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What is the H.A.T? (Download the Hub of All Things 1 Pager)
The H.A.T project is a £1.2m multi-disciplinary project funded by the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme. It involves 7 academic investigators (check us out) with a team of 9 researchers from the domain of Economics, Business, Computing and the Arts across 6 UK universities of Warwick, Exeter, Nottingham, Cambridge, West England and Edinburgh. The project will begin in June 2013 and will last 2 years.
The objective of the HAT project is to create the HAT – Hub-of-All-Things- a Multi-Sided-Market-Platform (MSMP) for the home based on collecting primary data on individuals’ consumption, behaviors and interactions and exchange data for future products and services. The outcome of the HAT project, is therefore A MARKET (think of a bazaar of buyers and sellers) and it is the first project that would attempt to engineer and emerge a LIVE market right in the home that currently do not exist, consisting of real products/services, real money, real data and real people, powered by the internet-of-things.
The data collected from the internet of things (and internet of everything) will allow the research team to explore dependencies between industries, for example medicine, energy and food, and then develop algorithms to mathematically embed context into data, facilitating the creation of almost limitless new business models and data-driven innovation.
But the implications of the H.A.T are profound for the individual, as well as for businesses supplying products and services.
The H.A.T digital vault (which could be server-at-home, cloud-based or a hybrid of the two) will store all data collected in the home and, crucially, all data generated by the individual is owned by the individual. This means that the data’s worth – in every sense from a ‘vertical’ dataset (such as consumption of medicine) to the relational dataset (such as the linkages between several objects e.g. food, fitness and medicine) – is owned by and can only be used with explicit permission from the individual for the time period stipulated by the individual. Such data could be exchanged with firms for personalized products or servicesthat would enhance lives, and could inform and empower individuals for better decisions and behaviours.