In order to produce a conversationalist, we use … Continue reading A prompt to condition a Positronic Brain to follow the Three Laws of Robotics →