The two CDTs PPAR (Pervasive Paralellism) at Edinburgh and HiPEDS jointly organised an Industry Event at Edinburgh for partners and students on November 10th 2016. (See http://pervasiveparallelism.inf.ed.ac.uk/industrial-engagement-event_2016/
for more details.)

Eleven HiPEDS students travelled to Edinburgh for the day-long event. The varied timetable included 1.5-minute and 1-slide research briefings by 27 PPAR and HiPEDS students, followed after a break by 4-minute company presentations by about 17 industry partners. The latter included descriptions of internship opportunities as well as more general activities of the company. These talks prepared the way for networking over a long lunch break where students presented posters of their research, followed, in the afternoon, by one-one 5-minute chats with partners about internship and/or research possibilities.

All aspects of the event were appreciated by students and industry alike, and the day ended with a final networking reception.

Protocopier is a group project within HiPEDS, developed by PhD students who started in October 2016, with support from Dyson Limited, and the Dyson School of Design Engineering. Full details can be found on their group project site.

Throughout summer 2016 a number of staff and students from HiPEDS took part in various College-wide outreach activities.

Dr Alastair Donaldson, Senior Lecturer in Computing and Leader of the Multicore Programming research group, gave a new lecture ‘What Makes Software Go Wrong’ to the following audiences:

• IET Children’s Engineering Lecture: What Makes Software Go Wrong?
• Y11 Project STEM Summer School
• Engineering Summer School for Y9 girls
• Sutton Trust Summer School for Y12 students

For more information, see http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/outreach/

The constituent departments of HiPEDS also invited individual streams of students into their departments for 4 days as part of the Sutton Trust Summer School. Electrical and Electronic Engineering additionally took part in the College’s newly expanded Work Experience programme.

As part of ongoing work with teachers to assist and develop Maths, Computing and Engineering in schools the Outreach Team have recently begun running a series of Teacher Focus Groups to collaborate and gain feedback on new programme ideas.

Luke Bacon, Physical Sciences and Engineering Outreach Programmes Manager and Faculty Outreach Champion, Prof George Constantinides, speaking to a focus group of secondary school teachers to open a two-way discussion over outreach needs and requirements.

Imperial HiPEDS, Edinburgh PPAR, Oxford AIMS

April 26^th – 28^th 2016 Eastpark Conference Centre, Bracknell

At the end of April 27 PhD students from three CDTS based at Imperial, Edinburgh and Oxford participated in a two-day creativity sandpit.  We were very fortunate to welcome to the event three industry engineers, Walt Aldred,  Research Director and Scientific Advisor for Drilling at Schlumberger Gould Labs, Dr. Nathan Chong, ARM researcher, and Dr David Sharp, Head of Technology 10x at Ocado. Each gave a stimulating briefing for their challenge: Underground SLAM, Novel parallel algorithms for warehouse operations, and New applications and opportunities with the Internet of Things (IOT). Together with four academics from Imperial and Edinburgh, they then participated as mentors throughout the sandpit, giving valuable guidance and feedback.  Professor Peter Childs of the Dyson School of Engineering at Imperial gave a plenary talk entitled “Ideas to Reality”, which offered a compelling picture of the importance of creativity and design,  and Imperial’s impressive track record in turning this into industrial impact.

During the first half-day, the students learned about the challenges, started asking questions and having initial ideas, got to know each other, and built some weird Rube Goldberg contraptions for popping party crackers. On the second day they constructed mind maps and formed groups to work on one of the problems. After initial presentations and feedback from everyone, the mentors ran a “test lab” to help the students challenge themselves further about their ideas. On the final half-day the students presented their ideas for final feedback and then gave an elevator pitch to conclude. They formed seven groups, and many exciting ideas emerged. One group worked on a novel approach to “underground vision” and several groups worked on algorithms for autonomous robots careering around a large warehouse without colliding, including from one group a simulation built during the event, There were three innovative IOT applications, for smart city lighting, a non-invasive  hormone detector and emotion directed music.

Students appreciated the chance to discuss research ideas from an industry perspective and to work on real industrial challenges. The aims of the sandpit were several: to give them an opportunity to reflect on their own approaches to creative thinking, enable them to meet and work with peers from other institutions, and to discuss research with industrial engineers.

The event was organised by HipEDS Programme Director Dr Krysia Broda and facilitated by a team from Knowinnovation.

HiPEDs Ideas to Reality Cover

The Data Science Institute at Imperial College London in partnership with  HPCC Systems® announces a new competition for integrating Google’s recently open-sourced TensorFlow™ library with HPCC’s open source big data platform HPCC Systems®.

For more details on the competition (for which the prize includes PhD scholarship in the HiPEDS CDT), visit this website.

The PhD Industry Day saw approximately 42 students and 28 industrial engineers come today for a day of discussion. This exciting event was introduced by Professor Paul Kelly and led to many engaging and stimulating conversations about “challenges in industry” and student research ideas. Initially attendees all filled in an A3 piece of card with a few short sentences about themselves and their research and “dream internship” or “challenges” as appropriate. These were stuck to the wall and made for informal networking. There were 4 subsequent discussion sessions involving different groupings of industry and students, and lots of lunch discussions as well. The feedback from industry seems to have been extremely positive, and there have already been various follow-up communications.

The event was facilitated by Knowinnovation, who prepared the “dance-cards” and identification labels, as well as looking after the organisation on the day.
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