Emma Salgard Cunha

Contact: Emma Salgard Cunha <Emma.SalgardCunha@enterprise.cam.ac.uk>

Emma is based at Cambridge Enterprise, responsible for commercialisation of research from Cambridge Arts, Humanities and Social Science departments. Researchers in those departments often have interesting digital projects, without ready access to technical resource for prototyping. It's worth contacting her each year, to see whether she might be aware of potential opportunities

In 2021:

Introduction to Vladimir Vilde, regarding technology for linking from image watermarks.

In 2020:

I’m working with a conservation and behaviour researcher based in zoology, Doug Macfarlane, on a proto-social enterprise based around assessing and directing funding into evidence-based and evaluated conservation projects.

At the moment the idea is to deliver this as a sort of consultancy to corporate or other large donors to match them up with small-scale projects in need of funding. The team have access to data and a formula which allows them to rank the projects by urgency, efficacy, etc. But there is also the thought of producing a platform, in the style of a crowdfunding site, to display and rank projects and to gamify the process in order to encourage donors to achieve the greatest impact and possibly even to rank their philanthropic efforts against others in their sector.

This is Doug’s academic profile. He has built an interesting team of social scientist and conservation practitioners: https://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/directory/douglas-macfarlane

Although its less of a design-led project than the digital humanities projects, I wonder if this could be of interest to your students. If so I’d be glad to put Doug in touch with you (or whoever is holding the fort while you are away).