This happened
My first contribution to the Manchester Science Festival is this amazing screening of Back to the Future 2, a trilogy that was certainly defining of my teenage years. I'm so excited to have been able to produce this with #MSF15 and that Gorilla in Manchester is screening. Here is my presentation from the night.
As part of the Digital R&D for the Arts funding stream overseen by Nesta, they put together a programme of presentations as a final showcase. I was asked by their new Director for Digital, Tim Plyming, to make a contribution to the final session of the day, looking at future directions. It was a really fun panel with Freya Murray, Director, Stamp House; Anthony Lilley OBE, Interim CEO and Creative Director, The Space and CEO, Magic Lantern Productions; David Watson, Head of Digital, Hull UK City of Culture 2017.
As part of my involvement with the amazing 2020 Health project, I was asked to take part in a Conservative Party fringe event, exmaining how digital technologies can transform the health care system. It was a pretty far reaching discussion and my central concern was around data ownership, mobility, and expansion. More to come on that.
Chaired by: Dame Helena Shovelton DBE, Chair, 2020health
With guest speakers:
Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair, Science & Technology Select Committee (Invited)
Paul Burstow, Independent Health Consultant
Dr David Lee, Medical Director, Computer Sciences Corporation
Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
Talk today for Salford University CPD conference.
This week, I received a report from Lord Haskell, detailing the House of Lords debate of 8th September, in which he kindly mentioned my work on drones. This is an important citation for Project Daedalus and great to have made a link there for NESTA. Here's the report, crucial reading for all UAV/drone users. Our online toolkit is also online now! Here's a link to get started on learning about drones.
AND festival went to Grizedale forest this year, a return after 5 years. We delivered a number of drone activities over the weekend, including a networking event for drone enthusiasts and some flying experiences for beginners and experts. We were incredibly lucky with the weather and had some great people come along and learn.
I have spent the last week in Chernobyl with my Salford colleagues Dr Mike Wood and Professor Nick Beresford, as part of a programme funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. The week was spent visiting key sites around the Nuclear Reactor, including the reactor itself, along with doing some fieldwork. I have been working with Mike and Nick on a project called 'Alienated Life?' which is an artistic installation for Manchester Science Festival. I spent a lot of my time there producing films for the install and documenting what took place over the week. Films to follow.
This is the first of a series of short films about colleagues in ELS I am making, profiling their research and sharing a bit about their lives. I'm delighted to have worked with Prof Rob Young to track this enigmatic creature. We got a lot more than we expected, even a mother carrying its young. Hope you enjoy the footage.
On the recommendation of one of our PhD students, I spent some time at the Pousada Uacari, which is connected with the Mamiraua Institute, an organizational set up in the 1980s to conserve an area of the Amazon that was under threat from logging and fishing companies. A number of the region's wildlife were affected negatively by this, notably the Uacari, a primate that was near extinction until this programme began.
Thirty years later and the Uacari is thriving again and the local communities have both ownership of the fishing industry and the capacity to feed and grow their populations. The focus of the research here remains the conservation of the natural habitat but there is so much more that they do, including health and education programmes.
The idea of conservation has defined a lot of this trip for me and I have thought a lot about how that concept may have evolved since its rise in prominence in scientific disciplines in the 1970s. It emerged clearly out of a range of disciplines and is intimately connected to the rise of wider environmentalism which defined that period.
Many of the techniques used to underage conservation research are quite primitive, involving experimentation with mimicking conditions in the wild so as to understand whether it is possible to use captive breeding or growing as as step towards a more natural repopulation.
In this sense, science and technology are servants to nature, their aim s imitation not displacement. Alternatively, science is used to measure and monitor, with a view to establishing things like fishing quotas or simply an understanding of how populations are being affected by human behaviour.
The question I leave here with though has to do with that concept of conservation and how compatible it is with population growth and how much it may have changed over the last 40 years. This seems a nice starting point for a new line of inquiry for me which resonates with the aspirations biotechnologists have for nature. There seems something on obviously incompatible about the two approaches, but reaching this conclusion depends heavily on where one ends up with the definition and meanings of the word conservation.
This month, I am out in Brazil for a few things, one of which is to work with Professor Robert Young to track and document the Giant Anteater. I'm currently working on a film about this, but it's my first time out in the field with a colleague from Salford, figuring out what they do and getting an insight into their research. All of this is enriching my skills as a film maker, but also as a theorist interested in biotechnological and environmental change. I'm hoping part of what I learn at Salford will inform my theories on posthuman evolution, drawing particularly on an understanding of biological precedents for species adaptation and change. It is one of the main reasons I took the role at Salford. I tell people that I spent the first decade of my career with humans and I want the next decade to be with non-humans. It's not quite as clear cut as this, but certainly a lot of what I have been arguing about posthumanism over the last ten years has led me much closer towards non-human species to understand how we might think about our own biological possibilities, but also the implications on disrupting. species categories through technology.
This week, Rio marked the 1 year to go anniversary before the opening of the Olympic Games. I always try to get to an Olympic city ahead of the event and spent my time here attending the official press conference of the organizers in the morning, and the civic protest in the afternoon. Here's what the latter looked like. It was a small group and very peaceful. It was also not focused only on the Olympics, but instead a range of groups were present, all of whom have complaints that may be tied to the wider changes around the city.
A quick interview with Mind the Film productions for Project Daedalus
This week, i was in my home city of Norwich for 'BIG' the STEM communicators Network, at which I received their Josh Award for science communication. The Josh Award is so named after Josh Philips, the first science communicator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. You can read a bit more about Josh here. I had a chance to talk to his dad while in Norwich, which was really lovely. It was fantastic to be among such wonderful communicators and it was really humbling to see the range of talented people who are making a career out of professional science communicators.
This award comes at a wonderful time for me, as I find myself doing a lot more production, commissioning, and staging of science communication activities. During the event, I attended a session for freelancers, to understand what they need and what they are going through. it was led by my friend Greg Foot who has to be one of the best examples out there for this kind of work.
I'm really over the moon to have received this award. My first forays into science communication were when I was a PhD student and decided I needed to start building websites to communicate my research. I remember hearing that the average academic article is read 6 times and felt there was a lot more we need to do to get our work out there. Since then, I have made public communication, engagement, and involvement, a core part of my own research discovery process. From working with film makers on productions, to developing concepts around theatrical shows, to giving talks at festivals and speaking/writing for the media, communication is core to what I have tried to do as an academic.
My new role at University of Salford, along with the wonderful relationships I am developing around Manchester with the likes of MOSI's Sally McDonald, Natalie Ireland, and Marieke Navin, along with long standing relationships with other creative people in the city, it feels like this year is really going to be a fantastic time for me to have this award and, I hope, make a contribution to the prospects of other science communicators.
The major thing for me will be the Salford Science Jam, a weekend of science activity taking place at our university building in Media City. Keep the 24-25 October free to come to Manchester!!
This week, I was privileged to speak at the University of Salford's London meet up. It was a unique event for me and incredibly humbling to see and speak to so many remarkable people who have come through the university, including a Lord who was involved with writing the House of Lords report on drones - the subject of my talk! It was a great way to conclude an extraordinary first academic year at the university.
University of Salford 087e1
On 22nd July, Project Daedalus set up an exhibition space to launch our new toolkit for drone artists. Here's a bit of a glimpse into what took place.
This week, I took part in a Battle of Ideas debate at the UK Space Conference in Liverpool exploring the Internet of Things and its transformative potential. It was a pretty far reaching debate, but my main argument focused on the need to step back and imagine a world where the IoT is not imagined as something in the service of humanity, but something which may serve a wider notion of ecosystem well being. This doesn't mean ignoring the desires and needs of humans, but instead trying to come to terms with what might be afforded by this technology if we adopted a wider perspective. I went on to advocate the need to think about an 'Interstellarnet of Things', which takes us beyond the confines of our planet in imagining the potential of this technology, along with the importance of thinking about some of the consequences of artificial general intelligence and the possibility that objects becoming sentient. In this regard, the idea of an Internet of Things at all misses the point - they will not be things, but beings, entities which may have a certain moral status by virtue of its capacity for volition or self-actualization.
Finally, I talked about the importance of the open data initiative and the need to overhaul some of the conventions operating around digital platforms which restrict our freedom to roam by precluding us from exporting our data into some universal language.
2015.07-UKSpaceConf
My first #SciFoo (Science Friends Of O'Reilly Media) event just came to a close and it was a marathon of crazy conversations with people doing remarkable things in science, art, and technology. Some of my highlights were a conversation with a paleontologist about using a probablistic approach to explaining why mammoths became extinct, chatting with the Pope's astronomer, and running two sessions in the programme, one on Drones, the other on Google Glass. Here's a glimpse from start to finish...
#Scifoo about to kick off here at @google in Mountain view! Excited! @makingscience@TechMoonshotspic.twitter.com/qKxLcHRQ3N
— Georgia Dienst (@georgiadienst) June 26, 2015
at the Google holodeck for #scifoopic.twitter.com/MgieukSU1s — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
googling #scifoo (@ Googleplex - @google in Mountain View, CA) https://t.co/drwfXkOuh5pic.twitter.com/HJIU981h4g
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
Google's driverless car shown at #scifoopic.twitter.com/fpqzbxNgJ6 — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 27, 2015
check out this 360 filming @GoPro rig at Googleplex #scifoopic.twitter.com/YXzpm4aRfU
— Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
Google glass session. main room at tent, in 5. #scifoopic.twitter.com/xIzzHk1kBY — Professor Andy Miah (@andymiah) June 28, 2015
A couple of weeks ago, I attended #SheffDocFest invited by The Wellcome Trust through their curator of the Ideas and Science stream Erinma Ochu. It was a fantastic experience, which came at just the right time for me, as I embark onto more documentary film making with colleagues in Salford. One of the main appeals for being at Salford was to work with environmental and life scientists, whose reseaerch is with non-human species. By working with them, I hope to enrich my theories around posthumanism and biotechnological change. However, the element of the #SheffDocFest that was most helpful to me was around the overlap between journalism and the art of documentary. Some argue that journalism has lost its capacity for in-depth investigative work and that the art of documentary making is providing a space for more creative, groundbreaking journalism to emerge. The few pieces I saw in Sheffield really hit home these possibilities.
The first film I saw was The Nine Muses, which was a lovely way of being exposed to artistic film making, which could be underpinned by a scientific narrative.
Next, I hopped over to a panel debate called Final Frontiers 101, which had the amazing Robin Ince with Alice Bell and David Kirby from Manchester. It was part of the Wellcome programme and focused on a discussion about how science and film makers work together to develop stories that are factually accurate, but also entertaining.
Next up was a mock commissioning session, whereby a panel sat through a process of imagining how a work gets commissioned, covering the stages of production from idea to screening. It was a great insight into the commissioning process, the range of people involved, the financial negotiations around release territories, and the sheer fragility of the whole process!
After this, I had a chance to pop into one of the commissioning panels, focused on factual entertainment. It was a lovely glimpse into a crucial overlap that academics need to figure out - how to make their science entertaining.
Before 6pm, I also managed to pop in to Site Gallery, which had a VR exhibition, exploring how film can be created for such devices. It was a quite eery space, with people wearing headsets standing in silence, moving around slowly. The content within the devices was the best I have seen and the potential of platforms like Oculus Rift are really creating possibilities to realise film in a way that could only be imagined back when VR first took off in the 1980s.
I was then able to briefly pop along to a Film Londond drinks reception, before heading over to see 'Spectres of the Shoah', which, stylistically, made me think about how much you can do with a simple interview style documentary, bringing in archival images and footage to re-create a story from years ago. It was simply beautiful and breathtaking and a wonderful experience to hear about. Below is a photo of the director with Nick Fraser, who has been helping to push the film to new audiences.
The final event of my night was the amazing story of Greenpeace, in the film 'How to Change the World'. As someone who believes we should all have the capacity to enjoy this aspiration, it was a wonderful way of reconnecting with the possibilities of environmental activism and how central image making is in the process of making change happen. The founding members of Greenpeace, particularly one of its founders Bob Hunter, for me, wonderfully encapsulated what we need to do to make change happen. Bob had the skills of a journalist, the insights of a scientist, and the energy of an activist. Despite Greenpeace's complicated early life, this film is a great starting point for changing the world.
Overall, the SheffDocFest was an amazing day - oh yes, I did all this in just one day 12pm-10pm. So grateful to have been there at this time, where film making is becoming a bigger part of my life. Congratulations to the Wellcome Trust for putting themselves into a new space, bringing science to film and film to science. Another big thumbs up for this amazing organization.
ps. can I have some money to make an epic documentary in Brazil next year with the amazing Professor Robert Young
Video essay, from my talk at #YorkFoi York's Festival of Ideas.
This week, I took part in a panel at the Cheltenham Science Festival focused on the use of drones in every day life. I talked a lot about Project Daedalus and some new innovations, particularly high authority autonomous systems - essentially completely intelligent drones - while Gerry Corbert from the Civil Aviation Authority gave a run down of the rules and regulations surrounding application. He was quick to point out that the guidelines that surround UAVs were never designed for the very small UAVs which can now be picked up in toy stores or even the Apple store, but there were some key issues that seem unresolved. One of them relates to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkZ4FONiiw
This example of a form of augmented reality glasses being used to give FPV perspective of the drone's camera is provocative because the CAA guidelines stipulate that flying with FPV goggles is actually not legal, since the pilot must always have visual line of sight (VLOS). However, these glasses offer transparency which permits VLOS, while locating the drone's camera feed within the glasses as well. So the question is, 'is this legal?'
This seems one of the future directions around the use of augmented reality devices with drones, making even more complicated the way in which the rules operate.
