New £1 billion strategy for UK's semiconductor sector

Many thanks to John Goodacre who has played a key role in developing the Government’s 20-year, £1 billion strategy for the UK's semiconductor sector that was announced on May 19th. The strategy sets out how government investment will boost the UK’s strengths and skills in design, R&D and compound semiconductors, while helping to grow domestic chip firms across the UK. Working in tandem with industry, investment made by the government will drive research, innovation and commercialisation through the sector. You can read the full report here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-semiconductor-strategy

MPs call for research sector reforms to address concerns with reproducibility of science

Staying on the topic of government strategy and policy, on May 10th the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee produced a report focusing on issues around openness, transparency, and reproducibility in scientific research. Carole Goble, Caroline Jay, and I all provided written evidence to the Committee and it was good to see a number of our suggestions make it into the final set of recommendations. You can read the full report here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmsctech/101/report.html

Key recommendations include:

• Reproducibility as a condition of grants awarded for empirical research
• Review the Research Excellence Framework assessment criteria to assure that transparency is a prerequisite of top-scoring research
• Require, outside exceptional circumstances, the deposition of research data and code in open-access repositories alongside the publication of research outputs
• Dedicated funding for the presence of statistical experts and software developers in research teams

Welcome to our new DKOF appointment - Hongpeng Zhou - who joined the department at the beginning of May

Hi everyone, my name is Hongpeng Zhou, a new Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellow in our department. I was a postdoc at UoM and finished my PhD at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. My research project is on "AI for cancer research - Interpretable machine learning to uncover biological mechanisms". My research interests include machine learning, deep learning, Bayesian learning, interpretable learning and bioinformatics. Please feel welcome to visit me in my office at G20 whenever you have the time. I'm always open for a chat. Please find more info about me at https://www.hongpengzhou.com/.

Dear All - please could you let us know if you can come to the summer social on the 19th July - we need an idea of numbers for catering purposes.  And we would also welcome offers to help support the event on the day - many hands make light work!  Just complete the short form here 

Many thanks

The CSOps team

Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation Showcase

Support for adoption of digital technologies like supercomputing, data analytics, AI and quantum computing.

Date and time: Tue, 6 Jun 2023 12:00 - 17:00 

Location: Kanaris Lecture Theatre, Manchester Museum Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL

Digital Futures at the University of Manchester (UoM) and The Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation are hosting a showcase for businesses to explore their support and resources available to help adopt digital technologies.

The Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation is a collaborative programme with IBM which will enable businesses to acquire the skills, knowledge and technical capability required to adopt digital technologies like supercomputing, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing.

HNCDI provides a safe and supportive environment for organisations to explore the latest digital technologies and skills, develop proofs-of-concept and apply them to industry and public sector challenges. The dynamic and collaborative approach is driven by industry requirements and will help organisations to de-risk investment in new and emerging digital technologies.

Who ​is it for?

This is for organisations and individuals with an appetite for change, who are ready to innovate and create useful solutions, enhance and adapt products and processes, adopt new digital technologies and expand into new markets. Whatever the size of your business or organisation we have an established track record working with industry, from start-ups and SMEs to large corporates, and public sector organisations such as NHS Trusts and local government.

​Whether you’re at the start of your digital journey or trying to advance to the next level, we can help you navigate the possibilities of AI and quantum computing technologies to discover the next step for your organisation. 

Find out more and register here

Institute for Data Science and AI’s annual Advances in Data Science and AI Conference

Following on from the success of ADSAI 2022, this year’s Institute for Data Science and AI’s annual Advances in Data Science and AI Conference, a Digital Futures activity, will take place at the Alliance Manchester Business School in Manchester on 13 June.

The Advances in Data Science and AI (ADSAI) Conference is Manchester’s annual data science and AI conference and brings together researchers from across the broad fields within data science and artificial intelligence to explore the latest advances and to discuss important topical questions being posed by society around the use of data science and AI.

This year we will be discussing the following topics:

• Digital Twins
• Human-Data Interaction
• AI for games
• Natural Language Processing

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr Matthew Thomas, Lecturer in Data Science and Analytics at the University of Manchester.
• Professor Mark Girolami, Chief Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute.
• Tim Pearce, Artificial Intelligence Researcher at Microsoft Research.
• Matt Benetan, Research Scientist in Machine Learning and AI at Sonos.
• Professor Ewa Luger, Director of Research Innovation at The University of Edinburgh.
• Dr Maria Aretoulaki, Head of Voice & Conversational AI at GlobalLogic/Hitachi.
• Professor Andreas Vlachos, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge.

To join us and take part in these key discussions, please book your place now.

The next DSE Awareness session will take place on Tuesday the 20th of June at 14:00, link below.

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTY0ZDg4NDAtN2JiZi00Nzc4LTg4MjItYWJmMjAzYTA5YTI3%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%220c031bb6-ea60-481a-9d6c-b9ea1fa10467%22%7d