Tag: Digital Economy Research

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Digital manufacturing, say what?

Reflection on developing a digital manufacturing toolkit for children

post by Natalie Leesakul (2018 cohort)

What is the first thought that comes to your mind when you think of manufacturing? Assembly lines? Boring and repetitive tasks? Loud noises?

Over the years, the manufacturing sector has evolved and moved more towards the age of digitalization. However, as the sector entered the era of Industry 4.0, skilled-labour shortages started to become a problem. The sector is experiencing the phenomenon where current employees are retiring while failing to attract new skilled employees. The manufacturing sector was not on my radar until I started my PhD at Horizon CDT (Grant No. EP/L015463/1) working in partnership with DigiTOP (Grant No. EP/R032718/1), and that has completely changed my perspective. This sector is filled with innovation. It is about forward thinking. At the core, there is a major element of maximizing productivity and efficiency by utilizing advanced technologies but also a shift towards ensuring seamless human-machine collaboration and contributions to sustainability and the Net Zero movement. After getting more involved in this sector in the past three years, the question that always comes up is how do we make manufacturing sexy? How do we inspire future generations to be interested in manufacturing?

As part of DigiTOP’s work, we are developing a toolkit to help organizations implement and integrate digital technologies. We provide research on the role of human factors and the impact of technology on the workforce along with use cases and recommendations on the technology adoption and design. One of the on-going toolkit developments is an educational set of resources focusing on the introduction to digital manufacturing aimed at a younger audience (primary and secondary children). I had an opportunity to be a part of the team in charge of developing the content from the start of the video production to running our very first workshop with students in collaboration with Speakers for Schools.

At the start, the first question to answer was how to transform a complex topic into something that is easy to comprehend by the children. We see digital manufacturing as “the use of smart, digital, autonomous and intelligent technologies within the manufacturing sector. These technologies include robotics, virtual and augmented reality, sensors and distributed data networks.” Certainly, there was quite a bit to unpack from this definition. Putting ourselves in the shoes of a 7-year-old, a short animated film was chosen as a communicational medium. Acknowledging that there was not any other existing child-focussed videos on manufacturing at the time, we decided to go forward with the plan and the video was produced in collaboration with Cloudifacturing and Digitbrain projects. The video production kicked off with choosing the right supplier. We searched for a video producer who really understood the brief and the video style of our preference and that required reading through multiple proposals as well as extensive discussion on animation style, colour schemes, voiceover artists, etc. Once we decided on the proposal, we provided the producers with an initial script that covered the objectives and key messages of the video including:

        • Introduction to general changes in industry 4.0/digital manufacturing
        • Cloud-based technologies and human factors considerations
        • Digital twin
        • Human physiological sensing
        • Human robot collaboration
        • Virtual reality in manufacturing and design
        • Responsible technology development and adoption

The challenge we had was explaining all of the above topics in a 3-4 minute video. We consulted with experts in child education to translate (boring) academic language into child-friendly and exciting dialogue. After many editions and revisions of the script, here is the final cut of the video:

The project did not stop at the video production. We are continuing to develop further content to support the use of the video as part of a school curriculum. For our first trial, we were invited to run a workshop through Speakers for Schools program under the weekly theme of digitalization. The workshop dove into the topics mentioned in the video in an interactive manner. We wanted to hear from the students while still making it fun and educational. The workshop was divided into three sections: 1. Subject and skills for digital manufacturing; 2. Sensors; 3. Humans & Robots. I was responsible for the third section. Creating workshop content for younger audience required a completely different approach to a preparation for a conference presentation. How do we gain their engagement especially in a virtual environment? What kind of activities needed to ensure positive engagement? How do we keep them entertained instead of dozing off? How do we make it simple but still interesting? We had various brainstorming sessions to find different ways to run this workshop. We found that to keep the same narrative in all three sessions, creating a fictional character called ‘Amy’ who is a digital factory manager was the way to go. Throughout the workshop, Amy faces different scenarios where she needs helps from the students to make decisions. We used tools such as running polls, storytelling, yes/no questions, and lots and lots of pictures!

In my session of human-robot collaboration, I asked the students to help Amy assign tasks to either human operators or robots.

I was very surprised by some of their answers. The answers were mostly robots even for making coffee! To me, this demonstrates the pro-technology nature of the younger generation. They seemed to be quite comfortable with the topic and it was quite refreshing to see positive engagement from the students. Although we are now living in the world of digitalization, the final note that we left the students with was data and ethics. It is important that we are aware of potential issues and impacts that may arise from technology in order to balance the interests of all stakeholders. Special thanks to the team: Dr. Glyn Lawson, Debra Fearnshaw, Dr Adrian Marinescu, Dr Setia Hermawati, and Siobhan Urquhart.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blogpost. I hope this sparks your interests in digital manufacturing and public engagement. My name is Natalie, Horizon 2018 cohort, and my PhD focuses on the adoption of collaborative embodied autonomous systems in the case of digital manufacturing from legal perspective. 😊

 

 

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Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and the Creation of a Substrate Independent Mind (SIM)

Angela Thornton (2019 cohort), who is partnered with Carboncopies Foundation,  had the opportunity to give a presentation at the Foundation’s Journal Club this past weekend.

Angela talked about her doctoral thesis which looks at Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and the Creation of a Substrate Independent Mind (SIM).  After her presentation, Angela took questions on WBE.

Angela’s presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyXLMGKV72Q

 

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Just write it!

Reflection on my first paper writing experience
post by Natalie Leesakul (2018 cohort)

Citation: Urquhart, L., Reedman-Flint, D. and Leesakul, N. (2019), “Responsible domestic robotics: exploring ethical implications of robots in the home”, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 246-272. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-12-2018-0096

As I was wrapping up my first study and starting to draft the paper, I thought this might be a good time to write a reflection piece on my first paper writing experience. Writing a paper can feel a bit daunting. There are always so many ideas to cover and it is so easy to get consumed by the findings and the need to make the paper perfect – and that is where I’m usually stuck at. So, I have to often remind myself that writing a paper is a journey on its own and it is going to take several drafts and many revisions before arriving at the final document, but even that is not the end!

When I was in my first year, my supervisor, Dr Lachlan Urquhart, invited me to join in on a paper that he was working with another Horizon student, Dominic Reedman-Flint, for ETHICOMP 2018 conference in Sopot, Poland. The motivation of the paper was to introduce empirical observation and conceptual analysis to present how responsible robotics should be built and what people think of life with robots. As the paper focused on exploring challenges and requirements for designing responsible domestic robots, it was very much aligned with my interest in robotics and the law, so I got on board.  Following the submission to the conference, we were invited to submit the paper to Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, and the paper was accepted and published in May 2019. Although it has been over a year since the conference, I still remember the feeling when I gave a presentation at a conference for the first time and the excitement when we found out that the paper was finally in the pipeline for publishing.

For paper preparation, we were working remotely prior to the conference – Lachlan was the lead on this paper while Dom looked at the exploratory study and my responsibility was to support and fill the gaps in some parts of literature review, data analysis and copy editing. We collaborated via email and used Dropbox to keep track of different paper versions and editing (the raw survey data was not stored on here). Through collaboration, the paper started to develop from a rough outline of the paper format to the final draft ready for submission.  Unfortunately, neither Lachlan nor Dom was able to attend the conference. Although it was quite nerve-racking when I found out I would be going to the conference and presenting the paper, this experience really set a good start for my PhD (I’ll save the details for another storytelling!).

After returning from the conference, we took into consideration the questions that were asked during the presentation and addressed this further in our paper. Some of the questions we received were around the main themes of the survey, how the questions were formed, and the general question on how robots can be used for other purposes such as helping those who are socially isolated. In this case, Dom and I were able to work together in person to revise the paper before submitting to the journal. It was definitely easier to collaborate in person as we needed to make some substantial changes to comply with the journal formatting requirements and criteria, decisions could be made faster this way. It took a few days of in-person meetings but intensive email exchanging between all three of us until we had the final draft.

After the paper was accepted and went through peer review process, we received feedback with a minor revision (adding an appendix that includes the statistical analysis). This part of the process allowed us one last chance to edit the paper before publication. It was a very crucial stage to ensure that the paper was airtight which only meant more revision and more back and forth emailing. As I mentioned from the beginning, having a final draft is still not the end of the journey. The paper can always be made better, but it is important to know when to stop. After reading over the paper several times and everyone double, triple, quadruple checked the paper, we then agreed on the final editing.

What I have learned from this experience is very valuable to my PhD journey. For practical skills, I personally think it is a good practice to maintain a record of each revision. I found the recommendation from Lachlan very useful for collaborative writing – so instead of everyone editing the master document, we created a copy of it to add our content to with track changes on. All the revisions must be uploaded onto a shared folder but then only one person compiles all the content onto the master document as this will prevent confusion and corrupted files. For personal development, although I was new to this process, I found that the key for successful collaboration consisted of being flexible and open to new suggestions, respecting each other’s opinions, being supportive, and having good communication, which both Lachlan and Dom have shown me 😊.  It was certainly a good first paper writing experience and a nice reminder to be patient with the process.

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My Journey to a PhD

Post by Abigail Fowler (2016 Cohort)


STEM “My Journey to a PhD” Talk, February 2019

I joined a Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) event at Loughborough Grammar School. I was happy to join in when I heard they were running STEM events for secondary school boys and girls. On a rather wet and windy day, I headed to the event hoping the pupils would enjoy my talk and have some interesting questions.

My talk covered My Journey to a PhD, my research, and a memory game to demonstrate working memory. The game involved seeing an image of items from around the home and kitchen for 10 seconds. Then having 10 seconds to write down as many items as they could remember. I took the items with me as a tactile version in case any blind or partially sighted pupils attended. Somewhat ironically I forgot to boil an egg to take with me to match the image, but improvised with an egg cup for the tactile version.

The talk went really well and the pupils loved the memory test. No one got all 14 items, and they all sighed when I put the image back up so they could see what they’d missed. The second test involved spotting what was missing from an image, and they all answered the moment the slide appeared. It was a simple but effective demonstration of how our ability to remember varies between tasks and this should be considered in design. I am glad I included a practical element as it is always great to get more interaction. The group had been hesitant to ask questions, so it was good to give them permission to get involved at the end of the talk.

My PhD is sponsored by the rail industry. It turned out that Network Rail provide funding for a STEM challenge. Pupils were eager to hear how they could work on projects of interest to Network Rail. I suggested they consider level crossings, and how to influence the behaviour of level crossing users, as this is an area of great interest to the rail industry.

During the day I got to hear some of the current ideas students had for their own STEM projects. These included how to detect when someone is having an allergic reaction to food and designing a water filtration system to provide drinking water. I was really impressed with the range of projects and their innovation.

I talked to the teacher afterwards, and they will be coordinating STEM events in the future across the region to raise awareness with pupils of opportunities and future careers in STEM. I welcome this programme, and the links that can be built between schools and universities to support pupils in their further education of STEM subjects.

—Originally posted at

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A Weekend of Rail Hacking!

Post by Christian Tamakloe (2016 Cohort)

Hackathons are endurance events that bring a host of parties involved in software development together with subject-matter experts in a field to work together to develop products usually in an extremely short period of time, typically a day or two. A long-time staple of the software community, hackathons are increasingly popping up in other industries as they have been shown to be very effective in producing innovative solutions to problems.

I recently had the opportunity to take part in HackTrain 5.0, a rail transport focused hackathon organised by Hack Partners over the weekend of the 9th to 11th of November and it was an amazing experience. It was a hackathon with a twist, as being rail-focused, it involved hours of coding interspersed with train trips to different cities in different countries. It also had massive support from the industry, with sponsors from a range of industry stakeholders including the Department for Transport, Network Rail, Transport for London, Great Western Railway, South Western Railway, Eurostar and Fujitsu among others.

The weekend began with a launch event that saw over 100 participants from all walks of life in the same room with rail industry staff and experts. After a brief introduction to the programme of activities for the next 48 hours by the organising committee, it was the turn of partners and sponsors to present an overview of their various challenges and datasets that they hoped participants could come up with innovative solutions to. These challenges were centred around 4 main themes: customer experience, operational efficiency, rolling stock enhancement and intelligent infrastructure. The presentations were followed by a dinner break where participants could mingle and get to know each other better as well as prod the sponsors and mentors for more information on the challenges.  After dinner, participants were divided into two groups: one group would be travelling through two European cities (Paris and Frankfurt) while the other, of which I was part, would visit the UK cities of Milton Keynes and Cambridge. While the European team proceeded to take their leave, the UK team began the process of team formation.

Participants were allowed a minute to present any ideas they had around the challenges and rail travel in general as well as any skills they would want in potential team members. The top 10 ideas were voted for by all, and teams were formed around them. I took over an idea from another participant who pitched two and recruited 2 others to join me. Our idea was an online marketplace for trains where passengers could buy and sell items among themselves while on a trip, in response to the customer experience challenge.

Idea and Team Formation

After the teams were formed, the group headed to the station to catch our train to Milton Keynes. It was an exciting trip with our large group making our way through crowded stations decked in our HackTrain paraphernalia, which included an infinity gauntlet! We had to share carriages with other passengers and after explaining what we were doing sometimes got some feedback on ways our solutions could be enhanced.

Hacking on the train

The Infinity Gauntlet

Our first stop in Milton Keynes was a hotel, where the hacking officially begun. My team began with refining our initial idea by doing some research into its technical feasibility and business viability. Even though the idea was novel and innovative, we decided there were too many issues with it to progress it. After hours of deliberation, we settled on a new idea that took advantage of one of the technologies provided us to solve a long-standing problem with rail travel: accessible travel for disabled passengers.

Using the local train Wi-Fi network, augmented with an innovative “Edge Computing“ platform, we proposed an web application that would allow disabled passengers to book travel, require assistance, order food and plan their onward journeys form the train. Our aim was to empower these passengers to make more spontaneous journeys, as the current methods hampered their ability to do this and usually resulted in bad journey experiences and ultimately fewer trips overall. We called our solution Platform C 3/4  to reflect the how our service would serve as a portal to a magical train experience for disabled customers (C).  With our idea and plans finally decided, we proceeded to work on building a prototype and prepare our final pitch. Even though we only went to bed quite late into the night, we were satisfied with what we had been able to achieve.

The next morning, we headed back down to London, to the next hacking space. This trip was much better, as most teams managed to get table seats so they could work on the train.  We spent the afternoon at the ORM offices and continued working till evening, when we set off for the final hacking space in Cambridge, the St John’s Innovation Centre. We nearly lost some members in the chaos of the Saturday crowds and were delayed for a while due to this. However, we finally made it to Cambridge safe and sound in the evening, quickly set up and got to coding our prototypes. Each team had a mock ‘dragons den’-style presentation where we pitched our solutions to the HackTrain team and mentors, who acted as the dragons. This session proved very useful and provided very constructive feedback on our pitches in terms of delivery, content and challenge focus.  We spent the entire night incorporating this feedback as well as working on our prototype. It wasn’t all work and no play though, as the teams took turns to take part in a Mario kart competition, which turned out to be as competitive as the hackathon itself.

A bit of Mario Kart

Our final trip came the next morning, where we joined up with participants from the European train back at the Fujitsu offices in London, which was to host the finale of the hackathon. Despite most people staying up the whole night, the energy was amazing, even as teams rushed to make last minute fixes to their codebase and submit their work to beat the submission deadlines. At about two o’clock, the final pitches began. Teams were given four minutes to present their work and the grilled with questions from the judging panel. A lot of innovative solutions were presented and every team had a working demo to show. At the end of the day, even though my team did not place in the top 3 overall, we were able to nab the top spot for the best solution around South Western Railway’s customer experience challenge and came away with cool prizes. Not bad for a weekend of work J .

Final Pitches

All in all, it was a great experience that gave me a lot of insight into the issues, priorities and future direction of the rail industry. It was also a good opportunity to sharpen my skills in idea generation and prototype development through its agile design sprint-like process. Finally, I made lots of new friends and industry contacts that would be valuables resources in my future projects.

You can find more information about future HackTrain events by following them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TheHackTrain.

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Summer Scientist

Each year children and parents are invited to visit the University and play lots of free and fun games that help us with research. This past summer, Wendy Olphert (2015 cohort) enjoyed assisting in one of the activities at Summer Scientist 2018:

A bit of brainwave! –Wendy Olphert

I’m researching the role that digital technologies (such as mobile phones and the internet) play in the lives of people with a brain tumour – whether their symptoms create challenges for technology use, and whether using technologies can contribute to improving their quality of life.

At one level, this is quite an easy idea to communicate to people outside of an academic context – we readily understand that if we have a problem with our brain it could affect our ability to think or act – but to appreciate the range of impacts that a brain tumour could have on an individual’s life requires an awareness of what our brains do and how they work.  The brain is such a complex organ that scientists are still researching these questions.  But we already know a lot, and as I recently found out, even for young children it can be fun as well as instructive to learn about how brains work!

Over the summer I had a chance to assist in an event called Summer Scientist 2018.

This is a week-long programme run by the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in the school vacation that has now run for several years.  Families are invited to bring their children (aged 4-11) to spend half a day at the University to play lots of free fun games and optionally to take part in some research activities – that were also designed to be fun and engaging. By taking part, children (and parents) get to learn about how the mind and brain work by experiencing real science first-hand.

University of Nottingham Psychology Science week. Photos by Alex WIlkinson of Alex Wilkinson Photography.

I was given responsibility for an activity on the theme of electroencephalography – how dull does that sound for young kids?!  But the organisers had found a clever and entertaining way to demonstrate the fact that the brain generates electrical impulses, using a special headset with a pair of furry (fake!) cat’s ears attached (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurowear). The headset picks up electrical activity from the brain which in turn moves the ears depending on your state of mind. When you are relaxed, the ears droop; when you are interested, the ears are alert – and when you are ‘in the zone’ the ears wiggle.  The kids had free choice over the activities they chose to take part in, and most were fascinated by the wiggly ‘cats ears’ and keen to try them out for themselves.

The children attending had a free choice over the activities they opted to do, and during the course of the two sessions in the day around 40 children of different ages came to the stand to try out the ears and, by doing so, learned about electrical impulses in the brain.  There was a mirror to look in; once I’d attached their headset, some found out that the more they giggled at their reflection the more the ears wiggled (and the more the ears wiggled, the more they laughed!) Others, especially one little boy of about 6, spent many minutes silently trying out different ‘brain activities’ such as thinking about exciting times such as parties, being calm, or trying to count backwards from 20, and clearly being intrigued to see the effects of his ‘brainwaves’ on the ears’ movement.

For the older children, and in some cases their parents, I explained how scientists can use the electrical impulses in the brain to find out more about how it works and what is happening when the brain is not working as it should – and that in turn gave me a chance to tell some of them about the research that I am doing.

I really enjoyed the day and it was clear that the kids had a great time too, as well as picking up lots of science along the way.  I felt that the whole concept of ‘Summer Scientist’ week really was a bit of a brainwave!

 

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My way to PhD thesis submission

Tatiana Styliari (2014 Cohort) has started a new Medium blog. She is currently in the thesis write-up stage (almost there!) and wants to share her experiences and offer tips & hacks to survive a PhD. She has also started an Instagram account where she will be sharing updates, so give her a follow!

“Is this a good subject to start my Medium account? Who knows! What this article aims to do is firstly, to actually help me organise my thoughts and get whatever is on my mind out there and secondly to inform fellow PhD sufferers on their way of planning their thesis submission!”

Read more of Tatiana’s post here.

 

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Call for Participants: Interviews on business-orientated rail travel experiences in the digital age

PhD researcher Christian Tamakloe (2016 Cohort) is currently recruiting participants to take part in an interview-based study.

What is it for?

The study forms part of a PhD project to explore how data from digital self-tracking technologies (such as smartphones and wearables e.g. Fitbits) can be used to better understand how and why business rail passengers use and value their time while travelling, as well as how this influences their travel behavior. Insights from the project will be used to power novel tools/ apps and services that will enable passengers to plan their rail trips around their preferred time use, improving their overall journey experience.

Who can take part?

This study is open to individuals who undertake work-related journeys via train fairly often. This could be at least two short/medium-distance (1.5 – 3 hours , cross-regional/national ) trips a month, during business hours for work purposes (e.g. attending conferences/trade fairs, internal/external meetings, visiting clients/suppliers/partners, etc.) or long-distance commutes (typically around 2 hours).

What does it involve?

Interview questions will revolve around preparations for journeys, activities engage d in at different stages and places of the journey, devices used and any strategies /hacks relied on to make the most of the time spent travelling.

The interview itself will last no longer than an hour and participants will be compensated for their time with £15 Amazon vouchers.

The study has been approved by the University of Nottingham Faculty of Engineering Ethics committee and all data will be recorded anonymously and used strictly for research purposes only. Participants are free to withdraw at any time during the interview .

What next?

Your involvement will help discover how to improve the rail journey experience. If you are interested in taking part in the study or would just like to know more about the research please leave your contact details at http://bit.ly/InterviewMe2 and/or send an email to Christian via Christian.Tamakloe@nottingham.ac.uk

 

 

Thank you!

Check out Christian’s Research Highlights here: https://highlights.cdt.horizon.ac.uk/students/psxckta