Andrew leads EPSRC’s strategic interactions with key partners within the university, business, regional and international sectors to ensure that the EPSRC progresses its Delivery Plan Priority Framework and its desired outcomes. Andrew also leads EPSRC Impact and Public Engagement activities.
Andrew is a member of the EPSRC Executive Board and currently the Project Director for the Rosalind Franklin Institute.
Previously Andrew has led:
The University Relationship portfolio as Deputy Director
The Physical Sciences Capability theme commissioning research and training within the fundamental chemistry, physics, and materials portfolio
Andrew's presentation title is: "EPSRC: Creating Value for Businesses"
Russell Beck, Director of ImagineThinkDo, has become a strong source of inspiration for the TFNetwork team. In his Thought Leadership talk he tied together a rainbow of viewpoints about the "Future of Work" covering "Work Nomads", "Technology", "Women", "Future Skills", "Be the Best", "Brand" and "Networking". And if you ever wanted to see a great 'About' page on a website: check this out!
He now is back and exploring if "Meaning is the new Money!". Please join him at the conferenceon 23rd March, at 11:10 AM. Ask your questions in chat and for the panel from 11:40, where he will be joined by speakers from EPSRC, MVINE, and universities of Lancaster and Leicester.
Russell is a thought leader. He is a catalyst who is great at using research and insight to challenge preconceptions.
His clients say he is a passionate presenter who joins the dots to make things real.
Russell brings broad experience from a diverse career having held many top roles including working as an engineer managing large-scale international projects, leading a £120m talent management business and growing a successful consulting operation from scratch.
Synopsis: We have been talking for over a decade that we should ‘start with why’ yet now, more than ever, more and more people are questioning “what is the point?” People who find meaning in their work are more productive, more motivated, more innovative, healthier and have longer tenure. This is the challenge and the opportunity. ‘Meaning is the new money’ and to unlock the potential we need to do more than just know why, we need to really embed it. This session will show you why this is so important and how to start.
ImagineThinkDo is a people strategy consultancy whose purpose is to inspire, challenge and enable leaders to unlock the value of their people. We do this through delivering research-led thought leadership, expertly facilitated workshops and powerful one-to-one coaching sessions.
We have helped leaders embed purpose-led leadership; define and live their values; effectively manage remote teams; embrace and then enable cultural change; understand and unlock the benefits of the generations; how to plan for the future of work. Through this, we help organisations increase productivity, hire and retain the right people and enhance engagement.
We work with a broad mix of clients of different sizes and from different industries. What they all have in common is an appetite to improve and a curiosity to step beyond traditional leadership development. Some want us to inspire and challenge their people, some want us to help them take that further to enable lasting change. All want to invest in their people as they know they are their most important asset.
Dr Gilbert Owusu heads the Service and Operational Transformation Research in BT. He has a strong track record in applying AI, production management and operations modelling technologies to service operations which have led to significant customer service improvements and OPEX reduction in BT's operations.
Gilbert's research on applying AI technologies for transforming service operations have been published widely in book chapters, conferences and journals, He is the co-editor of two books on service production management. Gilbert is a visiting professor at University of Essex, a member of the UK Operational Research Society's General Council and an executive member of the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on AI.
Creating Value for Economies: Collaborate - Innovate - Educate
Panel discussion
Wednesday 24th March, 13:05 - 13:40
Gilbert will be joined by his academic partners and former postgraduate researcher for a panel discussion at our conference providing case studies about the impact of collaboration.
Spring 2021 - Virtual Conference Creating Value for Economies: Collaborate - Innovate - Educate
We've been bringing you the conference that is written into our vision and is close to our heart.
The Tommy Flowers Network brings together the ICT industry and Academia with the new generation of universities' postgraduate researchers to understand the biggest challenges we're facing. We're living connected, digital lives in a world that's been radically changed by our use of technology and now through the pandemic as well.
Many of the devices, applications and services we rely on today, and the technologies that underpin them, were inconceivable to previous generations. What happens next will be driven by the next generation of researchers coming out of universities. We need this new generation of research leaders to understand the ICT industry they will be inheriting - because they will be shaping our world from now on, and we want to support them to get it right!
The CONFERENCE
Now more than ever this conference is well positioned to challenge the old and embrace the new. We will explore how this changed world can create opportunities for new ways of collaboration.
Find individual talks via the speaker profile links below.
Day1
Tuesday 23rd March 2021
Leaders from industry, academia and governance bodies will provide collaboration and innovation stories to inspire the future.
Carol Fletcher, BT's Head of Academic and Research Partnerships and Mike Williams, our compere opened the conference
Talk: Please watch the recording of Dr Andrew Bourne, EPSRC – UKRI, Director Partnerships, for his view on the impact of collaboration on the UK economy in his presentation on "EPSRC - Creating Value for Businesses".
Talk: Please watch the recording of Joseph Spear of MVINE, providing his industry view on the impact of collaboration for his company and the economy in general.
Demo: Shane Allum, BT will give a bite size demo from the Adastral Park Innovation Showcases.
Talk: Please see the profile and slide deck of Prof Idris Eckley, Lancaster University, who gave insights into his experience of collaboration with industry and the impact on innovation and the economy.
Talk: Please watch the recording of Dr John Drake's italk of "I was a PGR once", a career that lives and breathes collaboration.
Keynote: Please watch the recording of Russell BeckDirector of ImagineThinkDo. He gave an inspiring view on this new world of work, and asking the question: "Is Meaning the new Money?"
Panel: Please watch the recording of the lively panel discussion about "Creating Value for Economies" with Dr Amanda Chmura form EPSRC, Joseph Spear, Prof Idris Eckly, Dr John Drake and Russell Beck answering the questions from the audience.
Day 2
Wednesday 24th March 2021
We'll showcase collaboration successes, with industry and academia driving latest innovations together.
13:00 PMCarol Fletcher, BT's Head of Academic and Research Partnerships, will be opening the day and will be joined by Simon Parry, BT University Programmes.
13:05 PM - Panel Case study: Please join BT’s Dr Gilbert Owusu, Service & Operational Transformation. He will lead a case study panel discussion on "Maximising the value of Research". He'll be joined by expert collaboration leaders from Essex University, University of Loughborough, Robert Gordon University and Michigan State University. This sees Gilbert's former postgraduate research collaborators joining the team once again, showing the impact of collaboration on young careers.
13:40 PM- Demo: Shane Allum, BT will give another bite size demo from the Adastral Park Innovation Showcases.
13:45 PM- Keynote and interactive session: Ken Shaw from Benchmark Communication Techniques will add his view on this new world we live in, the skills needed and the questions that need to be asked in a talk on "Presentation Skills: New thoughts on an old subject".
14:15 PM Carol Fletcher has a Fireside chat with Dr Alastair McGibbon from Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult.
14:30 PMPeter Brady from Orbital will give a deep dive on “MYSPIRA - A collaboration between Orbital, the NHS and the University of Suffolk”
14:45 PM Dr Jon Chamberlain will deep dive as well on “Investigating Human Impact on Norfolk's Chalk Reef Using 3D Photogrammetry”
Day 3
Thursday 25th March 2021
We'll dive deeper into collaboration stories and we explore the impact of a Digital Future on collaboration and innovation across sectors.
10:15 AMCarol Fletcher, BT's Head of Academic and Research Partnerships, will be opening the day.
10:20 AM- Panel Case study: Stephen Cassidy will be leading the Fireside chat and panel on "Prosperity: the Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure NG-CDI"
10:50 AM- Talk: A collaboration deep dive from a different sector by Dr Malcolm Skingle, GlaxoSmithKline: "Driving Science through Collaboration"
11:10 AM- Talk: Lisa Perkins, BT Adastral Park & Research Realisation Director is talking on "Mind the Gap: How collaboration can help to address the skills gap".
11:35 AM- Demo: Shane Allum, BT will give another bite size demo from the Adastral Park Innovation Showcases.
11:40 AM- Keynote: Please join Prof Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK for the closing keynote on "Collaborative research for sociodigital futures: interdisciplinary and cross-sectional perspectives".
Speaker: Dr Sandy Brownlee, University of Stirling Title: Improving trust in the results of search-based optimisation
The event was hosted by BT Applied Research's Dr Gilbert Owusu and his team.
Search-based methods, including techniques like metaheuristics, local search, and evolutionary algorithms, are powerful tools for finding good solutions to difficult optimisation problems. Usually the problem is formulated as a representation (what a solution looks like) and a fitness function (which measures the quality of solutions). The algorithm will explore the space, generating new solutions through a variety of randomised processes, and eventually settle on a good solution. Sometimes the solutions found by these processes can be a little unexpected or "outside the box", which can make acceptance difficult.
In this talk, I looked at a few approaches I've taken to using visualisation for trying to improve trust in the solutions of search-based optimisation. These are about trying to understand what the algorithm has learned about the problem during the search, and how robust the solutions it found really are.
The example applications are a software tuning problem and some problems in building design, but the general principles should be much more widely applicable.
Dr Sandy Brownlee joined the Division of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling in 2013, where he is currently a Lecturer. He gained BSc and PhD degrees from Robert Gordon University in 2005 and 2009 respectively, and has also worked at Loughborough University, and as a software engineer in the energy industry. He is interested in "explainable" optimisation: techniques that find good solutions for optimisation problems but also reveal underlying information about the problem to help people make informed decisions.
His main focus is in metaheuristics, including evolutionary algorithms and estimation of distribution algorithms; related issues such as fitness modelling (and mining such models), handling constraints and multiple objectives, decision support, and what makes particular algorithms suited to particular problems. This work has resulted in over 60 publications in peer-reviewed venues, and has found applications in areas including scheduling and simulation-based optimisation in civil engineering and transport, software engineering, healthcare, and art.
Date: 26th November 2020, 13:30 - 14:30 Speakers: Professors from the Computational Foundry at Swansea University. Title: Data Visualisation Techniques Registration is closed now
The event was hosted by BT Applied Research's Dr Anasol Pena Rios (2020 WeAreTechWomen100 Award winner).
Prof Mark Jones
"Interesting algorithms, techniques and visualisations!"
In the past few years I’ve been interested in developing new approaches for rendering, accelerating algorithms and immersing human experts in their data. Some of the areas I’ve been deeply involved with have involved the following techniques: photon mapping, ray tracing, global illumination, visualization, kernel density estimation, accelerometry data, Machine Learning, lossless data compression, transfer functions, probability density functions, clustering, Monte-Carlo techniques, statistics, GPU acceleration, distance measures, Lloyd’s relaxation, Voronoi diagrams, vector/chamfer distances, volume rendering, data structures (kd-trees).
I will show some work in these areas and adapt the talk as we go along depending on the kinds of research you’d like to hear about.
Mark W. Jones received B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Swansea University. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Swansea University. His research interests include global illumination, visualization, data science, and associated algorithms and data structures.
He has published over 25 journal papers since 2013 in the area of Visual Computing, Data Analysis, and Machine Learning, received Best Paper and ACM Computing Reviews Best of 2013 awards. He has been an investigator on six EPSRC projects (including three multi-site, and four as PI in the complementary areas of Computer Graphics and Visualization) and has been an active member of the UK Visual Computing community for 25 years, including programme chair of BMVC 2015 and conference chair of the EGUK conference in 2002 and 2003. He has over 80 papers in the area of Visual Computing, and a patent.
Daniel Archambault "Visualising and Clustering Networks and Text"
Networks and text are important data types in data science, but as their scale increases it is difficult to visualise all of the information directly.
In this presentation, I present some of my research on visualising and clustering this information for effective analysis. In particular, an analysis of the Irish blogosphere and an experiment to compare automatically detected and human-generated clusters in social media networks.
Daniel Archambault is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Swansea University. His main area of research is visual analytics, in particular for networks, and human-centred perspectives of visualisation. In this talk, he will present some projects on network and document clustering and visualisation.
Professor Xie has strong research interests in the areas of Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence and their applications to real-world problems. He has been an investigator on several research projects funded by external bodies, such as EPSRC, Leverhulme, NISCHR, and WORD.
Among his research works, those of significant importance include detecting abnormal patterns in complex visual and medical data, assisted diagnosis using automated image analysis, fully automated volumetric image segmentation, registration, and motion analysis, machine understanding of human action, efficient deep learning, and deep learning on irregular domains.
By 2020, he has published over 150 fully refereed research publications and (co-)edited several conference proceedings. He is an associate editor of IET Computer Vision and an editorial member of a number of other international journals and has chaired and co-chaired several international conferences, e.g. BMVC2015 and BMVC2019. More information is here
Title: “Intelligent Asset Management for Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management”
“Adding intelligence to network assets offers the possibility that the infrastructure can trigger appropriate maintenance processes. Prognostic maintenance scheduling concentrates engineering effort on reducing the risk to customer service and costs. Assets can learn from their own experiences, or from swarms of similar assets to anticipate their remaining useful life and co-operatively decide the best means to maintain service, reconfiguring themselves or calling for human help. Risk models embrace the likely propagation of problems across the regions of the network and between other networks such as the power network. The prospect is offered of determining the best action at the time, based on the dynamics of the existing traffic pattern.”
