Welcome to our February newsletter. As always, there’s a lot to report on with some exciting news items. If you are interested in following up on any of the stories, further information can be found on our website. The stories have been selected to illustrate the breadth of the Foundation’s activities as well as the impact we’re making for the benefit of wider society. Good reading.
Best regards,
Richard
The Alan Turing Institute director announcement
Professor Mark Girolami FRSE has been appointed to lead The Alan Turing Institute-Lloyd’s Register Foundation £10 million programme into data-centric engineering. An internationally leading researcher in statistical sciences, Mark has had a broad career including 10 years as an engineer at IBM. He brings to the programme significant experience of developing and applying advanced statistical and computational techniques to engineering challenges.
Heritage and Educational Centre (HEC) expert panels
The Lloyd’s Register Foundation Heritage & Education Centre (HEC) is one of the finest libraries and archives of its kind, holding unique material covering over 250 years of maritime history and engineering innovation. There are several ways in which we can maximise HEC in pursuit of our charitable aims and we are delighted to have convened two expert panels to help us review its future role and structure. The expert panels consist of high-profile academics and senior representation from a number of world-renowned institutions, including the Royal Institution, the Natural History Museum, the British Library, the Science Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, Memorial University of Newfoundland, English Heritage, Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Wellcome Collection and the National Archives. This reflects the prestige and potential of our collection.
RCA exhibition
We will be using the reception area of the old building at 71 Fenchurch Street for a small exhibition entitled, “Design for Safety at Sea.” The exhibition collects prototypes, designed by students of the Royal College of Art, that respond to the Foundation’s first Safety Grand Challenge and to the dangers people face on the River Thames. Dates are Wednesday 22 to Friday 24 February. We will start with a symposium on Tuesday afternoon, with a private view and awards ceremony that same evening. The public and group colleagues will be able to access the exhibition between 10am and 4pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We are immensely grateful to our LR colleague Dave Kelly, Head of Facilities for his enthusiasm and support.
Blockchain technologies workshop
The Engineering Applications of Blockchain Technologies workshop recently organised by us in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute was met with strong interest. Gary Pogson from Lloyd’s Register Group who led the workshop said: “We wanted to explore the use of distributed ledger technologies within engineering systems and to think through how they could be used to benefit society. We brought together people from across disciplines, industry sectors, government and academia to help us look at innovative applications and to consider the implications of this new technology for engineering.” The output from the workshop will be used to support an insight report. See the blog 'How Could Distributed Ledger and Blockchain Technologies Make Society Safer?' here.
Research fellowship
Dr Rebecca Boston has been awarded the 2016 Lloyd's Register Foundation / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in the control of nanostructures in functional oxides.
Rebecca is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Sustainable Functional Materials, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield.
‘My work focuses on the use of biological molecules to control the morphology of crystals in functional oxides. I will use these bio-templates to control the nanomorphology of known and new oxide material for dielectrics for capacitors, thermoelectric generators, and fuel cell materials, leading to a sustainable oxide device industry less reliant on scare or toxic materials.’
Ri lectures on video
The Royal Institution’s prestigious Christmas Lectures, presented by Professor Saiful Islam, have so far reached over 1.7 million people in the UK. Each lecture builds upon a theme of energy and energy storage, and they are now available internationally via the RI video channel. We encourage you to seek them out. In addition, the Ri and Saiful will be bringing the live lectures to Singapore and Japan later in 2017 – further highlighting both the Foundation’s aim to advance public education and also Saiful’s profile and his vastly increased potential to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Lloyd’s Register Technology Radar – Low Carbon
The drive towards sustainability has never been more urgent – and technology will continue to play a crucial role. Foundation Chief Executive Richard Clegg contributed to the Lloyd’s Register Technology Radar – Low Carbon, published on 31 January, examines the outlook for renewables, nuclear, grid and infrastructure, and energy storage. Read more and download the publication here.
Call for robotics expression of interest
Last October we launched our foresight review in robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) . The review introduced the issues around technology deployment and highlighted priority areas where advances would have significant impact.
We are now preparing to engage with the community in areas recommended by the foresight review as those where the Foundation can make a distinctive difference. We have issued a call that allows any organisations or institutions with an active interest in our priorities areas to register with us. Closing date for registering interest is 28 February 2017. Registration’s after this date will still be accepted but may miss earliest opportunities.
Resilience first call for proposals
Scoping studies for consolidating knowledge on resilience between and within critical infrastructure sectors.
Arup has been appointed by the Foundation to host a Joint Programme for Resilience Engineering (JPRE) which aims to improve resilience within and between critical infrastructure sectors globally. This is an opportunity to accelerate the resilience shift by promoting resilience engineering as a new approach that challenges old paradigms. Click here for more information.
Foundation's annual review
Download the Group Review 2016. Its theme ‘making an impact’ illustrates our vision to become one of the world’s leading engineering research and education charities.
Upcoming
Alan Turing Institute Optimal Experimental Design & Inverse Problems workshop
14 – 15 March London, UK: This two-day workshop, with attendees from academia and industry, aims to address the theory and practice in data acquisition design for reduced uncertainty in Bayesian inverse problems.
International Consortium of Nanotechnologies (ICON)
07 April Athens, Greece: The conference will provide an opportunity for the ICON network to come together to consider the grand challenges in nanotechnology.