The IT Pro Podcast: Digitising dinosaurs
How the Natural History Museum uses data to explore the ancient world

Many will doubtless be familiar with London’s Natural History Museum as a fun and educational place to visit, but it’s also an important research institution. Alongside its role as a tourist attraction, it also does vital work in the biological sciences field, doing things like species categorisation and climate science research.
All of that research involves a huge amount of very precise data, and managing it all is no easy task. In this week’s episode, we speak to Alison Davies, CIO of the Natural History Museum, about the role of data literacy in education, her background in scientific research, and how a giant squid makes her office so interesting to work in.
In this week’s headlines, we look at Microsoft’s $100,000 IoT bug bounty, why the UK’s internet still lags behind other countries, and the hacker behind the love bug.
Footnotes
News
- Microsoft offers hackers $100K to break Azure Sphere
- UK internet outages remain high despite global slowdown
- Creator of notorious 'Love Bug' virus comes clean after 20 years
In-depth
- Natural History Museum Data Portal
- UK to start trialling contact-tracing app on Isle of Wight
- What is big data analytics?
- Giant sea creature goes on display
- Seeing double: The rise of the digital twin
- Microsoft launches Stranger Things-inspired coding courses
- University uptake for STEM subjects flat despite more A-level entries
- How technology is changing education
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