20 October 2016
We are delighted that our Executuvie Director, Dr Carmen Torres Sanchez was recently asked to contribute to the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering blog. You can read the full article here
http://qeprize.org/createthefuture/less-bio-inspired-innovations/
16 October 2016
Cohort 3 research Orange Gao (left in image below) attended the Women in Machine Intelligence in Healthcare Dinner.
RE.WORK, an all-female company which is a strong advocate for supporting female entrepreneurs and women working towards advancing technology and science, organized an evening dinner event of discussions & networking around the progress and application of machine intelligence within healthcare on Wednesday 12th October 2016 in London. Dinner and presentations commenced at 7pm and finished at approximated 10pm. RE.WORK invited 50 attendees from leading academics, industry experts and entrepreneurs. During the dinner, speakers gave wonderful and insightful presentations about the new trends and ideas around the Machine Learning in health. Dr Kathy Goetz, VP partnerships & solutions from IBM Watson Health mentioned “The future of Healthcare is cognitive.” Dr Alice Gao, research scientist and engineer from Deep Genomics shared her work about “developing a scalable workflow for training molecular phenotype models.” Dr Razia Ahamed from Google DeepMind gave a speech about “Getting support for new ways of delivering healthcare.” People had the chance to openly discuss emerging and advancing techniques and the speakers enjoyed the lively discussion that followed.
The event was a great success. RE•WORK provided a unique mix of technology, from the exploration of latest scientific findings to startups that can make them a reality. Attendees can gain knowledge and skills from collaboration and brainstorming with global experts.
3 October 2016
CDT-EI researchers Jorge Garcia-Armenta and Ian Park from the Wolfson School at Loughborough University report on the conference....
The Institute of Physics (IOP) hosted at University of Leeds the most important optics and photonics conference in UK, the PHOTON 16. In this conference the latest technologies in optics and photonics are communicated to the scientific and academic community. The main topics in the sessions were Advances in lasers, sensing and imaging, light matter interaction, quantum optics, devices and systems, ultrafast and attosecond optics. This event also reunite worldwide recognized plenary speakers from the most important universities and research centres around the world.
The Synthetic Aperture Interferometry (SAI) group from Loughborough University participated in two talk sessions to speak about the main progresses in this optical project. Rob Middleton, a research assistant presented the work Design of a compact digital holographic camera with large numerical aperture. Meanwhile Ian Park, a CDT-EI postgraduate student, presented his project titled Characterisation of the reference wave in digital holographic camera, which describe an algorithm to find the correct position of the reference wave. That wave would be used to create the inference with the object wave to retrieve a holographic image of the object under study. Both scientific talks were well accepted by the audience which questioned the speakers about specific details of the addressed topics.
In summary, Loughborough University and the PhD students from the CDT-EI are being part of the scientific divulgation of their high level research on the most important international conferences. Additionally, this is a perfect way to make a recognition to the institutions that are part of the research projects and maintain a position within the top universities in UK and the rest of the world.
2 October 2016
Over 26 and 27 September we ran a workshop for the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) qualification our students are undertaking. We were delighted to be joined by Rodney Jones, Assessment Manager at ILM. Rod provided a good overview of ILM assessments and what his team of assessors are looking for when they are marking assignments. A tutorial was also run for a number of the assignments that members of Cohorts 1 and 2 have completed. After lunch the students took part in a team building activity. After a crash course in knot-making they were tasked with building a bridge, the catch was that all but one team member was blindfolded!
The following day Cohort 3 attended a session dedicated to their transition to year 3. Dr Carmen Torres-Sanchez, Executive Director of CDT-EI, highlighted that the Transition Zone themes for year 3 of the CDT-EI programme are enterprise and communication. Dr Joanne Whitaker, Head of IP and Commercialisation at Loughborough University was the guest speaker on the day and was able to explain the complexity of collaboration agreements and IP exploitation. Dr Donna Palmer, CDT-EI Centre Manager, also gave an introduction to public engagement, why it is important and how you can get involved.
29 September 2016
Ruben Kruiper from Cohort 2 attended the Reasoning Web Summer School 2016 early September this year in Aberdeen, Scotland. Renowned researchers from several areas related to Semantic Web, Linked Data and Knowledge Representation gave tutorials on various subjects as e.g. Inconsistency-Tolerant Query Answering, Test Driven Ontology Authoring and the Linked Data Lab. Carsten Lutz kicked off the week with a talk on data access with ontologies, starting with the foundations and diving into the fundamentals of query rewriting. Other speakers included amongst others Magdalena Ortiz, Meghyn Bienvenu, Frank Wolter, Juan Reutter and Stefan Schlobach. After a midweek packed with high standard seminars the summer school ended with a social dinner in the city town house.
27 September 2016
Last week we formally welcomed our third cohort of students.
The academic year starts with our annual retreat to the Burn in Scotland. The new cohort are introduced to our accredited Transition Zone training programme and start on their PhD journeys. Most importantly, the week allows the new students to get to know each other and to meet some of our cohort 2 researchers, who were able to pass on some top tips for success.
11 September 2016
Loughborough University’s Dynamic Research group hosted the ‘Powertrain Modelling and Control’ (PMC) 2016 conference; from the 7th to the 9th September, where CDT-EI members also aided in presenting and organising the event. The event hosted many presentation on the research done all over the world, including well thought out and interesting key note speakers. These speakers include:
These speakers and the researchers who presented their findings all have a significant impact on research and cutting edge technology on the automotive industry. CDT-EI member Robert Turnbull presented his findings on the coupled dynamic analysis of piston compression rings.
PMC 2016 was not only about presenting research but also to show case cutting edge technologies from many of the industrial sponsors who helped give rise to the opportunities showed at PMC 2016. These sponsors include:
Many of the sponsors had their own papers to present at PMC, and to show the future generation implementations to the modern road vehicles.
Loughborough Dynamic Research group also organised a scenic train trip with a classic steam engine and first class Gala Dinner. The train trip went through the old unused stations. The stations were kept/made to feel the time of the 1900s. Members were also allowed to see the coal fuelled furnace. The nature of the atmosphere allowed many industry associates to see researchers in a more relaxed manner and allowed an exchange of ideas and thoughts in a non-formal manner, while giving a good setting for the following day. The atmosphere experienced that evening was described priceless.
At the Galla Dinner Professor Homer Rahnejat, Professor of Dynamics gave a wonderful and memorable speech. Going from his past students making a difference to this world to the new projects being generated at the University.
It is hoping that PMC 2018 will continue the success and the experience of PMC 2016 and the possibility of more papers being published both the Dynamic Research Group and the CDT-EI.
23 August 2016
The 5th international conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems was held this year at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh between 19th and 22nd of July 2016. Ruben Kruiper of cohort 2 attended Living Machines 2016 and presented a paper titled: Computer-Aided Biomimetics (link). The paper introduces what is understood by a biomimetics process from a design engineering perspective and proposes several guidelines to partially automate this process. During the talk, one of these guidelines was further elaborated and the concept of ‘function’ in biology was addressed. This subject opened up an interesting discussion that revealed the opposing views of biologists and engineers to this concept, as well as intentionality and sustainability.
The 19th was filled with workshops that revolved amongst others around bio-inspired architecture, robots that adapt their morphology to the environment and the societal, economic and ecological impact of biohybrid technologies. The other days of the single-track conference were filled with plenary talks and poster sessions, as well as a diverse range of keynote talks by: Barbara Webb, Thomas Speck, Antonio Bicchi, Frank Hirth and Yoshihiko Nakamura.
