Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MSCA FIRE (MSCA FIRE: Fellows with Industrial Research Enhancement)
Teaser
MSCA FIRE brings together 2 established centres of excellence in doctoral training and research to enhance interdisciplinarity, and increase inter-sectoral engagement and internationality. This approach provides the fellows with a very large group of peers undertaking doctoral...
Summary
MSCA FIRE brings together 2 established centres of excellence in doctoral training and research to enhance interdisciplinarity, and increase inter-sectoral engagement and internationality. This approach provides the fellows with a very large group of peers undertaking doctoral degrees across a range of research disciplines. Research topics range from replacements for oil-based plastics, through research into healthcare technologies such as sensors for monitoring water or managing disease, to the use of advanced motion capture research and machine learning. This research is focused developing new technologies to improve the quality of life of citizens in a sustainable manner.
The objectives of the MSCA FIRE programme are to:
1. offer the Fellows the benefits of 2 established national Doctoral Training Centres, as they expand their international partnerships and company placement activities;
2. bring Fellows the benefits of the cross-sectoral reach of both Centres, especially with vibrant industries;
3. enhance interdisciplinarity and experience sharing across the Centres, with common added-value training practices beyond their specialised research area, for the benefit of all their researchers; and
4. to use these synergies to fire-up the fellows to become autonomous, creative, highly-skilled and fully ready for careers in international industries.
Work performed
MSCA FIRE will output well developed researchers able to work across discipline boundaries and national borders: global scientific citizens with the confidence and tools to work anywhere and the knowledge to make a difference through excellent research outputs.
A full complement of 20 fellows (13 countries, 50:50 male:female) are registered for PhDs. Research projects have industrial partners and, to date (2/5 years), 5 journal papers have been published and 25 conference presentations made. The interaction with partners has been particularly beneficial as illustrated by 2 examples:
1. Chemicals from biowaste
Vicky de Groof works with Geneco/Wessex Water researching the use of anaerobic mixed cultures for bio-waste valorization. She accesses samples from wastewater plants and Geneco can implement such technologies. Early results from this project have been presented: V. De Groof, et al., Food waste as substrate to obtain two different enriched microbiomes for model development, 5th YWP Benelux Conference 2017, Ghent, Belgium.
2. An interactive sketch-based modelling platform
Thu Nguyen Phuoc works with Lambda Labs (LL), a company that specializes in deep learning solutions. She spent October at LL in Palo Alto, US to further develop a solution for robust 3D reconstruction from images and hand-drawn sketches - useful in developing virtual/augmented reality products. Working with industry provides access to further computational infrastructure, greatly improving the algorithm development and testing process. Thu is working with LL to prepare a submission for the European Conference on Computer Vision, March 2018.
Fellows participate in a wide range of “engagement activitiesâ€. These include the development of complementary skills, public engagement and community building via events open to external participants. Complementary skills development is enabled by formal training courses and opportunities to engage the public at science festivals.
Fellows lead the following:
i. Inclusiveness & Community Building
ii. Public Engagement
iii. Entrepreneurship & Business Skills
By giving fellows responsibility for these portfolios, they engage, develop new skills, and bring their own ideas and innovation to bear. This, in turn, encourages broader participation with many events held with the much larger groups of Doctoral candidates associated with CSCT and CDE (>120) and beyond.
Final results
\"As much of this research is targeted at developing technologies that directly enhance citizens’ quality of life, the impacts on society are deemed to be very important - 5 highlights:
1. Rapid on-site colourimetric determination of drinking water safety in the developing world
Molecules that change colour upon binding of fluoride ions are being developed for use in sensors to detect high fluoride levels in drinking water, which can result in the crippling bone disease, skeletal fluorosis. Working with the Nasio Trust, Carlos Lopez, will test his sensor molecules in E Africa. This research has been published (10.1039/C7CC07416F) and received much press attention.
• www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/2017/11/13/fluoride-water-test/
• www.reuters.tv/v/AdV/2017/11/22/simple-water-test-could-prevent-crippling-bone-disease
2. Investigation of human cognition towards building accessible and usable sensory substitution devices
Tayfun Esenkaya works on developing assistive sensory substitution technologies. There are approximately 253m people living with vision impairment (WHO data) and sensory substitution devices can provide cheap, non-invasive novel technologies to allow the visually impaired users have access to visual cues. Tayfun has published 2 papers, presented at conferences and been part of many outreach events to spread awareness for visual impairments and assistive technologies.
3. Organoid expansion bioreactor development - a way to make miniature organs for testing how effective drugs are without using animals
Jessica Pinheiro de Lucena-Thomas works with Cellesce, on ways to produce human “organoids†in quantities and quality suitable for use in testing of drugs. Organoids are 3D structures that mimic tissue structure and tumour heterogeneity: “miniature organs†that are grown outside of the body in the lab - the research is to design a bioreactor to produce these at the scales required for widespread use in drug development.
4. A system for semantic imagery data exploration using generative models
Yassir Saquil is developing a system which enables the user to perform a custom browsing of imagery data by interactively defining high level semantic attributes. The aim is to define rules and semantic criteria implicitly from the user interaction with the system and propose a personalized ordering and preference of the data. The knowledge gained can lead to new research focused on studying the interaction between the user and data under the flag of the machine learning and human-computer interaction domains. An output of this research has been submitted to top conference Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition 2018.
5. Participating in ITWIIN – meeting inspiring, brilliant women inventors & innovators
MSCA Fellow, Isabella Poli, was selected as a finalist in The Italian Association of Women Inventors and Innovators (ITWIIN) prize 2017. Isabella attended the ITWIIN 2-day annual conference in Turin and presented her invention to a jury. She was one of the youngest participants and received an honourable mention from the jury for the sustainability aspect of her innovation (10.1039/C7TA06735F). In her own words “I didn\'t win as best inventor nor best innovator, as my competitors were great … with great medical inventions like regeneration of the heart or bones! It was so inspiring to spend two days with all these superwomen\"\".
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Website & more info
More info: http://bath.ac.uk/csct/people/msca-fire.