Beautiful Japanese Teas
Open your mind and palate as we introduce you to classic examples of the finest Japanese teas.

We will be sharing a hand-picked selection of stunning teas sourced directly from Japan’s tea gardens. The teas will include classic examples of green, shaded, black and roasted teas – with some unique surprises to complement the classics.

We will also be sharing ceremonial grade Matcha and you will learn how to prepare, serve and store Matcha to bring out its distinct and delicious flavour.

Traditional Tea Gathering
Teas will be prepared and served in traditional Japanese teaware – houhin, kyusu and chawan.

The right choice of teaware optimises the flavour and aroma of high quality teas, so you will be enjoying them at their best. We will give you brewing tips, and advice on how to source and buy Japanese teas.

It promises to be a fun, sensory adventure through modern Chinese tea culture that will entertain, educate and inspire.

No experience required. Just bring curiosity and a love of tea.

What if I like research but not teaching? What if I do not like any of them? What alternatives to academia do I have?

We would like to introduce the “SIU Career Sessions”, a termly round of talks focusing on alternative careers for PhD students and postdocs, which will definitely help you with these questions. Get ready to hear from experts and explore new career paths! If you are not sure what is next after your PhD or would just like to be aware of your options, these events are for you!

Our first session will focus on a promising field for PhD-level scientists: industry. In this event, attendees will have the opportunity to hear from high profile speakers from two pharmaceutical companies with different focuses: Novo Nordisk and Immunocore. The speakers will bring not only information about the attributes they seek in potential employees, but also the daily life in industry and opportunities for a successful and stable career in big pharmaceutical companies. We will also learn from their first-hand experience how they took the career transition path to industry.

Is industry for you? Come find out with us!
As always, this event is completely free and everyone is welcome.

Plastics (polymers) and other organic materials are typically thought of as insulating materials that surround conducting metals (e.g. copper) to protect us from shocks. However, through careful design, a class of so-called “pi-conjugated” organic compounds and polymers can be both semiconducting and conducting, and can be processed as flexible and in some cases stretchable thin films. In addition, these materials can be tuned to absorb and emit light across the visible spectrum. These pi-conjugated materials have been incorporated into devices such as organic light emitting diode (OLED) based displays common in cell phones (e.g. Samsung phones and the iPhone X) and now televisions (LG). OLEDs are now a multi-billion dollar market (> $10 billion expected in 2018), that is forecasted to grow rapidly over the next decade. OLEDs are now under active development for a variety of high efficiency light applications, with high-end lumenaires being marketed by a variety of companies. In addition, these materials have found use in organic solar cells, and also as components in a new class of highly efficient “perovskite” solar cells.

In this presentation, Professor Seth Marder, Visitor to Oxford Martin Senior Fellow, Professor Henry Snaith, will provide a brief introduction to how chemists develop these materials, introduce the basic working concepts of OLEDs and photovoltaics, show how organic compounds have been used in these technologies, and touch on both the strengths and weaknesses of organic materials for these various applications.

Geoengineering, the practice of artificially altering the climate, has long been a contentious topic. Its attractiveness to scientists and policy makers who aim to engineer alternative solutions to mitigate the dangers of climate change is often met with economic, social and even ethical concerns.

This seminar looks to explore arguments for and against the implementation of geoengineering. What are the economic, social and environmental implications of proposed schemes? Can we afford not to employ them? Is geoengineering ethical? Does it work and if so, is it possible to reach the targets set out in the Paris agreement without it? These are just some of the topics we hope to investigate.

The talk will he chaired by Professor Rosalind Rickaby. The panel consists of Mr Tim Kruger, James Martin Fellow and Dr Phil Renforth, Lecturer in Engineering Geology at Cardiff University. A further two panellists will be released shortly.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1987490278167428/

St Anne’s College is proud to host an inspiring group of entrepreneurs to demystify the field of entrepreneurship and explain some of the paths to a career in this field.

Our speakers will present their first-hand experiences from different areas of the start-up ecosystem, from founding and growing successful companies to investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs. The talks will be followed by a Q&A panel session featuring young entrepreneurs sharing their journeys to show their routes into the field. With this range of involvement, you will be able to get a feel for how to be a part of start-ups from joining an existing team to developing your own ideas.

This event is open to everyone and free to attend. There will be a networking drinks reception following the talks where you will be able to carry on discussion.

Matt Clifford – Matt is a co-founder and chief executive of Entrepreneur First (EF), the world’s leading technology start-up builder. Since 2011 they have helped build over 140 start-ups that are now collectively worth over $1 billion. EF’s mission is to bring together individuals who want to start their entrepreneurial journeys and in this process, sthey help put people together to create cofounding teams that go on to build companies.

David Langer – During his Maths degree at Oxford, David founded GroupSpaces – a software company to help university clubs and societies manage themselves, hosting over 5 million memberships. After six years working on this, he then moved on to found Zesty, a Y Combinator backed corporate meal provider based in Silicon Valley that has raised over $20 million from investors. David is also an angel investor and startup advisor working with over 20 companies across Europe, Asia and the United States

Speaker: Carlo van de Weijer

Digitisation has entered the mobility arena. The car has evolved from a mechanical device into a “data producing embedded software platform”, and the internet is quickly linking the supply and demand to effectively fulfil our transport needs. And just like every industry that is confronted with digitisation, the changes come faster than most traditional players can prepare for. Yet, with all unpredictability that comes along with disruption there are some fixed rules that one can prepare for. This makes mobility a real example of an industry in the midst of disruption. Carlo van de Weijer will highlight the most important future trends within mobility, from uberization to self driving vehicles, electrification and the impact on cities and society.

“3.5 million cyber-crimes recorded, true figure could be 20.5 million” – this is just one of the headlines that exemplify how significant cybercrime is today.

Cybercrime has been ruthless, victimising everyone from corporations to charities and the elderly. In this light-hearted talk, Jason examines the topic of cybercrime with a focus on how criminals target individuals and exploit how we think, reason and behave. This touches on the fields of computer science and psychology. Additionally, Jason provides some tips and tricks for how you can protect yourself and your families online.

If you’ve ever wondered about cybercrime, come along tonight – Jason guarantees that fun (honest!) will be had by all!

Our world is driven by technology and while it offers a variety of benefits to society, it also exposes us to a series of new and complex cybersecurity risks. These can relate to how we conduct business, how we engage with colleagues, family and friends, or even how organisations and individuals interact with new platforms such as social media and the internet-of-things.

In this talk, Dr Jason Nurse will explore these issues from the perspective of Cybersecurity. His talk begins with a brief discussion of what cybersecurity is, and then moves on to a detailed presentation of some of the significant challenges facing cybersecurity practice and research. Topics that will be covered include: the challenge of social engineering and why it is one of the most popular attacks today; the internet-of-things and its security and privacy implications; and how criminals use social media as a key platform for intelligence gathering on potential targets. These are all topics that will become critical in the future as society grows and technology becomes even more embedded into our daily lives.

If you’d like to find out more or reach Jason online, check out Twitter @jasonnurse!

This is the second in a series of lunchtime workshops to think about teaching/research through different (and intersectional) lenses, with the goal also of capturing interdisciplinary and intergenerational perspectives.

This time we want to explore ways in which research deploys a queer lens to transform, disrupt and challenge fields of scholarship, and how that productive dislodging of perspective informs teaching (and could do so more profoundly), at both an individual and a more systemic level. Our specific focus is on the interface between research/teaching (in art, ancient world philology and musicology) and activism/performance – both within and outside ‘the academy’. This workshop is timed to fall within a few days of the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Bi-Phobia.

The panellists are Oreet Ashery (Ruskin School of Art), Jacob Mallinson Bird (Music) and Richard Parkinson (Oriental Studies).

This workshop will be chaired by Jane Garnett (Tutor in Modern History, Faculty of History).

Lunch will be available from 12.30pm. Attendance is free but booking is essential.

This workshop, facilitated by journalist Shaista Aziz, will introduce and explore the notions of ‘intersectional’ identities. Intersectionality may be defined as the way in which people’s experiences are shaped by their ethnicity, class, sex, gender, and sexuality all at the same time and to varying degrees. For example, if being middle-class brings with it a set of shared experiences and expectations, how might those experiences and expectations become altered by being a member of the black middle-classes? Intersectionality is a way in which such terms as class or ‘race’ can retain some usefulness without oversimplification or stereotype.

As a city, Oxford is also prey to stereotype: white, scholarly, privileged, elite even. But Oxford is also the product of its intersectional histories, cultures and inhabitants and we perhaps need to do more to recognise and understand the complex inter-relations that have always defined it and continue to shape it. Understanding Intersectional Oxford is a session devoted to opening up and exploring the experiences that make up intersectional Oxford.

Shaista Aziz is a freelance journalist and writer specialising in identity, race, gender and Muslim women. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Globe and Mail, New York Times, BBC and Huffington Post. She’s a broadcaster and political commentator and the founder of The Everyday Bigotry Project seeking to disrupt narratives around race, Islamophobia and bigotry. She’s a former Oxfam and MSF aid worker and has spent more than fifteen years working across the Middle East, East and West Africa and across Pakistan with marginalised women impacted by conflict and emergencies. Most recently she was working in Borno state, North East Nigeria. She is also a member of the Fabian Women’s Network Executive Committee.

Kei Miller is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, broadcaster and blogger. His many books include the novel Augustown (2016) and poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which won the Forward Prize (Best Poetry Collection of 2014). In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature. He is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter.

Kei’s work challenges the way we think about and perceive the world and its history through vibrant, compelling language and imagery. Come and hear one of the country’s most sought-after readers in an event organized by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre for Think Human Festival.

Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six poetry collections, including Parallax (2013), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2017 she was awarded the Forward Prize for her most recent collection, On Balance, and is currently Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts at Newcastle University.

Sinéad often writes of her native Northern Ireland, but her poetic gaze ranges much more widely and frequently interrogates the act of looking itself. Her poems are resonant with meaning and beautifully crafted, provoking the reader or listener into further thought. Join Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre at Think Human Festival to hear one of the most critically-acclaimed poets in the UK read from a selection of her most recent as well as older work.

In this exciting event organized by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre for Think Human Festival, the celebrated poet, editor and translator Clare Pollard will join us to read from her work and talk about the ‘thrill of entering a new way of thinking’ when we read and translate poetry from another language. How does translation break down boundaries between cultures? Can the translation of poetry help to make us more empathetic or even more human?

Clare has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, the latest of which is Incarnation (2017). Her translation projects include a version of Ovid’s Heroines (2013), which she toured as a one-woman show, and a co-translation of Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf’s The Sea-Migrations (2017) which was The Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year. She is the new editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What’s more, its potential is nearly limitless – every hour the sun beams down more energy than the world uses in a year. But Varun Sivaram, Fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Oxford researcher, and author of a new book, Taming the Sun, warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar’s current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.

Innovation can brighten those prospects, Sivaram will argue. Financial innovation is already enticing deep-pocketed investors to fund solar projects around the world, from the sunniest deserts to the poorest villages. Technological innovation could replace today’s solar panels with coatings as cheap as paint and employ artificial photosynthesis to store intermittent sunshine as convenient fuels. And systemic innovation could add flexibility to the world’s power grids and other energy systems so they can dependably channel the sun’s unreliable energy. Unleashing all this innovation will require visionary public policy: funding researchers developing next-generation solar technologies, refashioning energy systems and economic markets, and putting together a diverse clean energy portfolio.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book signing, all welcome.

Welcome to the first event in our two-part China-UK Science Innovation Series!

In 2016 alone, China invested USD236 billion in Research and Development, making it the second largest investor in innovation globally. Given this, as well as China’s rapid economic growth, Science Innovation Union (SIU) and the Oxford Chinese Life Sciences Society (OCLSS) have decided to team up to hold an outstanding two-session event on this exciting area of development. Attendees will hear from a distinguished group of high profile speakers coming from the government, academic and private sectors. Our audience will have the chance to learn about how China and the UK have been working together to boost innovation, opportunities available for funding and to get an update on the latest leading-edge research.

Speakers:
Sunan Jiang (Minister Counsellor for Science and Technology, the Chinese Embassy in the UK)

Dr Wenming Ji (Managing Director at Oxford Cardiomox Ltd.; Former Senior Consultant at Isis Innovation Ltd; Former Project Manager at Innovation China UK)

Dr Shisong Jiang (CTO of Oxford Vacmedix)

Schedule:
17:30-17:40 Registration

17:40-18:00 Speaker 1

18:05-18:25 Speaker 2

18:30-18:50 Speaker 3

18:50-19:10 Q&A

19:10-20:00 Networking

As always, this event is free and open to the public!

The second part of this series is entitled:
“Building bridges between UK and China: From investment to ongoing global research advances” and will take place on the evening of June 26th.
Please keep an eye out for further details in the coming weeks!

A History of Food Fraud and Its Detection
Dr Duncan Campbell (DPhil Soil Solution Chemistry, 1986)

Duncan’s talk will cover the long history of food adulteration from medieval Germany to 19th century America, the pioneers who applied scientific methods to its detection in the 19th century and some modern examples from Britain and further afield.

Duncan was a student member of St Cross College from 1982 to 1985. After his time at St Cross and a period of post-doctoral research, he broadened his horizons to apply chemical analysis to public protection and gained the qualification required to act as a Public Analyst in 1994.

Although small in number, Public Analysts play a key role in enforcing many aspects of food legislation in the UK, directing the analysis of food and providing expert opinion on the results. A leading member of the profession, Duncan has contributed to the wider debate on protecting the public’s interests in relation to food, as well as TV programmes including the second episode of Netflix’s documentary series ‘Rotten’ which sets out to expose fraud and corruption in today’s global food industry.

Drinks reception to follow.

Do you want to learn about artificial intelligence? Have you been put off by technical jargon or fears of terminator robots?

Come along to this evening course for beginners run by the AI consultancy Oxford Insights.

No previous experience or knowledge of AI is required.

The course will cover important definitions, developments and debates in AI today, to help you answer three questions:

what is AI?

who is doing what?

why should we care?

Our teachers are AI experts and great communicators who will bring technical discussions to life.

This will be a small group to leave space for lots of discussion. We are charging the very low introductory price of £15 for this evening only!

Do you want to learn about artificial intelligence? Have you been put off by technical jargon or fears of terminator robots?

Come along to this evening course for beginners run by the AI consultancy Oxford Insights.

No previous experience or knowledge of AI is required.

The course will cover important definitions, developments and debates in AI today, to help you answer three questions:

what is AI?

who is doing what?

why should we care?

Our teachers are AI experts and great communicators who will bring technical discussions to life.

This will be a small group to leave space for lots of discussion. We are charging the very low introductory price of £15 for this evening only!

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) offer the opportunity to control devices directly with the brain. Brain-controlled devices can return communication to those without speech, memory function to those with hippocampus damage, while prosthetic limbs controlled via the brain continue to develop at a pace. In the future, these technologies may also open doors to enhancements of the scope of human abilities beyond that which we generally expect.
This panel explores the state of the art in BCIs: What ethical issues arise with these technologies? How ought they to be understood, in terms of personal identity, or moral responsibility? Extending into the future, how might BCIs feature in human enhancement? Based in what we know already, we will set out to speculate about ‘beyond the horizon’, emerging BCI technologies and how to prepare for them.

Large numbers of satellites currently circle Earth, continuously observing its surface in a variety of ways. In this lecture, Professor Barry Parsons will explain how these satellites may be used to investigate earthquakes – mapping earthquake faults; determining the topography produced by past and recent earthquakes; imaging the displacement of the earth’s surface in earthquakes; measuring the straining of near-surface material, strain that will eventually be released in future earthquakes – and to find out what happens in an earthquake below the surface.

Professor Barry Parsons was Director of the Centre for the Observation and Modelling for Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) from 2002 to 2013. COMET is an Earth Observation Centre of Excellence supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) that links scientists at several earth science departments, deploying earth observation (satellite) techniques on questions concerning the science and hazard of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Barry is currently Principal Investigator for a NERC-funded consortium project, Looking inside the Continents from Space (LiCS), which aims to exploit the opportunities to measure crustal strain accurately and in detail presented by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 radar satellites.

This lecture is suitable for an audience of approx 16+, especially those with an interest in Physics, Geography, space technology and applied sciences.

This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Technological innovation is critical to addressing planetary health challenges. What can be done to ensure that innovation systems and the new “Fourth Industrial Revolution” respond effectively with positive social, environmental and economic consequences? How can we ensure equality of the energy transition?

This is a joint event with INET@Oxford

Technological change involves many economic, social and individual human factors that are interwoven in a complex pattern; thus, technological change serves as an exemplar for a complex socio-technical system. Moreover, some individual factors central to technological change are challenging areas with more unknown than understood: among these areas are individual creative invention, scientific interplay with technology, new business formation, human/product interactions and others. In this lecture, technological change and socio-technical system expert, Chris Magee, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow and Professor at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT will share a perspective that can help all of us better understand this phenomenon despite the complexity.

His focus on a major regularity displayed by all technological domains – a constant yearly percentage improvement in performance – and study of how these performance improvement percentage/rate varies over different technologies (but not over time) is one important foundation for this perspective. A second foundation is the wide interconnection among ideas and knowledge that drive improvements in domains that nonetheless have independent and different rates of improvement. Technological change, the process underlying the profound changes in society over the past 200 years – especially economic growth – is surprisingly decoupled from many societal and economic details.

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

Vint Cerf is the co-inventor of the Internet, and Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. In his lecture, he will be speaking about “The Pacification of Cyberspace”; a look at how to pacify the relatively lawless environment of the Internet, while preserving the utility of its openness to creative innovation and technological revolution.

The Romanes Lecture is the University of Oxford’s annual public lecture series, running since 1892.

The multi-talented Nick Lee is a Lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, a researcher at the House of Lords, and co-founder of the radical south-London project space, the Peckham Pelican.

Nick, an academic with a reputation as a revolutionary nonconformist, will be joining us for the final FAR (Fine Art Research) guest lecture of 2018.

This discussion at Oxford Brookes will present a series of painted images ordered to demonstrate the development of perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective).

The following question will be posed: what exactly is developing in these images and what subsequent forms of image-making does artificial perspective make possible?
(Progress here, as elsewhere, is uncertain; a way of seeing is produced which structures in turn how we see the world.) The extent to which computer-generated images replicate and further systematise this way of seeing will be considered…

FREE & ALL WELCOME

Booking is essential:
www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-art-history-nick-lee-uncertain-progress-tickets-52493195561

Join us for the launch event of the Future of Blockchain 3 Month Competition.

We will be joined by 8 of the leading projects in the blockchain space. Teams include:

Gnosis

Kyber

Iconomi

Liquidity Network

Thunder

Zilliqa

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The Future of Blockchain is a 3 month idea competition hosted at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL and KCL.

Challenge = Build something involving blockchain in 3 months

Over £80k cash in prize, Top Prize = £20,000 cash, 24 Bounties of £2,000 cash prizes from our supporters

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Winter Cohort:

Launch Events = 21st (Cambridge), 22nd (Oxford), 23rd (London) November 2018

Starts = Monday 3rd December 2018

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More info at www.futureofblockchain.co.uk

Sunday, 25th November 2018
11am – 6.15pm (Registration starts at 10.30am)
Chakrabarti Lecture Theatre & JHB207,
John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Road, Oxford OX3 0BP

“What does it mean to research through creative practice?”

Keynote Speaker: Dr Geof Hill (Birmingham City University)
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/-centres-of-excellence/centre-for-research-in-education/people/geof-hill

To have a look at the schedule and book your ticket, please visit: ars2018.eventbrite.co.uk

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Delegate/Attendance fee: £30 / Early Bird Tickets (£20) are available until 18th November – includes lunch & refreshments

We’ll be posting speaker information leading up to the event so keep an eye out for our Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/455606768180452

This event is supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and the Oxford City Council.

For a digital copy of the event booklet and more information please contact: info@ca-ru.org

We look forward to seeing you there!

CARU Conference Team
Follow us on social media: @CARUpage

Meet thermal imaging applications specialist to discuss how thermal imaging can be used in your application.

Meet thermal imaging applications specialist to discuss how thermal imaging can be used in your applications

Meet thermal imaging applications specialist to discuss your application and how thermal imaging can be used