Studying or working in a science or engineering subject? Interested in how to close the gender gap, and want to hear great role models speak about their experiences?

Join Oxford Females in Engineering, Science and Technology (OxFEST), alongside OxWIB and OxWomIn, on Saturday 18th February for our annual conference at the Oxford Maths Institute! We’ll be hosting inspiring women from industry and academia who are breaking boundaries in their fields. The day will involve talks, workshops on diversity, entrepreneurship and communication, and a panel discussion on promoting women in STEM. Breakfast, lunch, refreshments and prosecco will be provided! This is a great opportunity to be inspired, add to your skills, make new connections and get involved.

We are proud to introduce our first speaker: Anne-Marie O. Imafidon MBE. Anne-Marie is a computing, mathematics and language child prodigy who graduated from Oxford aged 20 and was awarded an MBE for championing women in STEM in her organisation Stemettes. You can read about her recent thoughts on the glass ceiling here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/…/the-glass-ceiling-is-made…

Like our Facebook page for more updates as we reveal our other amazing speakers: https://www.facebook.com/oxwomanempowerment/

Tickets are heavily subsidised and cost just £8 for the whole-day program and food and drink. Get yours here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/breaking-boundaries-shatteri….

We look forward to welcoming you on the day!

Alan Gray from EPCC will present a seminar on the Wednesday 22th of February 2017, (at 1pm) entitled:

A Lightweight Approach to Performance Portability with targetDP

Abstract
Leading HPC systems achieve their status through use of highly parallel devices such as NVIDIA GPUs or Intel Xeon Phi many-core CPUs. The concept of performance portability across such architectures, as well as traditional CPUs, is vital for the application programmer. I will describe targetDP, a lightweight abstraction layer which allows grid-based applications to target data parallel hardware in a platform agnostic manner. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of our pragmatic approach by presenting performance results for a complex fluid application (with which the model was co-designed), plus a separate lattice QCD particle physics code. For each application, a single source code base is seen to achieve portable performance, as assessed within the context of the Roofline model. TargetDP can be combined with MPI to allow use on systems containing multiple nodes: I will show scaling results on traditional and GPU-accelerated large scale supercomputers. I will also present preliminary performance results on new-generation NVIDIA Pascal and Intel KNL architectures.

About the speaker
Alan’s research career began in the area of theoretical physics: his Ph.D. thesis was awarded the UK-wide Ogden Prize in 2004 for the best thesis in particle physics phenomenology. He continued this work under a University Fellowship at The Ohio State University, before moving to EPCC in 2005. His current research focuses on the exploitation of GPUs to the benefit of real scientific and industrial applications: he has a particular interest in the programming of large-scale GPU-accelerated supercomputers, and also in the area of performance portability. He was awarded the status of CUDA Fellow in 2014. Alan leads EPCC’s GPU related activities, and is involved in management, teaching and supervision for the EPCC MSc in High Performance Computing.

At a time of heightened political tension and policy confusion about the refugee crisis, this lecture will explore why record numbers of people are fleeing their homes; what conditions they are living in; and what should be done to help them.

Rt Hon David Miliband will make the case that support for refugees is a global public good, which requires reform of international policy. It will also argue that winning the argument for supporting refugees is vital to the moral standing of western societies which constructed the international order after World War 2.

Our societies are increasingly dependent on, and shaped by, our information technologies. We read, watch, communicate, interact, and monitor digitally, both as individuals and in our institutions.

As we document and store every conceivable facet of our lives we expose tensions between the availability of information and the freedoms that we enjoy. We rightly expect a level of personal privacy and freedom of expression while, equally justifiably, expecting transparency from our governments and businesses. In practice, we all too often see the reverse.

In this talk Dr Joss Wright, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will examine technologies that seek to assert, resist, or subvert control over information, and assess the balance of the information we share as individuals and as a society. We will look at technologies such as the ‘dark web’ and Bitcoin, that seek to resist traditional observation and control, and the new forms of control introduced by broad-scale gathering of personal data and the algorithms used to act on it.

By understanding the consequences of hiding and sharing information, and the technologies and policies that we use to do so, we take a necessary step towards consciously guiding the shape of the future societies that we wish to see.

Oxford e-Research Centre
March 1, 2017 – 13:00
Access Grid Room, 277
7 Keble Road Oxford OX1 3QG

SeminarOpen to allMany-Core SeriesLunch provided
Christophe Dubach from University of Edinburgh will present a seminar on Lift, a novel high-level data-parallel programming model for GPUs.

Abstract

Graphic processors (GPUs) are the cornerstone of modern heterogeneous systems. GPUs exhibit tremendous computational power but are notoriously hard to program. High-level programming languages have been proposed to address this issue. However, they often rely on complex analysis in the compiler and device-specific implementations to achieve maximum performance. This means that compilers and software implementations need to be re-tuned for every new device. In this talk, I will present Lift, a novel high-level data-parallel programming model. The language is based on a surprisingly small set of functional primitives which can be combined to define higher-level algorithmic patterns. A system of rewrite-rules is used to derive device-specific optimised low-level implementations of the algorithmic patterns. The rules encode both algorithmic choices and low-level optimisations in a unified system and let the compiler explore the optimisation space automatically. Preliminary results show this approach produces GPU code that matches the performance of highly tuned implementations of several computational kernels including linear algebra operations.

About the speaker

Christophe Dubach received his Ph.D in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and holds a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from EPFL (Switzerland). He is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture at the University of Edinburgh (UK). In 2010 he spent one year as a visiting researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center (USA) working on the LiquidMetal project. His current research interests includes high-level programming models for heterogeneous systems, co-design of both computer architecture and optimising compiler technology, adaptive microprocessor, and the application of machine learning in these areas.

Professor Vlatko Vedral, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Bio-Inspired Quantum Technologies will explore the possibility of basing quantum technologies on organic molecules, namely using natural systems to support quantum bit for quantum computation.

Although criteria for identifying autism have been established based on behavioral factors, researchers are still exploring and developing models to describe the cognitive and affective differences that lead to the known behaviors. Some of these models offer competing ways of understanding autism; some simply describe characteristics of autism. Significantly, these models tend to involve cognitive functions that are also cited in accounts of moral responsibility. This suggests that autism may be a reason not to blame an autistic person for some actions that transgress social, ethical, or legal expectations even when we would certainly blame a neurotypical person for the same action. Whether to treat autism as exculpatory in any given circumstance appears to be influenced both by models of autism and by theories of moral responsibility. This talk will focus on a limited range of theories: autism as characterized in terms of executive function deficit, and moral responsibility based on access to appropriate reactive attitudes. In pursuing this particular combination of ideas, I do not intend to endorse them. The goal is, instead, to explore the implications of this combination of influential ideas about autism and about moral responsibility. These implications can be quite serious and practical for autists and those who interact directly with autists, as well as for broader communities as they attend to the fair, compassionate, and respectful treatment of increasing numbers of autistic adults.

Public event, all welcome. Booking essential.

By 2050, a quarter of humanity will be African. The continent is in profound transition, the scale of which matters not just for the citizens of Africa’s 54 nations, but for the world. It is the fastest urbanising continent, and experiencing rapid industrialisation.

Its economic growth has outperformed Latin America and most developed economies over recent years, yet 55% of Africa’s labour force today is still employed in agriculture, and the challenges of peace and security continue to occupy the headlines about the continent. Six hundred million of its citizens live without access to electricity, yet by 2014 more than 80% of the population had a mobile phone.

The facts about Africa’s growth and development leave no doubt about its unique trajectory, but how will the continent navigate these changes, and how will the world engage with this unprecedented scale and pace of change?

In Oxford, new approaches are being forged to studying and understanding Africa, including the Africa-Oxford Initiative and the inclusion of Africa within Oxford Martin School’s new research theme ‘Great Transitions’. Join us on 7 March to hear from Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, Dr Carlos Lopes, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and current Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, and Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School, and be part of the debate as they discuss the range of African futures that could emerge over the coming decades.

This panel discussion will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Oxford e-Research Centre
March 8, 2017 –
13:00 to 14:00
Conference Room 278
7 Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3QG

Seminar No booking required Open to all Many-Core Series Lunch provided

The Centre’s Research Software Engineer Ania Brown will be presenting a seminar, Towards Achieving GPU-Native Adaptive Mesh Refinement, as part of the Many-Core Series.

Abstract
Modern simulations model increasingly complex multiscale systems, and the need to capture details at multiple length scales can lead to large memory requirements. Adaptive mesh refinement is a method for reducing memory cost by varying the accuracy in each region to match the physical characteristics of the simulation, at the cost of increased data structure complexity. This complexity is a particular problem on the GPU architecture, which is most naturally suited to regular data sets.

Ania will describe some of the optimisation and software challenges that need to be considered when implementing AMR on GPUs, based on her experience working on a GPU-native framework for stencil calculations on a tree-based adaptively refined mesh as part of her Master’s degree. Topics covered will include achieving coalesced access with the AMR data structure, memory defragmentation after grid changes and load balancing using space-filling curves.

About the speaker
Ania is a research software engineer at the Oxford e-Research Centre. Her research interests are a combination of performance optimisation for large scale scientific simulation and software development methodology to improve the quality of such codes. She received her Master’s degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2015.

Limited spaces available so register now to secure your place:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/skills-workshop-an-introduction-to-design-tickets-32120337795

Working on a start up but lacking skills in design?
This session will help beginners and non-designers get comfortable with the basic principles of design (colour, typography, layout and psychology) and pick up the intangible skills that are hard to learn alone, but essential in coming up with fresh ideas, working with other creatives and designing with human behaviour in mind.

The main topics that will be covered are:

• FUNDAMENTAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES
A walkthrough of a design from start to finish to show how a designer comes up with and implements concepts, and a review of existing designs to see how colour, typography, layout and psychology are used and how these can be applied to your own work

• DESIGNING FOR A PURPOSE
A practical session to show the considerations and decisions a designer needs to make to fulfil an objective such as to communicate a message clearly, make something intuitive and easy to use, attract and guide attention and so on.

• HOW TO GET STARTED
A few short stories to demonstrate common mistakes beginners make and how to avoid them, how to come up with ideas and then translate them into an actual design, and ways to find opportunities to practise your skills

This workshop will be tailored to people with no or little previous design experience.

Check out previous workshops here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmfRPcybmAY

This workshop will be taught by Barney Yau. He has 8 years of design experience, started 3 design companies since he was 16, and has worked on over 200 projects with startups, SMEs and multinational corporations. He also taught design to over 500 students at Google Campus London, The London School of Economics, Imperial College London, The University of Warwick, Durham University and at HKUST for over 3 years, and have run private design sessions with startups, hackathons and incubator cohorts.

Africa currently has the highest disease burden of any region of the world and the least resources in terms of health personnel and health systems. But things are changing rapidly, many countries are in the process of major epidemiologic transitions with falling childhood mortality and the prospects of controlling many of the traditional infectious causes of ill health. At the same time the combined effects of economic development and rapid demographic expansion against a background of increasing urbanisation will pose enormous new challenges for the health of African populations.

In this talk Kevin Marsh, Professor of Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford, will examine the possible trends for the health of the continent.

March 10, 2017 –
14:00 to 15:00
Access Grid Room (room 277)
Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, Oxford

Seminar No booking required Open to all Coffee and cakes

The Oxford e-Research Centre is pleased to welcome Dr Nicholas Cole and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman. They will present a seminar examining the work of the Quill Project, which aims to become the definitive source available for the study of the origins of the text of the Constitution of the United States and, subsequently, state constitutions.

Abstract

This talk will examine the work of the Quill Project, a collaboration between Dr Nicholas Cole (History, Pembroke College) and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman (Visualization, e-Research Centre). This project uses historical records to model formal processes of negotiations, such as those that wrote the Constitution of the United States or which create treaties and legislation. This ability to create these models has implications for both research and teaching, by allowing for better qualitative and quantitative analysis of negotiations.The platform emphasizes the reconstruction as closely as possible of the context within which proposals and decisions are made.

About our speakers

Dr Nicholas Cole is a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, and a member of the History Faculty.

Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman is a Research Associate at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

Twitter: @quill1787

Rio gold medallist, Grace Clough, will talk about the experience of competing at sport’s highest levels. When not studying towards an MSc in Sociology, Grace is a member of the British Rowing Squad and won gold in rowing at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio. Grace will describe the unique training regime undertaken by British paralympic athletes with the aid of a short Team GB video. Join us to find out about the Rio experience, from the gruelling preparations to the exhilaration of competing and ultimately winning. There will be ample opportunity to ask questions.

Grace visits schools to advocate better integration of disability and to encourage students to persist in the face of obstacles. Her academic research looks at the media portrayal of disability and its impacts. Her own story is inspirational. She only took up rowing in late 2013, yet in an impressive unbeaten run she was a member of the LTA mixed coxed four that won gold at the 2014 and 2015 World Championships, then won gold again at the Paralympic Games at Rio 2016. In recognition of this, Grace was honoured with the award of the MBE in the New Year’s Honours list.

Join Grace in the Mawby Room at Kellogg College from 17:30 for refreshments. The seminar will begin at 17:45. It is free and open to all, and there is no need to book.

The Diseases of Modern Life project is hosting an event on ‘Germs Revisited’.

Bad germs? Friendly bacteria? Do we need to rethink our relationships with the microscopic world? Join us for an interdisciplinary lunch time talk. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Using past and present ideas drawn from medicine, fiction, and art, Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown (Faculty of English), Dr Jamie Lorimer (School of Geography and the Environment), and Dr Nicola Fawcett (Medical Sciences Division) come together to discuss new ways of thinking about human-microbe relationships in dialogue with developing trends in microbiome studies.

The Diseases of Modern Life is supported by the European Research Council.

Jeffrey Aronson presents a light-hearted talk on spelling in systematic reviewing.

Jeff is a Consultant Physician and Clinical Pharmacologist at the Oxford University Department for Primary Health Care.

His research expertise includes methods of classifying, detecting, and reporting adverse drug reactions, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

This talk is part of the Meta-analysis course which is one of our Postgraduate modules in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend by registering

March 17, 2017 –
14:00 to 15:00
Access Grid Room (room 277)
Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, Oxford

Seminar No booking required Open to all Coffee and cakes
We are pleased to welcome Professor David Abramson, a Visiting Professor at the Centre. David has been involved in computer architecture and high performance computing research since 1979 and is currently Director of the Research Computing Centre at the University of Queensland. He will present a seminar entitled “Caches all the way down: Infrastructure for Data Science”.

Abstract

The rise of big data science has created new demands for modern computer systems. While floating performance has driven computer architecture and system design for the past few decades, there is renewed interest in the speed at which data can be ingested and processed. Early exemplars such as Gordon, the NSF funded system at the San Diego Supercomputing Centre, shifted the focus from pure floating point performance to memory and IO rates. At the University of Queensland they have continued this trend with the design of FlashLite, a parallel cluster equiped with large amounts of main memory, Flash disk, and a distributed shared memory system (ScaleMP’s vSMP). This allows applications to place data “close” to the processor, enhancing processing speeds. Further, they have built a geographically distributed multi-tier hierarchical data fabric called MeDiCI, which provides an abstraction of very large data stores across the metropolitan area. MeDiCI leverages industry solutions such as IBM’s Spectrum Scale and SGI’s DMF platforms.

Caching underpins both FlashLite and MeDiCI. In this talk Professor Abramson will describe the design decisions and illustrate some early application studies that benefit from the approach.

This lecture is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.

Saïd Business School is pleased to welcome Lubomira Rochet, Global Chief Digital Officer of the L’Oréal Group, to speak at the School on Wednesday 26 April.

Leading digital transformation at L’Oréal

L’Oréal is the world’s number one beauty company with leading brands such as Maybelline New York, L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Kerastase. The group was also named by Adweek as 2017’s hottest digital marketer. How did one of the world’s oldest consumer goods companies get to this position? Lubomira Rochet, the Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal globally and member of the group’s executive committee, will talk about the digital transformation of L’Oréal’s businesses that she and her team have enacted since she joined the company in 2014.

The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School on Wednesday 26 April followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm. Please remember that registration is required to attend this event.

This talk will outline some of the challenges of mixed methods research and illustrate how they can be addressed in health psychology and other health research. Felicity will critically reflect on mixed methods research that she has conducted and discuss the philosophical and technical challenges of mixed methods, grounding the discussion in a brief review of methodological literature.

Mixed methods research is characterized as having philosophical and technical challenges; the former can be addressed by drawing on pragmatism, the latter by considering formal mixed methods research designs proposed in a number of design typologies. There are important differences among the design typologies which provide diverse examples of designs that health researchers can adapt for their own mixed methods research. There are also similarities; in particular, many typologies explicitly orient to the technical challenges of deciding on the respective timing of qualitative and quantitative methods and the relative emphasis placed on each method. Characteristics, strengths, and limitations of different sequential and concurrent designs are identified by reviewing a series of mixed methods projects each conducted for a different purpose.

Adapting formal mixed methods designs can help health psychologists and other health researchers address the technical challenges of mixed methods research and identify the approach that best fits the research questions and purpose. This does not obfuscate the need to address philosophical challenges of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.

Dr Felicity Bishop is a health psychologist leading an interdisciplinary programme of mixed methods research around complementary therapies and placebo effects in health care within Psychology at the University of Southampton.

This talk is part of the Mixed Methods in Health Research module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds Lecture Series, Professor François Pattou will be presenting ‘Gastric bypass; from intestinal glucose transport to diabetes. What is the expected duration?’.

François Pattou is Professor of Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of Lille, France, and Head of the Department of General and Endocrine Surgery at Lille University Hospital. Professor Pattou also leads a research group at the University of Lille, INSERM U1190, devoted to the clinical development of biotherapies for treating diabetes and a funding member of the LABEX European Genomic Institute for Diabetes (EGID).

“Diamonds are a rebel’s best friend” is one striking way to sum up the belief that valuable minerals spur violent conflict. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and the US Dodd Frank Act Section 1502, now on the chopping block under the Trump administration, are meant to counteract this: they aim to prevent trade in minerals unless it can be proven that revenues from these do not support armed groups.

Research however, suggests that the relationship between minerals and violent conflict may be more complex than this quote presumes. Valuable minerals may indeed fund or motivate rebel movements. But they may also provide a livelihood to millions of people, making them better off and less vulnerable to be recruited into armed groups. And revenue from minerals can also flows to countries’ governments and their armies.

In this lecture Dr Anouk S. Rigterink, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Department of Economics’ Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, will address the contradictory faces of ‘conflict minerals’ and their implications for how effective we think current policies to tackle them can be.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series, Mr James Gilbert (Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) and Dr Simon Knight (Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Oxford University) will discuss innovations in access surgery.

This is a hands on session which will see you actively determining the classification of a range of real devices based on the medical directive, with interactive discussion on how our interpretations of the guideline differ (if so).

Please bring your laptop / phone so you can work on the interactive cases with us.

This will be a lively event and should be fun to end the day!

This is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests

One of our biggest technological innovations is that of time keeping. From the atomic to the astronomical scales, our technology has enabled us to precisely measure time. Our timekeeping uses clocks that all tick along the same time scale – a time scale that is also relative to how we perceive the passage of time.

For biology, the passage of time, however, is not only different but reveals deep truths about life. Across the diversity of life, the passage of time from bacteria to humans to giant Redwood trees is perceived differently. Instead of a constant ticking of a clock – the pace of life is reflected in scaling laws that characterise the variation in the cycles of heartbeats, metabolism, growth and reproduction.

In this lecture Professor Brian J. Enquist, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, will introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life.

As will be discussed, the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

For Dr Kanade, good research derives from solving real-world problems and delivering useful results to society. As a roboticist, he participated in developing a wide range of computer-vision systems and autonomous robots, including human-face recognition, autonomously-driven cars, computer-assisted surgical robots, robot helicopters, biological live cell tracking through a microscope, and EyeVision, a system used for sports broadcast. Dr Kanade will share insights into his projects and discuss how his “Think like an amateur, do as an expert” maxim interacts with problems and people.

Dr Takeo Kanade is the 2016 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology.

Recent research purports that climate change is creating conflict, and leads to unchecked migration. But three distinct flaws characterise such research efforts; they often ask the wrong questions, present poor evidence, and remove references to other, more likely factors that cause conflict. It often gets translated into a perception that poor people act violently for ‘natural’ reasons, or are spurred by physical hazards. We all know that high climate vulnerability and conflict co-occur in the same general regions, but we know far less about what does shape the power and competition dynamics at the local level. Basically, who are the winners and losers of environmental change?

The reality from local research is that far more cooperation is occurring at the local level to mitigate and adapt to environmental challenges; and that a tremendous amount of development money is being directed towards adaptation and risk management. This changes the local calculus for violence. As a result, conflict, when and where it does occur, is often between the ‘winners’ from climate change, development and transitions to democracy.

Who’s listening? Communicating research in a noisy world

Dan Richards-Doran, Communications Manager, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford

The proliferation of social and digital media tools, combined with the availability of camera-equipped smartphones, means anyone can set themselves up as an online channel. Scientists looking to disseminate their research findings now no longer have to simply rely on their press office or publisher, they have at their finger-tips a fancy toolbox of tactics to broadcast their evidence to the world, but with the increasingly crowded media landscape how can they ensure their message gets through to the right audience?

This talk will discuss who the “public” actually are and what media they consume when it comes to science. Applying basic communications planning theory, it will briefly overview how to develop a plan before embarking on any communication activity, highlighting the opportunities for getting the most out of social and traditional media and the importance of dialogue to support science communication with impact.

Dan is Communications Manager at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. He is responsible for communicating the Department’s research communications and supporting researchers to communicate their work.

This talk is part of the Knowledge into Action module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

A number of developments such as the Arab Spring and on-going famines in Somalia and South Sudan have led to renewed interest among both scholars and policymakers in the role of food insecurity and food-price related grievances as catalysts of conflict. In this lecture Prof Gunnar Sørbø, Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), will address such linkages, using case material mainly from Sudan and Somalia, with a particular focus on food insecurity as a risk multiplier and the implications for choice of interventions.

We’re delighted to announce our next Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) Oxford Agora. In keeping with the spirit of DEF, we’re trying something new: a hardware innovation workshop.

Innovation is at the heart of what we do at DEF. Our aim is to drive bottom-up change in the culture across the MoD and Government more broadly. We don’t believe ‘innovation’ is best conjured up just by a unit or team given the name, nor from a fund dedicated to private companies bidding for a share, or from bold statements with little structural change. Our aim is to foster horizontal collaborations between military and government personnel, industry, business, academia, the media, the arts and others – the more diverse our groups the better. We aim to foster collaboration within our networks to come up with new ideas, innovations, inventions and approaches.

We’re privileged then to be hosted on 18 May 2017 by award-winning and innovative digital health technology company Incuna in Oxford (Ewert House, Summertown, OX27DD: directions. Leading proceedings will be Cyan Collier, one of the founders of Incuna, who will talk about creating innovation cultures, and more specifically, about hardware innovation – how surprisingly simple and cheap it can be for any of us to recombine hardware to create new technologies.

Cyan will talk about his own remarkable invention, which seems set to revolutionise our ability to accurately test for tuberculosis. In the short workshop that follows, we will work in teams to create our own digital hardware devices.

The aims of the session then are twofold – to gain a unique perspective on innovation from Cyan, and for us all to learn the basics of how to build new inventions in the digital age, a skill that has applications in a range of domains.

…and then, as ever, it’s off to the pub for a quick social pint for those that can make it.

We’re limited to 25 places – so book early – we had >40 people at last event, a fabulous turn-out and sign of how DEF is now beginning to grow as rapidly in the UK, just as it did in the US. Join us!

Summary: DEF Oxford Hardware Innovation Agora – 18 May 2017, 1930hrs, hosted by Incuna, Ewert House, Summertown, Oxford, OX27DD (directions).

Please RSVP – access will be granted only to those who have confirmed in advance.

Read more on Cyan’s work here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/project-tide-from-hackathon-clinical-trial-cyan-collier

Trials registries are a relatively new phenomenon and are there to ensure that a complete view of research is accessible to all. Yet, half off all trial results go unreported.

The talk will discuss the important of registries the evidence in the registry that matters and discuss how the CEBM and EBM Datalab are working with the WHO to improve clinical trial transparency

Professor Carl Heneghan is an advisor to the World Health Organization’s International Clinical; Trial Registry Platform and co-founder of AllTrials.