This happened
Salford University's Creative Entrepreneur event has become a huge success, with over 400 delegates registered over 1 day. I took part in a panel this year focused on Sport Business 2.0, at which I spoke about the game development community around sports and the growing mobile health market.
Over the last year, I've been working with Dr Mike Wood and Prof Nick Beresford on a NERC funded public engagement project, examining life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 30 years later. As part of this, I was in Chernobyl this semester making films about the research consortium behind the work.
This week, the team had a meeting near Oxford at which the films were launched. You can find a play list of them all here, or simply scroll through to see what we did.
This week, I was due to take part in an event in Paris, which was all about how to make cities places of greater intercultural connectedness. However, on Friday, the terrorist attacks in Paris led to my event being cancelled.
For a while, the organizers and the ministry felt that we would go ahead, but the severity of the attacks, coupled with the 3 days of mourning announced by President Hollande led, finally, to it being postponed until the spring. We were only told about this less than 24 hours before I was due to take my flight and, along with other participants and organizers, I felt I still strongly wanted to go. So I did. The event was still cancelled, nobody met, but I wanted to go.
I wanted to go because to not go would have seemed to give in to the terrorists, to accept their disruption to our lives, and to even cease to go about our business for fear of further incidents. To me, it also seemed like the most important time to visit Paris, to show support.
Arriving on the Monday, the city was mostly quietly going about its business. The key sites of the attacks were full of citizens paying their respects, and the media with 24 hour coverage of what was going on. Away from these locations, people were getting on with their Monday, so that's what I did.
I met a wonderful, intelligent French Professor, Bertrand Pullan, with whom I was due to have a conversation within the conference about cities, events, and social change. Instead, we had a lovely lunch in a restaurant he has been visiting for 30 years. We found more common ground in our pursuits, research interests, and way of life than I could ever imagined. His interests were as far reaching as mine and we have led similar lives through academia, good lives. It was a most wonderfully, typical trip to Paris, one of many I have enjoyed over the years.
Strangely enough, I happened to be in Paris on 9/11; I had forgotten about that. It seems I am destined to be with this city in tough times. I'm fine with that. It is a place that shines through all weathers.
Appearance on Sky News talking about the doping debate, in the wake of findings that prevalence is much higher than was previously thought.
It's not every day that you have a meeting with the good and the great in Manchester within a ball pool, but this was that day. Organized by Siemens and the Museum of Science and Industry, a select number of Manchester leaders were brought together to consider how to address the low levels of productivity within the North West.
It was a first step in re-thinking how we collaborate, inspire, and stimuate the economy of the region, at a crucial time in Manchester's history. Ahead of the European City of Science and the Northern Powerhouse debates, this was a fantastic and inspiring conversation which was made all the more remarkable by it taking place in an adult ball pool!
Another big delivery for me within the Manchester Science Festival was the Drone Expo at the Museum of Science and Industry, which took place over the opening weekend of the festival. It was produced in association with my Josh Award for Science Communication and we created a large flying space at MOSI with professional pilots and STEM volunteers to show the public what's happening with this amazing techology.
Well, this is the night when it all comes together, the preview of our Science Jam, our main delivery weekend within Manchester Science Festival. Over the last year, I have been curating a programme of work in the festival as Salford University's contribution. For many of the activities, I've also had some creative oversight and provided direction to some of the amazing people around the projects.
It has been an amazing and exhausting journey to get to this point, but the evening was a great success, with previews of the Royal Photographic Society science prize, the Chernobyl installation, Alienated Life?, and our co-commission exporing electricity and art, Kinetic Flux, produced with artists Paul Miller and Griet Beyaert, along with some science busking and a premiere of a new documentary science film called Traces.
There was so much over this weekend, I'm not sure how to showcase it, but here's a snapshot.
Professor Judith Smith, parasitologist,
Dean of the School of Environment and Life Sciences, University of Salford, Manchester
Marieke Navin, physicist and science communicator
Director of Manchester Science Festival
Dr Delphine Ryan, engineer
Ministry of Defence
Gunes Taylor, biologist
University of Oxford
We held the event at the newly opened University Technical College at Media City, in their amazing tv studio, filmed by students. It was a fantastic, wide ranging debate and we'll follow it up with some key statements. The event was produced with the support of the amazing Dr Gary Kerr.
Opening at the National Football Museum this week is a new exhibition I was involved with producing, through my relationship with the museum's artistic director, John O'Shea.
I have worked with John for many years now and he has done amazing work in bioart and new media art. He has brought together an extraordinary exhibition of the last 40 years of football computer games to show how much gaming has evolved and how close art and life now come together.
The exhibition is on until June, so plenty of time to see it. It's worth spending a whole day at least, just to experience the different kinds of game interfaces and appreciate how they have changed over the years.
In advance of #futureday, I worked with Guardian journalist Joanna Goodman to produce a piece that would come out on the day. It was a fantastic chance to talk about how close the film came to realising our world as it is today. Here's the final article - it got the most views on the Guardian for that day and Joanna even came up to Manchester for our sell-out screening.
My slides from the 7th International Olympic Committee Athletes' Forum, which focused on the use of media to empower and enable people. Also, here is the programme from the event.
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.
