Welcome to our RIED Programme July 2023 newsletter, it includes information on:
- Recent News
- People News
- Journal Papers, Conference Papers / Presentations and Public Presentations/Webinars
- Outreach, Impact and Advocacy Activities
- Look forward to the next quarter (up to the end of October 2023)
- Further Reading and Contacts
We hope you will find it interesting and informative. Any feedback would be gratefully received too as we settle back in to sharing these on a quarterly basis.
It’s been a busy and productive phase of the Programme. Areas of significant work have included:
- Continuing our work on our RIED design process capabilities
- Increasing our number of publications and public presentations
- Holding our 2023 Symposium in April at the University of York
- Ramping up our outreach, impact and advocacy activities
- Significant amount of lab work in Loughborough
- A new round of RIED design code-base agile sprints that are currently underway.
Also since our first Newsletter was issued, we have our RIED website, LinkedIn and Twitter sites up and running and being used regularly.
In April we held our second face to face RIED Symposium over 4 days at the beautiful University of York in the new Institute for Safe Autonomy with around 40 participants taking part over the course of the events. On the Tuesday, the RAs and PhD Students spent the day working together on their own to network, finalise their presentations and generally share their knowledge and experience of working on RIED. On the Wednesday, the whole team and our Partners and Board Members took a trip to Derby to visit the Rolls Royce. We had tours round the RR Heritage Trust and in the afternoon, we had a series of presentations and discussions with the wider RR team about RIED and their work on Methods including Optimisation tools. We would like to extend our thanks to Tony Phipps (RR) for hosting our day at Rolls Royce, along with Shahrokh Shahparfor his very informative presentation and to the Rolls Royce Trust Heritage Museum Guides, Peter Johnston and Colin Scrivener too, who made the visit so interesting.
On the Thursday, we had a full day of presentations to report out the progress made since the October 2022 Symposium. On the Friday, the RAs and PhD Students had another day together looking at plans and work to come. In parallel the rest of the RIED leadership took part in a series of more formal Board Meetings on Friday with our Industrial Collaborators Forum, the International Scientific Advisory Board and the Strategic Governance Board all being conducted. These went well, the discussions were great and the support from EPSRC and these Forum and Boards continues to be terrific and greatly appreciated.
2023 Summertime Sprinting
Following discussions at the Symposium and a subsequent Researchers’ event in Belfast, we have launched a series of Agile Sprints to “Refactor” the RIED design code base. The refactoring will enable the increasing number of methods and applications to be more easily interchangeable while also speeding up the running of experiments in support of publications. As in the 2022 round of Sprints, this is all being done within the GitLab software repository and in line with the Dev Ops Framework Training. The series of Sprints laid out run through June to mid-August.
People News
Our RIED team continues to grow with 5 more Researchers joining the team since the last newsletter was issued. They are Daniel Brice, Zhiwei Zhao and Thomas Shannon at Queens, Edgar Buchanan Berumen at the University of York, and Abdur Siddiq at Loughborough University. Their biographies are available in the RIED website “Our Team” page. This brings our number of Research Associates up to 10, with an additional RA in QUB arriving in August 2023.
As part of our Investing In People activities, we conducted a two-day face to face RIED Induction Training Event in Queens University Belfast where the new RAs and PhD Students from the three Institutions were involved in a series of sessions with Prof Mark Price, for a technical overview, with Andrew Colligan taking them through the world of GitLab and our RIED Code base and with Andrew Mowles for some operational related topics. We took the opportunity to have a good social event in the evening too where more of the RIED team were able to come and meet the new members. We also involved the new starters in an on-boarding session with the Brilliant Buttons Ltd team to introduce them to our Coaching and Development App based service.
As part of our Investing In People activities, we conducted a two-day face to face RIED Induction Training Event in Queens University Belfast where the new RAs and PhD Students from the three Institutions were involved in a series of sessions with Prof Mark Price, for a technical overview, with Andrew Colligan taking them through the world of GitLab and our RIED Code base and with Andrew Mowles for some operational related topics. We took the opportunity to have a good social event in the evening too where more of the RIED team were able to come and meet the new members. We also involved the new starters in an on-boarding session with the Brilliant Buttons Ltd team to introduce them to our Coaching and Development App based service.
There will be further opportunities ahead too as we look to expand the Post Doctorate Research team up to circa 14 members.
We are currently expanding the RIED PhD team too, there are two more PhD Students secured and will be joining in October.
We would also like to congratulate and pass on the good news about some of our brilliant RIED team who have been recognised by their home institutions for their outstanding academic work and been promoted.
Carmen Torres Sanchez has been promoted to a Chair in Loughborough! The Chair was awarded for her work of international standing in multi-functional materials manufacturing. This is such a fantastic achievement. It is not every day that a Chair is made, so on behalf of all of us a huge congratulations to Professor Carmen, who has been recognised as an outstanding scholar in her field.
Declan Nolan has been promoted to Senior Lecturer in Queen’s. Declan’s contribution to the school in combination with outstanding teaching and research was noted. Again, on behalf of the RIED team, a massive congratulations to Declan!
Also Edgar Buchanan was promoted in the latest round at York from Research Assistant to Research Fellow.
Three of our QUB 1st Year PhD Students, Orlagh Casey, Julian Francis and Thomas Whittaker have passed their differentiation, the first big milestone on their way to their PhDs.
Colin Roitt from the University of York who won second prize at the @EngineeringYork competition.
Here is a listing of the Journal Papers, Conference Papers, Presentations and Public Presentations, Webinars etc given by the RIED Team since the last Newsletter. These are all accessible via our website www.riedesign.org.
THERMEC 2023 – July 2023, Vienna
Members of the RIED Loughborough Team attended the THERMEC 2023 Conference in Vienna, Austria, a very prestigious bi-annual International Conference on “PROCESSING & MANUFACTURING OF ADVANCED MATERIALS: Processing, Fabrication, Properties, Applications”
The work presented was on the biodegradable and bioresorbable materials for medical devices and scaffolds based on Ca-Mg-Zn chemistry for bulk metallic glasses. PhD researcher Shangmou Yang and supervisors Profs Paul Conway and Carmen Torres presented and defended the paper entitled “Can multifunctionality of bioresorbable BMGs be tuned by controlling crystallinity?” during the session ‘Metallic Glasses 3’ chaired by one of them most eminent and internationally respected experts in bulk metallic glasses, Prof Jürgen Eckert, from Montan universität Leoben & Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Leoben (Austria).
And to make it even more special…
The RIED-Wien local team came to support us and boost our mood!
We met with Dr Vincent McKenna, RIED alumnus, who now resides in Vienna. It was a fabulous occasion, and we spent a lovely time with him there, celebrating how well he is doing in the city he now calls home. We are already looking forward to meeting him again (here in the UK or in Wien!)
There have been wide range of activities conducted in recent times under this broad heading. A number of these are described below.
1) The RIED Team worked with photographic artist Clare Newton recently on her “Seeds of Change” Project. The following is an extract of the news item posted on our RIED website
RIED is inspired by nature, we are observing natural systems at work and codifying these into engineering systems to produce innovative designs and processes. Nature also inspires art. Our great friend and outstanding photographic artist Clare Newton has produced an amazing exhibition where art and technology and nature are brought together. The Seeds of Change project explores the nature around us and gives alternative perspectives to the amazing world of engineering design that is being created in RIED.
“Exposing innovative science to the public is very important for me. The reason I made this a big part of the Seeds of Change project, is that I have not seen the inside story of science before and in particular in a non-scientific context.
Although there are science museums, they look at subjects that are around us, to enable children to easily relate to a subject. There is very few informative science projects that are portrayed in local exhibition form, and in anon-scientific public place. The purpose of this project is to reach out to a different sector of audiences and bring an unusual aspect of science that they can be inspired by and make the imagery immersive, so that the viewer feels the same excitement as I did when shooting the project. Over the years, I have brought different worlds together to widen a viewer’s point of view. This project I reach out to the non-scientific communities in public gardens, nature museums, churches, and other resourceful places. I know the public enjoy something different and will become fascinated by what I uncover.”
Clare’s exhibition can be viewed from the 6th June to 28th August 2023 in:
Gilbert White’s House,
The Wakes,
High Street,
Selborne,
Hants, GU34 3JH,
T: 01420 511275,
Open daily Tuesday to Sunday 10:30am to 4:30pm
2) On Thursday 22nd June the RIED Project were at the Northern Ireland Manufacturing and Supply Chain Expo, as part of the QUB Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre(AMIC) stand, at the TEC Belfast. Professor Mark Price was invited to host a panel ‘From Blueprint to Breakthrough’ and held a talk on ‘New Perspectives on interoperability across design and manufacturing in an integrated design process’. Both the panel and talk were well attended and received, and the Expo has since noted 1827 attendees on the day. This is a great way to get conversation flowing on what we’re doing at RIED and more eyes on our work.
3) Andy Tyrrell will be the co-chair of the IEEE SSCI 2023 International Conference on Evolvable Systems (ICES) taking place 5-8 December 2023, in Mexico City.
4) We are exploring RIED derived Undergraduate & MSc Projects in QUB for 2023/2024
5) The low TRL Research in the “Smart Design Pillar” of The Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre (AMIC) is being framed around the RIED Programme
6) The QUB RIED Team are underway with a Summer 2023 Project with AMIC who are co-sponsoring the project.
Over the Summer of 2023, focus will continue on
1) Building up our portfolio of RIED publications and outputs. We have a target to get towards a total of 15 Journal Papers submitted by the end of 2023.
2) The RIED code-base Refactoring Sprints, through till mid-August.
3) Embarking on the next major Exemplar – from September.
4) Developing and rolling out our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Plan that will disseminate a body of material for people to engage with including our commitment to the Team to provide a series of events and sessions in this field.
5) The next round of our internal quarterly Thread Reviews and the Operations Team Review through September.
6) Also as we look forward to the end of the year, we will be conducting our next Industrial Collaborators Forum and Strategic Governance Board as part of the preparation for our Mid Term Review with EPSRC in November.
We will continue improving and developing our use of the RIED website, LinkedIn and Twitter site.
For further reading and live news about the Programme please access the RIED website and live information will be shared on our LinkedIn and Twitter sites.