Digital holograms are presented as a way to re-present and contextualise works of art that are too valuable or fragile to be transported to, and placed in, a holographic imaging system. The prototype exercise was conducted on Chinese Yuan Dynasty blue-and-white porcelain artefacts. The specific aim of the work was to explore digital holographic printing as an innovative technology to recover detailed comprehensive impressions of such cultural relics and their environment. Instead of the use of specialist holographic imaging devices, a sequence of conventional photographs of the artefacts was taken and these were then used to create CGI three-dimensional images of them. The CGI recreations were then used to create digital holograms which were printed using an innovative printer developed within the authors' research group. Further, the environment in which the artefacts were discovered had only been very sketchily recorded and hence reasonable artistic licence was used to create CGI representations of this to create holograms showing the complete archaeological experience.

The growth of the creative industries has been a national trend in the UK over the last 5 to 10 years, despite global trends of economic downturn, and has been mirrored on the international stage. A distinguishing feature of the creative sector is its make-up of practitioners from a broad spectrum of disciplines. In addition, creative processes often benefit from the collaboration of partners. Established models and challenges of creativity are assessed and contextualized against the contemporaneous creative industries, which feature multi-disciplinary teams, supported by current technology. Crowd-accelerated developments and creative collaboration via social media are having a transformative effect on the creation, distribution, and exhibition of creative works. They are also having an impact on traditional art and design processes. Multi-user interaction enables location-based art works to be transformed into new kinds of interactive and dynamic experiences for global viewers. Current opportunities, issues and challenges that arise are discussed, and a number of questions are identified for further discussion.

It is estimated that by 2020 that the Internet of Things with embedded and wearable computing will have a major impact on society and be providing beneficial services in a wide variety of applications. It has already accomplished some cost savings in operations and increases in asset efficiency. Increased connectivity and improved safety, security, and reliability are expected to increase potential value in a range of applications from healthcare to transportation. As much of the technology is embedded and invisible it can have the role of a smart assistant working away autonomously and unobtrusively in the background. However, automatic monitoring of activities brings increased potential invasion of personal spaces and personal data. There are significant issues in a number of areas which still have to be addressed in order to ensure safe, reliable and trustworthy systems. A prototype funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board demonstrates the value and advantages of business to business collaboration via the Internet. It also emphasizes the benefits of connectivity and its contribution to sustainability.

Increases in the power and capability of collaboration and information exchange point to a trend towards artificial intelligence, at least of a form capable of designing and assembling technological devices, sometime in the present century. The exponential growth of the world's information and the Internet of Things will enable intelligent processing devices to deduce context. This combination of processing power and contextual knowledge appears to be well within the ability of current technology and, further, appears to have the ability to deliver the level of machine intelligence and skill that would lead to the phenomenon of "The Singularity", in which machines could become "cleverer" than human beings. This poses a major challenge for human beings to determine what their role would be after this event and how they would control the machines, including prevention of malevolent control. These developments in technology have significant implications for society whether or not they cause the large scale impact predicted by proponents of the singularity concept, such as Raymond Kurzweil.

Without requiring multicast support from the underlying networks, overlay multicast has the advantage of implementing inter-domain multimedia multicast communications. Usually, overlay multicast protocols employ two different topologies: r-ary tree and m-D mesh. In this paper, we study the influence of topology selection on multimedia multicast performance. We present a set of theoretical results on the worst performance, the average performance, and the performance difference along the link stress, the number of overlay hops, and the number of shortest paths for r-ary tree-based and m-d mesh-based multicast, respectively. Furthermore, through simulations in NS2, we observe and compare tree and mesh topologies along the metrics analyzed theoretically. Simulation results match our theoretical analyses. Finally we give our evaluations of and insights into these two kinds of multicast when used to transmit multimedia streams. The selection of overlay topology is application dependent. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of multimedia multicast performances in different overlay topologies. We believe that this study is useful for protocol design of target multimedia applications and for investigating multicast functions.