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The performance of absolute distance measuring systems has been improved in terms of accuracy, traceability, reliability and cost through the introduction of new methodology arising from research at the University of Oxford. This has brought commercial benefit to a German company making measurement systems, through the creation of a new product line. New capabilities for measurement have been delivered to a first customer in Germany. The research has also resulted in the establishment of new activity at the National Physical Laboratory, and influenced UK and European technology roadmaps for future manufacturing.
The Beazley Archive Online Database enables large and diverse audiences to access and understand ancient art through Oxford research. It allows users around the world to ask and answer their own research questions and to learn about ancient imagery. It is principally dedicated to the study of ancient Athenian figure-decorated pottery and ancient/neo-classical engraved gems. It makes available hundreds of thousands of pictures and information-fields which can be browsed and searched in a variety of ways, according to the level and requirements of the user. The Database is the foremost academic tool for the study of ancient Greek pottery, but its demonstrable impact extends far beyond academia, to an international audience of students, educators, museums, businesses, and private researchers.
OxCal is the most popular software package world-wide for calibrating and analysing dates within the carbon dating process, enabling the accurate dating of objects from the past. The brainchild of Prof. Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU), OxCal is based on chronologies refined by the use of Bayesian statistical methods, and provides users with access to high-quality calibration of chronological data, now the basis for global chronologies. It is available online and free to download, and has played a highly significant role in establishing the ORAU as one of the pre-eminent international radiocarbon dating facilities. Funded by the NERC, and used widely within professional archaeology as well as other disciplines, OxCal has also played a key role in research projects (within Oxford and beyond) brought to the attention of the general public by the media.
Research in Multi-spectral Imaging (MSI) of manuscripts by researchers in the University of Oxford's Faculty of Classics has led to advances in imaging technology. A series of initiatives by Dr Dirk Obbink that captured images through MSI technology have led to the decipherment of new texts that have made a substantial mark in the public sector. Equity spinout of this technology has resulted in the entry in the market of the first portable multispectral scanning unit in flat-bed desktop format. The scanner, which uses innovative patented LED technology at different levels of the light spectrum, was developed under funding from ISIS, Oxford University's technology transfer division.
Karl Gerth's work on the role of Chinese consumers in the global economy, and on ways in which Chinese consumerism may create more environmental and policy problems than it solves, has had a significant influence on business leaders seeking to position themselves in the Chinese market, as well as on public discourse around the `rise of China'. Gerth has extended the range and quality of the evidence on the interconnected and wide-ranging ramifications of the shift within China toward a market economy over the past thirty years, and has improved understanding of this phenomenon in ways which have enabled British business to compete more effectively in China.
The largest investment banks in London each have thousands of servers largely devoted to Monte Carlo simulations, and to quantify their risks and satisfy regulatory demands they need to be able to calculate huge numbers of sensitivities (defined below) known collectively as "Greeks". An adjoint technique developed by Professor Mike Giles in 2006 greatly reduced the computational complexity of these calculations. The technique is used extensively by Credit Suisse and other major banks, reducing their computing costs and energy consumption. It has also led to the Numerical Algorithms Group developing new software to support the banks in exploiting this new adjoint approach to computing sensitivities.
In 2010, the new Conservative government established the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) to provide independent and authoritative analysis of the UK's public finances. The economic case for an independent body to monitor fiscal policy was based on research by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis and his co-authors into fiscal policy rules and optimal debt policy. This research has provided important inputs to policymakers' thinking about fiscal councils, both in the UK and overseas. Work by Professor Wren-Lewis has strongly influenced and shaped the design and subsequent development of the UK's Office for Budgetary Responsibility.
John Blair's research on the history and archaeology of early medieval England has had a major impact on central and local planning policy. It has made several significant contributions to current practice as regards historic landscapes and building preservation (especially churches), and it is at the heart of the on-going debate about future policy reform. His publications are read and used by planning officers, policy makers, and by the general public — who have also come to know of his work through Channel Four's Time Team. Blair's research demonstrates the influence that academic history and archaeology of the highest scholarly standards can have on planners, policy makers, commercial archaeologists, and conservationists. Its public benefits include improved understanding, cultural enrichment, and conservation policies which are more sensitive to the heritage embedded in landscapes.
In 2003, Professor Nick Bostrom published a ground-breaking article entitled `Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?', in which he advanced arguments to suggest that it is more than just a sceptical hypothesis that we might be living in a computer simulation, it is almost certainly the case. This article generated considerable interest, both within the philosophical study and beyond it. It inspired: a popular `wiki site' devoted to the idea; a highly acclaimed play World of Wires (winner of the 2012 Obie Award for Best Direction), which ran in New York and Paris in January and November 2012 respectively; a very successful novel Bedlam, published early in 2013; and another novel The Simulator, published in July 2013.
Since its launch in 2009, the mobile phone package price comparison tool Billmonitor has identified £35 million worth of savings available to the 110,000 users whose bills have been analysed. It was the first price comparison tool to be accredited by Ofcom and it has been widely praised in the media. Exploiting techniques that they had developed for applications in finance and genetics, University of Oxford researchers Chris Holmes and Nicolai Meinshausen developed the statistical algorithms underpinning the package, which uses simulation-based inference and careful statistical modelling to analyse users' phone bill data. It searches over 2.4 million available packages to identify the best mobile phone deal for each user's particular pattern of usage. Widely quoted in the press, reports in 2011 and 2012 from the Billmonitor team estimated that approximately three quarters of mobile phone customers are on the wrong tariff, with an overspend of around 40%.