Welcome to our first RIED Programme newsletter. We hope you will find it interesting and informative. Any feedback would be gratefully received too as we settle in to sharing these on a quarterly basis going forward.
Recent news from the last quarter
A Time to Sprint
Over the summer our Research Team from across our three partner Institutions of Queens University Belfast, Loughborough University and the University of York were extremely busy but successful in conducting a series of Agile “Sprints”. This work was focussed on being able to demonstrate some of the scientific capability challenges in our early RIED design process methodology thinking.
Our first face to face RIED Symposium
During the first week of October we held our first inaugural RIED Symposium at the MAC Centre in Belfast Norther Ireland.
The event was conducted over a full, busy five days with on average 35-40 delegates in attendance from the RIED Programme team, representatives from our ten Industrial Partners and members of our International Scientific Advisory Board, our Strategic Governance Board and representatives from EPSRC and Innovate UK.
On the first day the Research Teams and PhD Students met together face to face for the first time since the Programme Launch in May 2021 and worked to refine and rehearse all their presentations.
The full symposium then began on the Tuesday opening with introductions lead by Professor Mark Price, our Principal Investigator and a Keynote Speech about the “Challenges Facing Industry” from Tony Phipps, from Rolls-Royce and Chair of the Industrial Collaborators Forum. Mark then gave an overview of the RIED Programme, its research challenges and background overview. The day was then full based on technical presentations from the Research Team on seeds, evolution and environments. We then had the first of two Poster Sessions to give the delegates time to meet and talk to the Researchers and Students. The day concluded with a second Keynote Speech from Dave Riordan (Spirit Aerosystems) on “The Challenges facing Aerospace”.
Wednesday began with a third keynote speech, from Kevin Lindsey of FAR-UK on the Challenges facing the Automotive sector. This was followed by series of technical presentation from the Research Team from Loughborough University on their work around verification and validation aspects based on what is known as the METL Exemplar. In the afternoon a series of presentations were given on the outputs from Sprints, including a live demonstration of the prototype RIED design process through a User Interface tool – this was stunning and really helped the delegates grasp the scale and ambition of what RIED may lead too. To complete the day we then went through an exercise on Agile capability challenge planning to build up a picture of some future user-case Exemplars and then a second Poster Session. To cap off a full day all the delegates were taken to a wonderful Programme Dinner at the Titanic Hotel.
During the Thursday we ran a number of formal Board meetings while the Researchers and Academics continued work on the Future Exemplars with the Scientific Advisors and Industrialists. The first of the Boards was the Industrial Collaborators Forum chaired by Tony Phipps and we were joined by regional representatives from EPSRC and Innovate UK. In the afternoon Professor Chris McMahon chaired the International Scientific Advisory Board. These two boards were very complimentary about the Symposium, the progress made and noted their keenness to continue building on the recent engagement. The final board of the day was the overarching Strategic Governance Board chaired by Professor Mark Gillan and although we all recognise there are challenges ahead given the scale and ambition of the Programme, the work and progress made was fantastic and the Board has “high hopes for the impact RIED will have in the years to come.”
On the final day the Research Team and PhD Students had a quieter reflective day together where we had a workshop event around EDI and Bias, and discussed leadership and people development topics.
What a week!
People News
In October we were delighted to have five new PhD Students joining the Programme. Welcome to Julian Francis, Thomas Whittaker, Orlagh Casey, Mudassar Khalil and Colin Roitt.
This increases our PhDs from 3 to 7 in total. This is an exciting time for the Students and the whole RIED Programme.
We would also like to say congratulations and best wishes to Laura McGirr who has been with us for nearly 12 months, as she moves on to a substantive role elsewhere in Queens University Belfast.
Looking forward to the next quarter
We have now released our new RIED website to the public and can be found via the following link. We will also be opening up and sharing news and information on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
www.riedesign.org
Our next round of internal Governance meetings will be kicking off as we start developing our planning for the next 12 month phase of the Programme. This will be based on the existing Thread based research work package plans but overlaying it with a number of future sprints, a mini-Symposium around Easter 2023 through to the major Mid Term Review in November 2023. The actions and opportunities identified at the October Symposium will also be built into our thinking.
In December Dr Simon Hickinbotham will be presenting a Conference Paper on behalf of the RIED team entitled – “Evolving the Generative Design Engineer” at the SSCI-2022 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Singapore, supported by Professor Andy Tyrrell. There are two Journal papers from RIED that are out on peer review that will be released soon.
In January we are expecting our next round of new Research Assistants to join the Programme across the three Institutions.
We also be launching our Outreach and Impact team.
Lots to look forward to !