̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Department of Engineering

Sir James Dyson opens invention powerhouse at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

ts657 — Mon, 09 May 2016 08:36:11 +0000

Sir James Dyson opens some of the world’s most advanced engineering facilities at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge today – giving the institution’s students and academics the space and means to prototype, invent and collaborate on cutting-edge research.

̽��ֱ��development has been funded by a £8m donation from the James Dyson Foundation – the largest gift ever received by Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, consistently ranked among the best engineering departments globally.

̽��ֱ��Dyson Centre for Engineering Design is the focal point for teaching Cambridge students about the design process, providing specialised printing machinery, scanners, lasers and routers. It provides space for over 1,200 bright engineers to conduct their project work. An open plan design encourages the sharing of ideas and a collaborative environment. Student led projects housed within the centre include solar powered electric racing cars, vehicles engineered for arctic ice, quad-rotor drones and helium balloon spaceflight systems.

A separate new four-storey building, the James Dyson Building for Engineering, houses postgraduate researchers and supports world leading research in areas including advanced materials, smart infrastructure, electric vehicles and efficient internal combustion systems. A bridge link offers easy access to testing laboratories housing world-class fluid dynamics machinery, aerodynamics equipment and areas for aeroacoustics analysis.

̽��ֱ��building itself is as smart as the minds it houses: fibre-optic sensors in the foundation piles, concrete columns and floor sections offer live data, about temperatures and strain – providing a picture of how the building is behaving. ̽��ֱ��result is a building that’s more of a living creature than a passive block of material.

Research undertaken in the hub will build on a rich tradition of invention: Cambridge alumni include internal combustion pioneer Harry Ricardo and Jet engine inventor Frank Whittle.

̽��ֱ��Department is located at the heart of the Cambridge cluster, Europe's largest technology cluster, which employs around 57,000 people in more than 1,500 technology-based firms, which have combined annual revenue of over £13 billion. Cambridge has created over 1,500 spin-out companies over the last decade, with a 97.4% five year survival rate, compared to 44.6% nationally.

Sir James said: “Developing the intellectual property that will help Britain succeed in the global technology race depends on applying our brightest minds to ambitious and exciting research projects. I’m hopeful that this new space for Britain’s best engineers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will catalyse great technological breakthroughs that transform how we live”.

Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “ ̽��ֱ��research taking place in this building exists at the very cutting edge of engineering excellence. Allied to new ideas generated within the Dyson Centre, this will produce not only world-changing discoveries and inventions, but the future generations of engineers the world requires to address the major challenges of the 21st century.”

Head of the Department of Engineering, Professor David Cardwell, said: “Collaboration is at the heart of solving global engineering challenges and the new James Dyson Building brings brilliant researchers from across disciplines together with industrial practitioners to serve our cities, transportation and energy systems with novel techniques.

“ ̽��ֱ��adjoining Dyson Centre for Engineering Design enables students to express their creative talents and test their engineering skills using high-tech and diverse machining and prototyping equipment. Here we will also welcome schoolchildren to see engineers at work and captivate the next generation of competent engineers. An updated and redesigned Engineering Library will guarantee flexible spaces for collaborative as well as silent work spaces for our students and researchers.”

Professor Dame Ann Dowling, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “Academic rigour must meet with practical invention. ̽��ֱ��Dyson Engineering Design Centre and the James Dyson Building for Engineering bridge the gap, encouraging engineers to apply their minds to creatively experiment and try new things.”

Engineering hub focuses on advances including smart infrastructure, electric vehicles and efficient internal combustion systems

I’m hopeful that this new space for Britain’s best engineers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will catalyse great technological breakthroughs that transform how we live.

Sir James Dyson

James Dyson Building Department of Engineering

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Local teenagers bridge the gap to a career in industry

ta385 — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 10:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��'s annual Fenland Engineering Taster Events are hosted by Metalcraft , a cutting-edge manufacturer and major employer in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire.

Metalcraft makes equipment for international clients in energy, medical science and other industries – one of its most high-profile projects was at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Back in Chatteris, the company also offers a traditional engineering apprenticeship, drawing most of its recruits from local schools. The ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has been working with the firm to inspire and encourage students in local schools for several years.

In the first quarter of 2016, ̽��ֱ��Fenland Engineering Taster programme engaged 92 Year-10 students from six schools: Neale Wade Academy (March), Cromwell Community College (Chatteris), Ely College, Witchford Village College, Thomas Clarkson Academy (Wisbech) and Sir Harry Smith Community College (Whittlesey).

̽��ֱ��full-day events comprise a bridge-building challenge overseen by outreach teams from the ̽��ֱ�� and its Engineering Department, followed by a tour around Metalcraft’s workshops with the firm’s Apprentice Coordinator, Neil Kirby.

Participants are asked to build a bridge across a 1m gap using only paper, key rings and steel nuts and bolts. After receiving a crash course in bridge design, each team competes to build the bridge with the highest strength-to-mass ratio. Each team’s bridge is tested to breaking point by hanging cans of food to it.

In late February, it was the turn of eleven students from Thomas Clarkson Academy. Among them, Dylan soon took responsibility for quality control, telling his teammates: “Make sure the paper is rolled tight or it won’t be strong enough”. Across the room, James concluded: “This is much better than double maths”.

Metalcraft’s Neil Kirby comments: “This programme not only introduces Year 10s to engineering basics, it also gets them thinking about what they want to do when they leave school. Metalcraft stays in contact with local schools all year round and it’s great to be working with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� to encourage local teenagers to aim high.”

Matt Diston, Widening Participation Project Coordinator at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� says: “This is one of the really successful aspiration-raising projects run by the ̽��ֱ�� in the region and we are committed to doing even more. Our work isn’t just about inspiring students to apply to top universities, it’s about encouraging all young people to fulfil their potential and pursue a rewarding career path.”

̽��ֱ��Fenland Engineering Taster Events are run as part of the ̽��ֱ��’s Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Schools Outreach Group (CAPSOG).

In 2015, members of the group arranged over 51,000 interactions with students from 134 local primary and secondary schools to give students potentially life-changing educational opportunities.

CAPSOG’s members include the Department of Engineering, the ̽��ֱ��’s eight Museums and Botanic Garden, the Cavendish Laboratory, the Millennium Mathematics Project, St Catharine’s College and several other Offices.

Students from six Fenland schools are taking part in a programme designed to encourage students interested in engineering and manufacturing.

It’s about encouraging all young people to fulfil their potential and pursue a rewarding career path.

Matt Diston, Widening Participation Project Coordinator

Fenland Engineering Taster Event in Chatteris

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��man with the golden brain

bjb42 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:32:24 +0000

̽��ֱ��sea squirt, a type of marine filter feeder, swims around looking for somewhere to settle down for the rest of its life. Once parked on a rock in a suitable spot, it never moves again. So the first thing it does is eat its own brain. While this may seem a little rash to some, for Professor Daniel Wolpert it makes perfect evolutionary sense.

“To me it’s obvious that there’s no point in the brain processing or storing anything if it can’t have benefits for physical movement, because that’s the only way we improve our survival,” says Wolpert. “I believe that to understand movement is to understand the whole brain. Memory, cognition, sensory processing – they are there for a reason, and that reason is action.”

Wolpert is firmly convinced that movement is the underlying factor and final result behind every functional aspect of a brain. “There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood, or perceiving the colour of a rose, if it doesn’t affect the way you’re going to move in later life,” he says.

A professor in the Department of Engineering, Wolpert examines computational models and uses simple behavioural experiments to describe and predict how the brain solves problems related to action. Through this combination of theoretical and behavioural work, Wolpert has begun to revolutionise the study of human sensorimotor control, the way in which the brain controls physical movement.

He was recently presented with the prestigious Golden Brain Award by the California-based Minerva Foundation. ̽��ֱ��award is given to those producing original and outstanding research into the nature of the brain, regarded by many as the most complex object in the known universe.

So what occurs in the brain when humans produce movement? Science has long struggled with the mysteries of this question. Wolpert uses the example of the game of chess: “We have computers that can generate algorithms of possible chess moves at tremendous speeds, beating the best human chess players. But ask a machine to compete on a dextrous level, such as moving a chess piece from one square to another, and the most advanced robot will fail every time against the average five-year-old child.”

̽��ֱ��models employed by Wolpert and his team have yielded startling results, offering a possible glimpse into the patterns integral to our mental matrix. “It turns out that the brain behaves in a very statistical manner, representing information about the world as probabilities and processes, which is possible to predict mathematically,” says Wolpert. “We’ve shown that this is a very powerful framework for understanding the brain.”

For action to occur, a command is sent from the brain causing muscles to contract and the body to move. Sensory feedback is then received from vision, skin, muscles and so on, to help gauge success. Sounds simple, but a vast amount of misinformation or ‘noise’ is generated with even the most basic action, due to the imperfections in our senses and the almost incalculable variables of the physical world around us. “We work in a whole sensory/task soup of noise,” says Wolpert. “ ̽��ֱ��brain goes to a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this noise and variability.”

̽��ֱ��brain’s crystal ball

To combat this noise, our brains have developed a sophisticated predictive ability, so that every action is based on an orchestrated balance between current sensory data and, crucially, past experience. Memory is a key factor in allowing the brain to make the optimal ‘best guess’ for cutting through the noise, producing the most advantageous movement for the task. In this way, our brains are constantly attempting to predict the future.

“An intuitive example of this predictive ability might be returning a serve in tennis. You need to decide where the ball is going to bounce to produce the most effective return. ̽��ֱ��brain uses the sensory evidence, such as vision and sound, and combines it with experience, prior knowledge of where the ball has bounced in the past. This creates an area of ‘belief’, the brains best guess of where ball will hit court, and the command for action is generated accordingly.”

Movement can take a long time from command to muscles, which can leave us exposed. Like chess, we need to be anticipating several moves ahead, so the brain uses its predictive ability to try and internally replicate the response to an action as or even before it is made, a kind of inbuilt simulator. ̽��ֱ��brain then subtracts this simulation from our actual experience, so it isn’t adding to the noise of misinformation.

“For behavioural causality, we need to be more attuned to the outside world as opposed to inside our own bodies. When our neural simulator makes a prediction, it is only based on internal movement commands. ̽��ֱ��brain subtracts that prediction from the overall sensation, so that everything left over is hopefully external.”

But this can have intriguing effects on our perceptions of the physical world, and the consequences of our actions. “This is why we can’t tickle ourselves, as tickling relies on an inability to predict sensation, and your neural simulator has already subtracted the sensation from the signal,” says Wolpert.

“But they hit me harder!”

A further example of this sensory subtraction occurred to Wolpert during a

backseat bust-up between his daughters, a familiar experience for most parents during long car journeys. ̽��ֱ��traditional escalation of hostility was ensuing as each child claimed they got hit harder and so retaliated in kind.

Wolpert explains: “You underestimate a force when you generate it, so as one child hits another, they predict the sensory movement consequences and subtract it off, thinking they’ve hit the other less hard than they have. Whereas the recipient doesn’t make the prediction so feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, it will appear to the first child to have been escalated.”

This observation led to a simple but effective experiment being conducted called ‘tit for tat’, in which two adults sit opposite each other with their fingers on either side of a force transducer. They were asked to replicate the force demonstrated by each other when pushing against the other's finger. Instead of remaining constant, a 70 percent escalation of force is recorded on each go. It seems that we really don’t know our own strength.

Deciding to act

̽��ֱ��next challenge for Wolpert is to investigate how we make the decision to act, and what happens in the brain if we change our minds after the initial decision. “We think that the fields of both decision making and action share a lot of common features, and our goal is to try and link them together to create a unifying model of how actions affect decisions and vice versa,” says Wolpert.

“As we walk around the world, do our decisions depend on how much effort is required, and to what extend does perceived effort influence the decisions we make? Similarly, to what extent does perceived effort relate to the decision to change our minds? These are the questions we want to address.”

To this end, Wolpert is about to begin on a project for the Human Frontiers Science Programme on linking decision to action. “We’ve developed robotic interfaces in the lab which allow us to control and create experiences that people won’t have had before,” he says.

“We ask subjects to perform simple tasks using a joystick. Once they are in a rhythm, we generate forces that act proportionally to speed but perturb their arm in unusual ways, such as right angles, and see how they respond. This allows us to build a dataset on novel learning, how people adapt to various forces, and the decisions that they make in the process.”

Wolpert’s ultimate aim is to apply these models of the brain and how it controls movement to a greater understanding of brain disorders. As he explains: “Five percent of the population suffers from diseases that affect movement. ̽��ֱ��hope is that we will not only understand what goes wrong in disease, but how to design better mechanisms for rehabilitation.”

What’s the point of a brain? This fundamental question has led Professor Daniel Wolpert to some remarkable conclusions about how and why the brain controls and predicts movement. In a recent talk for TED, Wolpert explores the research that resulted in him receiving the Golden Brain Award.

I believe that to understand movement is to understand the whole brain.

Professor Daniel Wolpert

Daniel Wolpert: ̽��ֱ��real reason for brains

thelunch_box via Flickr

Neurons, in vitrio colour!

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Yes

Recreating ‘ ̽��ֱ��Great Escape’

ns480 — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:50:34 +0000

Immortalised by the largely fictionalised 1963 Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough, ‘the great escape’ of RAF airmen from the German PoW camp has become the stuff of legend.

But how did 76 men escape via a 100m-long tunnel from a camp built on a site chosen especially to thwart an escape by such means?

Hugh was among a team of experts, archaeologists, veterans and modern-day RAF personnel taken back to the site near Zagan in Poland to excavate for the first time the remains of ‘George’, a tunnel that was in progress when the war ended, and the famous ‘Harry’ tunnel from which the Allied airmen escaped on the moonless night of March 24, 1944.

̽��ֱ��results can be seen in ‘Digging the Great Escape’, shown on Channel 4 on Monday evening (November 28) at 9pm. ̽��ֱ��programme follows last year’s successful attempt by Dr Hunt to recreate 617 Squadron’s Dambusters raid.

Hugh, from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Engineering Department, said: “Although only a handful of men worked on the tunnel directly, the escape plan involved hundreds of prisoners who never really knew what the plan actually was. It was some people’s job to move bin lids or wear their hat a certain way if a German guard was coming – but they never knew why.

“It took a year to dig the tunnel but for more than 70 years since then, ‘Harry’ and ‘George’ have remained undisturbed – and with them the final secrets of a remarkable story and history.

“We all came away with an appreciation of just how difficult – and dangerous – digging the tunnel must have been. Working with the particular type of sand you find there is very tricky. It’s like making sandcastles on the beach; it’s fine if it’s a bit damp, but it dries out very quickly and then the walls cave in. They also had to dispose of a ton of sand for every metre they tunnelled.”

To make their great escape, the prisoners led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, made use of (or stole) 4,000 bed boards, 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 3,424 towels, thousands of knives, forks and spoons and around 1,400 Klim powdered milk cans – used to engineer an ingenious ventilation system. Some of the original Klim cans used were uncovered in the excavation of the site.

They also forged documents and befriended, bribed or coerced German guards to provide them with the civilian uniforms and train timetables so essential once they reached the other side of the fence.

However, all but three of the escapees were recaptured. Fifty of the 73 recaptured were executed by the Gestapo, including Roger Bushell.

For the return to Stalag Luft III, Dr Hunt was among a team of experts including engineer Lt Col Philip Westwood RE; war historian Dr Howard Tuck, archaeologist Dr Tony Pollard and Hilary Costello, one of his own engineering PhD students from Cambridge..

Among a host of responsibilities, Hugh and Hilary designed the 10m tunnel dug by modern-day RAF pilots, evaluated shoring methods, built the railway track and crafted digging tools and saws fashioned from bits of gramophone players, bunk beds and kit bags.

Interweaving the historical narrative with first-hand testimonies and the unfolding story of the excavations and experiments, the film offers a new insight into the Great Escape, and is a celebration of the courage and ingenuity of a remarkable group of men. ̽��ֱ��recreation also assembles a remarkable cast of surviving veterans of the escape, including Stanley ‘Gordie’ King, the man who operated the tunnel ventilation system on the night of March 24.

Added Dr Hunt: “What I think we learned from attempting to do something similar ourselves is the magnitude of the task; it’s simply amazing what they achieved given how difficult it was. But talking to some of the people who were involved, we also got a sense of the bravery, camaraderie and fun of it all - despite the fact that the Germans knew they were tunnelling and were looking everywhere for them. In comparison, we had it easy.

“What is astounding is the range of skills that the prisoners had to build the tunnels, ventilate and light them, as well as making compasses, radios, forging documents, heat treating metals, you name it. A lot of these skills have direct links back to engineering and that can hopefully get young people thinking about university studies in engineering – rather than getting an economics degree and going to work in the city.”

First it was the Dambusters raid, now Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Dr Hugh Hunt has helped to recreate ‘ ̽��ֱ��Great Escape’ from Germany’s infamous Stalag Luft III.

What I think we learned from attempting to do something similar ourselves is the magnitude of the task; it’s simply amazing what they achieved given how difficult it was.

Hugh Hunt

Hugh Hunt, Department of Engineering

Hugh in the recreated tunnel at Zagan

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Yes