Have you thought about using crowdfunding to fund your next degree, innovation, entrepreneurial project, charitable work, creative arts or sports club? What support you need from your college, the university and the crowdfunding platform? Speak out and let them know.

OxFund invited Jonathan May – the CEO and Co-founder of Hubbub, the representatives from the Development Offices at Green Templeton College, Keble College, Merton College, Regent’s Park, St Hugh’s College, Somerville College (the only Oxford college has its own branded crowdfunding platform) and University College, and the staff from ISIS Innovation who are working with Hubbub to build a Oxford-branded crowdfunding platform for Oxford staff and students to raise money for their entrepreneurial projects to form a panel to listen your needs.

More college’s development offices may join, as we are still in the process of confirming. Please check the Facebook event for the updates. Even your college’s development office is not in the panel, speak out your needs and we will pass them to the development office of your college.

Twenty minute talk, one hour discussion. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take an active part in the discussion. Free entry, no need to book.

The Psychology and Neuroscience Applications Society (PsyNAppS) is excited to bring you the biggest event on the neuroscience calendar!

Register here to attend our inaugural symposium for FREE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/psynapps-inaugural-symposium-tickets-16983645541

The event boasts an exciting line up of speakers – guaranteeing something for everyone – held at the award-winning TS Eliot Theatre.

The speakers and talk topics list is as follows:

Dr. David Lewis: Founder of Mindlab on Neuromarketing
Dr. Adam Corner: Psychology of climate change communication
Dr. Rebecca Park (Oxford): Neuroscience and treatment of eating disorders
Mr. Stelios Kiosses: Challenges of treating compulsive hoarding

This free event will take place on the 11th of June at the TS Eliot Theatre of Merton College, located in Rose Lane gardens (accessible from either Merton College or directly from Rose Lane). Doors open at 3.45pm and there will be a drinks and canapes reception at 7pm.

Exhibition Tour with Paul Teigh

Join Modern Art Oxford’s Production Manager, Paul Teigh, for a tour of the Lynn Hershman Leeson exhibition Origins of the Species (Part 2).

Free, booking essential via https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/exhibition-tour-with-paul-teigh/

What the World is Losing, a talk with Dr Paul Collins, Dr Robert Bewley & Dr Emma Cunliffe

A special talk with Dr Paul Collins, Curator of the Ancient Near East Collections at the Ashmolean Museum, as well as Dr Robert Bewley and Dr Emma Cunliffe from the University of Oxford School of Archaeology

Saturday 25 July, 10.30am‒12pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

FREE entry. No booking required.

*** Spaces limited. Please arrive early to secure your seat. ***

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Middle Eastern cultural heritage is under threat as never before. These talks highlight what the world is losing in Iraq and Syria, as well as talking about Oxford University’s ‘Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa’ project.

Dr Paul Collins spoke in April this year about the recent destruction of museums, libraries, archaeological sites, mosques, churches and shrines across northern Iraq to highlight the unique heritage that is being lost.

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This is a free Festival of Archaeology Talk. See the full programme of events at: http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Festival/

Since the discovery that our genes hold the keys to our health, the race has been on to find a precise method to edit our genomes. CRISPR provides the tools to precisely edit genomes with unparalleled simplicity and flexibility, resulting in the potential for a revolutionary step towards curing hereditary disorders and correcting mutations that cause cancer. This breakthrough gene editing technology is barely 3 years old, however it has already attracted tens of millions of dollars from investors, inspiring a multitude of exciting biotech start-ups.

Join us for what is certain to be an informative and inspiring discussion about how entrepreneurs, academics and industry professionals can join in with the battle to exploit, arguably the biggest biotech discovery of the decade.

This free inbound strategy workshop, speifically aimed at the technology sector, will teach you how to enable business growth by implementing the inbound methodology of attracting new visitors, converting them into leads, closing them into customers and delighting them to promoters. We will use a step by step approach to offer you real practical advice relevant to you and your business.

The Oxford Architecture Society lecture series

Lisa Finlay is coming to speak to us from Heatherwick Studio.
Established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, Heatherwick Studio is recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking. At the heart of the studio’s work is a profound commitment to finding innovative design solutions, with a dedication to artistic thinking and the latent potential of materials and craftsmanship. In the twenty years of its existence, Heatherwick Studio has worked in many countries, with a wide range of commissioners and in a variety of regulatory environments.

Part 3 of a three-part mini-series on notation: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Part 1 was Reading Slough and London Paddington: the persistent lure of spelling reform (July 16th). Part 2 was Writing little messages in Italian: the social origins of music notation (August 20th).

Free entry, no need to book. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion. The meeting room will be indicated on the display screen just inside the Town Hall entrance lobby.

Conceptions of Enlightenment is a one-day conference concluding in a public lecture at 5pm. The lecture will be delivered by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts University, Boston), author of The Pragmatic Enlightenment (CUP, 2014).

Over the last century, historians and philosophers have used the term ‘Enlightenment’ in diverse ways. Was it primarily a philosophical movement, or did it involve a much wider change of outlook and sensibility in the course of the eighteenth century? Did its origins and centre lie in England, the Netherlands, France, or Scotland? Did it establish the human rights and freedoms we now value, or did it in practice subject humanity to rigidly rational systems of control? Did it give a voice to women and colonial subjects, or did it reinforce male domination and European hegemony over the rest of the world? Did it prepare the way for the French Revolution and the Reign of terror, or is its heritage to be found in the American Declaration of Independence?

To discuss such questions, a number of leading scholars of the Enlightenment will introduce the work of some of the historians and philosophers who have been most influential in shaping this much-debated concept.

To avoid dangerous climate change will require not only very steep cuts in emissions, but also the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of the models that avoid dangerous climate change do so by assuming that it will be possible to deploy a technique called biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (or BECCS for short) at a very large scale. But is this realistic?

Please join us for a public discussion to explore this issue. To what extent may it be possible to use biomass as a way of both generating electricity and removing carbon dioxide from the air? What are the likely impacts of such an approach – on climate change, on food supply, on biodiversity and on the will to reduce emissions.

The Oxford Martin School has brought together four excellent speakers with expertise in this field. Dr Craig Jamieson has explored the potential of using waste material from rice production for BECCS, Professor Tim Lenton has modelled how much biomass could be used for BECCS given projected population growth and dietary habits, Professor Nick Pidgeon is an expert on the social acceptability of new technologies and Dr Doug Parr is the Chief Scientist and Policy Director at Greenpeace.

The Earth Trust is an environmental learning charity based in Oxfordshire that reconnects people with their environment and encourages sustainable living, enhancing people’s quality of life as well as their environment. It believes that sustainability can only become a reality if economics, society and environmental needs are in balance. The Earth Trust is unique in its broad range of economic and environmental activities focusing on changing hearts and minds. Dr Lock will provide an overview of the Earth Trust’s aspirations and explores its evidence-based research approach to developing sustainable land management models.

As part of our AHRC-funded project, Cyberselves in Immersive Technologies, researchers from Oxford University and the University of Sheffield are organising a two-day symposium on virtual reality, telepresence and associated technologies.

The symposium will be multi-disciplinary, with contributions from technologists, psychologists, philosophers, literary and cultural theorists, with a particular focus on the future societal and cultural impacts of immersive technologies. It will also include a showcase of new technologies and current research into virtual reality, augmented reality and teleoperation.

Oxbotica are an Oxford University Spin-Out Company from the mobile robotics group. Oxbotica specialize in mobile navigation and perception – allowing robots to precisely map, navigate and interact with their surroundings.”
Graeme Smith, Oxbotica’s Chief Executive has a substantial track record in delivering complex products and services from research and development through to customer launch and has held executive leadership positions in several global start-ups and Joint Ventures.

If you want to learn more about the technology, a career in research, or just have an interest in robotics, come to hear Graeme at OUEngSoc’s first of many lunchtime talks this year. There will be a Q&A session at the end of Graeme’s talk. A buffet lunch will be served after the talk.

Wine reception, snacks, and £5 year membership to PsyNAppS available. Alternatively, pay £2 for a single event!

Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Experimental Psychology

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Professor Warwick instigated a series of pioneering experiments involving the neuro-surgical implantation of a device (Utah Array/BrainGate) into the median nerves of his left arm in order to link his nervous system directly to a computer to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. The development of the implant technology was carried out by a team of researchers headed by Dr Mark Gasson who, along with Kevin, used it to perform the ground-breaking research. Kevin was successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans. His research has been discussed by the US White House Presidential Council on BioEthics, The European Commission and led to him being widely referenced and featured in academic circles as well as appearing as cover stories in several magazines – e.g. Wired (USA), The Week (India).

Kevin Warwick is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. Prior that he was Professor of Cybernetics at The University of Reading, England. His research areas are artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng.) and is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET). He is the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the City & Guilds of London Institute (FCGI). He is the author or co-author of more than 600 research papers and has written or edited 27 books (three for general readership), as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects. He has broadcast and lectured widely and holds various visiting professorships.

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Psychology and Neuroscience Applications Society

The junction where psychology and neuroscience research meets action and innovation.

PsyNAppS aims to disseminate information about what you can do with your psychology or neuroscience degree and research. We are here to tell you everything Freud hasn’t. We want to show you how psychology and neuroscience can be applied practically to a variety of industries.

Renewable energy is a strong component in the race to mitigate climate change, and solar power is a particularly cheap and viable green energy option. Considering current technologies, cost, markets and infrastructure, Professor Henry Snaith, Co-Director of the Programme on Solar Energy: Organic Photovoltaics, and Professor Malcolm McCulloch, Head of the University of Oxford’s Electrical Power Group and Co-Director of The Oxford Martin Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy, will debate whether solar is indeed the answer to the urgent question of irreversible climate change.

Wine reception, snacks, and £5 year membership to PsyNAppS available. Alternatively, pay £2 for a single event!

Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Experimental Psychology

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We are at the cusp of some far-reaching technological advances that will be of tremendous benefit to sensory research. Within a few short years we will be able to test thousands of people from any demographic with ‘connected’ technology every bit as good as we use in our labs today — indeed more so. Here, Dr Woods discusses on-web versus in-lab, predicted technological advances and issues with online research.

Dr. Andy Woods received his PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, in Multisensory Psychology and have subsequently postdoc’d in Bangor (Wales) and later in Manchester (England). He also spent 4 years as a research scientist working for industry in the Netherlands (Unilever R&D). His research remains primarily focused in the field of multisensory psychology. For the past 6 years he has been developing the ‘Xperiment’ software package, which lets scientists conduct research interchangeably on the internet, on the phone/pad through Xperiment apps, or in the lab.

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Psychology and Neuroscience Applications Society

The junction where psychology and neuroscience research meets action and innovation.

PsyNAppS aims to disseminate information about what you can do with your psychology or neuroscience degree and research. We are here to tell you everything Freud hasn’t. We want to show you how psychology and neuroscience can be applied practically to a variety of industries.

Professor Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, will explore the huge technological, scientific and environmental shifts that have led to humanity’s current state, and consider the choices that will determine our long-term future.

Over the last few decades there have been many initiatives to bring about the recovery of populations of scarce or declining bird species in the UK. This has resulted in some notable successes, with species such as Red Kite and bittern. However such schemes do not always meet with immediate success. Having been involved in many recovery projects over many years, Ken Smith will look at some of the successes and also examine why it is not always easy or possible to bring about recovery

New emerging infections can pose huge global risks to health, with potentially devastating societal and economic impacts. In this seminar, Professor Angela McLean, Director of the Institute for Emerging Infections, will look at how new pathogens adapt will look at how new pathogens adapt as they spread, and how we can improve the development of new treatments and strategies to target infectious disease.

Wine reception, snacks, and £5 year membership to PsyNAppS available. Alternatively, pay £2 for a single event!

Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Experimental Psychology

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Taha Yasseri is a Research Fellow in Computational Social Science at the OII. He graduated from the Department of Physics at the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2005, where he also obtained his MSc in 2006, working on localization in scale free complex networks. In 2007, He moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he completed his PhD in Complex Systems Physics in 2010. Prior to coming to the OII, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, working on the socio-physical aspects of the community of Wikipedia editors, focusing on conflict and editorial wars, along with Big Data analysis to understand human dynamics, language complexity, and popularity spread.

Yasseri, T., and Bright, J. (2014) Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data? Information Technology 56 (5) 246–253.

Yasseri, T. (2013) Conflicts and opinion clashes in Wikipedia. Human Behavior and Network Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2013.

Yasseri, T. (2013) Petition growth and success rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street Website. ACM Web Science conference, Paris, France, May 2013.

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Psychology and Neuroscience Applications Society

The junction where psychology and neuroscience research meets action and innovation.

PsyNAppS aims to disseminate information about what you can do with your psychology or neuroscience degree and research. We are here to tell you everything Freud hasn’t. We want to show you how psychology and neuroscience can be applied practically to a variety of industries.

Do we have the means necessary to create the perfect human? Do we have a moral responsibility to do so? Professor Julian Savulescu, Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics, will consider current and potential human enhancement technologies, and look at the ethical arguments surrounding their use.

Much of our research focuses on understanding the behaviour of individual molecules when they become energised following absorption of light or collision with an electron, both very common processes. Advancing our knowledge of such molecular behaviour has widespread applications in areas including atmospheric chemistry, astrochemistry, industrial processes, analytical instrumentation, molecular structure determination, and molecular synthesis. Usually, the energised molecules undergo a variety of fragmentation processes. The basic physics of a fragmentation process determines the speed of each fragment and the direction in which it flies away from the other fragments, and if we can measure these speeds and directions then we can ‘reverse engineer’ the process to learn about the underlying physics. We have recently developed a new tool for recording this information, in the form of the Pixel Imaging Mass Spectrometry (PImMS) camera. By some measures the fastest camera in the world, the PImMS camera allows us to detect individual molecular fragments with a time resolution of nanoseconds, and is now being used around the world in a variety of experiments in the areas described above. I will present some of the science underlying the development of the camera, and will also highlight some of the new science made possible by the PImMS technology.
Claire Vallance is a Professor of Physical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Tutorial Fellow in Physical Chemistry at Hertford College, University of Oxford. She has a variety of research interests, including chemical reaction dynamics, applications of velocity-map and spatial-map imaging to mass spectrometry, and the development of laser spectroscopy techniques for microfluidics and chemical sensing applications, and is a co-inventor of the PImMS ultrafast imaging camera. In addition to her research activities, Claire is active in a wide range of teaching and outreach activities within the Department of Chemistry and Hertford College.

An interesting talk by Carolin Krenzer, a Senior Member (Studio General Manager) at King about Producing Mobile Games! Everyone is welcome and there will be free drinks and snacks! Please email yuxi.yao@univ.ox.ac.uk if you are interested or just show up for the event!

How do vaccines stimulate the immune system, and how can we use this knowledge to develop more effective vaccines for future pandemics? Professor Adrian Hill, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Vaccines, will discuss the diverse challenges of vaccine design and development, with particular reference to his group’s recent pioneering clinical trials of Ebola virus vaccines.

Wine reception, snacks, and £5 year membership to PsyNAppS available. Alternatively, pay £2 for a single event!

Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Experimental Psychology

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Dr. Anil Anthony Bharath is Reader in Image Analysis, and on the Research Board of Imperial’s Data Sciences Institute. He holds a degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from UCL, and obtained a PhD from Imperial College, also from the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering.

He was appointed as Lecturer in the Department of Biological & Medical Systems at Imperial College in 1991. Between 1993 and 2003, Dr.Bharath held the posts of Hayward Lecturer, then Hayward Senior Lecturer in Medical Imaging. He was appointed to a Readership position in 2005.

Dr. Bharath has published in the field of imaging, image analysis, and signal processing, and has 20 years’ experience in signal processing. In 1998, he demonstrated the first application of steerable filters to shape detection, an area of image analysis. Later contributions included the use of Bayesian marginalisation in very early-stage computer vision, focus-of-attention methods, and the use of customised wavelet transforms to analyse images in a scalable manner. The analysis of visual data, including new algorithms and system architectures, continues to be his main research interest.

In 2002, Dr. Bharath initiated the Basic Technology Project “Reverse Engineering Human Visual Processes”, which created a blueprint for a subset of processes in the human visual system, particularly of visual area V1.

In 2008, Dr. Bharath spun out the company Cortexica Vision Systems, which applies spatial neuronal models, expressed through the use of two-dimensional, complex wavelet decompositions, to visual search, both at video rates and on mobile devices.

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Psychology and Neuroscience Applications Society

The junction where psychology and neuroscience research meets action and innovation.

PsyNAppS aims to disseminate information about what you can do with your psychology or neuroscience degree and research. We are here to tell you everything Freud hasn’t. We want to show you how psychology and neuroscience can be applied practically to a variety of industries.

Join your colleagues, friends and mentors at this event to see teams present their projects and find out who will be awarded funding!

The Carbon Innovation Programme is an opportunity for students and staff at the University of Oxford to generate unique ideas for carbon reduction across the University’s Functional Estate. Teams or individuals have the opportunity to receive full funding to deliver their innovative carbon saving projects over the coming academic year (2015/16) whilst also receiving mentoring from industry experts. Successful candidates may have the option to discuss internships and career opportunities.

Professor Carl Heneghan will deliver an interactive workshop, taking an evidence-based approach to answering your own clinical questions.

With over 20 year’s experience in clinical epidemiology, Professor Heneghan has over 200 peer reviewed publications that all started with a clinical question.

Climate predictions provide key scientific input into climate policy – and will continue to do so in future years. Professor Tim Palmer, Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, will discuss how scientific and technical advances can be expected to improve our climate predictive capability in the coming years – for example through the application of inexact supercomputers, about which James Martin himself was especially enthusiastic. With projects like the Large Hadron Collider in mind, Tim will also discuss possible changes in the way climate prediction science organises itself internationally. Finally, Tim will address the important question of how to attract more mathematicians and theoretical physicists into the field of climate science.

The Symposium, celebrating Ada Lovelace’s 200th birthday on 10 December 2015, is aimed at a broad audience of those interested in the history and culture of mathematics and computer science, presenting current scholarship on Lovelace’s life and work, and linking her ideas to contemporary thinking about mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence.

The Symposium takes place in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, with a reception at the new Weston Library (Bodleian) and dinner at Balliol College on 9 December.

Other activities will include a workshop for early career researchers, and a ‘Music and Machines’ event. For more information and for the full line up of speakers please visit: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/symposium/

*Registration*

Standard Registration, December 9-10: £40
Gala Dinner Ticket, December 9: £50

You can register and pay via the University of Oxford online-shop: http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=70&prodid=386

Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we have a limited number of student funded places available to cover registration and the conference dinner. These are open to students studying in UK universities in 2015-16. For more information please visit: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/symposium/