https://www.facebook.com/events/495653777253176/

The Oxford Guild is very excited to welcome Larry Hirst CBE, former Chairman of IBM EMEA, to speak on Thursday 7th May. This will be an incredibly insightful talk and is not one to be missed, especially for anyone interested in technology, business, or issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The event will include a Q&A session open to the floor, and promises to cover a wide range of topics, as Larry discusses his high-profile and varied career. ALL ARE WELCOME!

DATE: Thursday 7th May 2015 (2nd Week)
TIME: 6:40pm
VENUE: Habakkuk Room, Jesus College
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE: http://tinyurl.com/LarryHirstIBMGuildTalk

Until his retirement from IBM in July 2010, Larry Hirst was chairman of IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He represented IBM to the European Commission and other authorities such as NATO and the EDA on issues of international public policy and business regulation. During his time as Chairman, IBM EMEA revenues grew to $35bn, with a workforce of 110,000 people. Previous roles in his 33-year career included Chairman of IBM Netherlands (2002-2010), the leadership of IBM’s business in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and South Africa (2002-2008).
Larry is passionate about the issues of diversity and inclusion and is an Ambassador to the Everywoman company (https://www.everywoman.com/) and Black British Business Awards (http://www.thebbbawards.com/), as well as a supporter of groups including the Asian Business Networks Association, the European Women’s Achievement Award, the Afro Caribbean Group, Stonewall, Whitehall in Industry, Asian Business Women, and Investors in Diversity.
Larry was appointed C.B.E. in 2006, in recognition of Services to the IT industry.

This event will be particularly insightful for anyone considering a career in technology or business, and there will be a Q&A session as part of the event.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Oxford Internet Institute Bellwether Lecture presented by Professor Dan Burk on Copyright, Culture, and Community in Virtual Worlds

We have accumulated an increasingly rich body of data concerning online communities, particularly those that share virtual environments. The on-line interactions of such communities are uniquely mediated by the audiovisual content of the software interface, which becomes a feature of shared culture. Much of this content is subject to copyright law, which confers on the copyright owner the legal right to prevent certain unauthorized uses of the content. Such exclusive rights impose a limiting factor on the development of communities that are situated around the interface content, as the rights, privileges, and exceptions associated with copyright generally tend to disregard the cultural significance of copyrighted content. Thus, the opportunity for on-line communities to legally access and manipulate the graphical elements on which their communities are built is frought with potential legal liability. Reconsideration of current copyright law would be required in order to accommodate the cohesion of on-line communities through cultural uses of copyrighted content.

Please visit http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/ for more information.
Please email events@oii.ox.ac.uk to register for the event.

As part of this year’s community outreach program, Oxford Brookes University’s 150th anniversary, and as a way showing our appreciation to all participants, clinicians, researchers, members of the public and organisations that have supported our work, we will be holding an open day on Saturday, 30th of May 2015. Over the past decade, the Movement Science Group, which now falls within the Centre for Rehabilitation at Oxford Brookes University, has conducted extensive research on a variety of topics related to rehabilitation and physical activity. Topics include measuring and understanding movement in those with movement difficulties, exercising benefits in people with neurological conditions, and developing novel rehabilitation strategies.

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.

So many of us are desperately busy doing what’s immediately in front of us rather than the things that make a real difference.

Ben will tell the story of the GB men’s rowing 8+ in the build up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where they won the gold medal, and how they challenged everything to make the boat go faster. For Ben it was the culmination of nine years in the national team.

Ben’s story is a call to action, challenging you to examine how you spend your time in a way that ensures you are travelling in the direction that you want to go.

About the Speaker
Ben Hunt-David MBE
BEN HUNT-DAVIS MBE

Former Brookes student, Ben Hunt- Davis is a performance coach, speaker and author. Ben has been involved in five Olympic Games – three as a competitor and two as a member of the headquarters team. He was also Chairman of the Organising Committee for both the 2011 World Rowing Junior Championships and the 2013 Rowing World Cup. He now runs a performance consulting company helping companies to make their ‘boats go faster’. His first book is entitled Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

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.

Two hour cycle ride with Max as he reveals some surprising facts about the science of cycling. Ride and demonstration.
Please show up 10 minutes before departure at The Story Museum. The ride will finish back at The Story Museum.

Author and cyclist Max Gaskin explores the science of cycling from hydrogen to helmets!
6.30pm – 7.30pm £8/£5 concessions

International table tennis player, broadcaster and writer, Matthew Syed will reflect on the psychology of performance.

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/

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.

The first OxArch workshop of the series ‘Behind Architecture: The Essentials’ is set to bring us back to the analogue process of representation. ‘Architecture in Watercolours’ presents an opportunity to begin the year with a little experimentation.

Anisha Meggi (currently studying her PhD) works with watercolour to capture the essence of a project with the physical and theoretical layering of watercolour paint and model making.

Come join us on the 4th floor of Abercrombie on Thursday at 4pm, if you’re interested in learning a new skill or pushing further what you already know about watercolour.

We will be providing some watercolour trays, watercolour paper and brushes. However, if you have you’re own watercolour sets, please feel free to bring them in.

Prices:
£7 for members
£9 for non members

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.

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.

3D character animation online with Mixamo/Adobe
On June 1st of this year Adobe announced its purchase of the company Mixamo.
This evening John Twycross – Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Production, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University – will demonstrate some of the features of the current Mixamo website, look at how this currently integrates into game engines and discuss the implications of this for designers.

The Mixamo online service provides a motion capture library, character generation and automated rigging. It is exciting because it makes character animation accessible to all. It also clearly signals Adobe’s commitment to gain a foothold in the 3D character animation field and expanding Photoshop’s 3D features.

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.

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.

Oxford Fashion Society is delighted to bring you our first speaker of the year, FELICITY HAYWARD! Join us on the 12th November for a very special event with the international model, ASOS stylist and artist. There will be top style tips, insights into her amazing world of fashion, and a chance for any questions, as well as a (FREE!) drinks reception following the event!

Felicity has had an amazing and varied career, from being ASOS’s go-to gal for all things CURVE, to gracing the cover of I-D and Noctis magazines (and countless others), to her nearly 40k followers on Instagram, and she’ll be joining us to tell us all about it! For anyone interested in modelling, styling, fashion, or just a great evening out, this event is an absoloute must!

Tickets are £3 on the door and include FREE DRINKS afterwards!
Join the Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/990444424351368/

See you all there!

OFS love X

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.

Adobe specialists Richard Curtis and Niels Stevens are coming to Film Oxford for a special presentation on the new features of Creative Cloud for photographers, designers and film makers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see the latest features in the new release of Adobe Creative Cloud 2015, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, Speedgrade and more. Learn about what’s new in this 2015 release that will help you do everything you do more efficiently using the latest innovations and modern standards. Get answers to your questions and get inspired by film makers and photographers who are creating amazing work.