Events – Australian Science

The First Science Promotion Conference in Southeast Europe

Editorial Board — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:03:48 +0000

If you happen to be in Europe this October, you probably wouldn’t like to miss the First Regional Science Promotion Conference on October 2 and 3, 2013 in Belgrade, Serbia (Southeast Europe).

The Center for the Promotion of Science (CPN), under the UNESCO patronage, is hosting the First Regional Science Promotion Conference with the aim of gathering science promotion professionals, practitioners and enthusiasts from the Region in order for them to share experience, to network and formulate the future steps in view of strengthening the link between science and society in our Region. Exploring challenges and finding synergies on the path towards our common aim to increase the scientific culture in the region, should result in the identification of short and long term strategic goals.

Keynote sessions will bring international experts and representatives of international organizations, research and education institutions, science camps, science communicators, NGOs, private sector and media on board.

They will address the topic of science promotion and communication challenges and open the debate on how to:

– Strengthen the link between science and society through communication between the state and local institutions, research organizations, academic community, media and the public

– Improve the scientific culture in the region via public popular science programs;

– Increase the role of media in the promotion of science and education;

– Emphasize the role of science centers and science camps in the popularization of science;

– Improve science communication and language of scientists and researchers allowing them to present their work in a comprehensive manner;

– Use science and innovation to boost economic development.

These wide network of science promotion contributors will allow diverse contributions to the Conference’s thematic sessions:

– Popular science events

– Media and Science (Back-to-back Program with UNESCO South East Science Journalism School)

– Science Camps

– Science Center Communication Towards the Public

– Science Communication From Research Iinstitutions Towards the Public

– Knowledge Economy: Science, Innovation and Economic Prosperity

The joint Conference Conclusions and Action Plan, as the result of the First Regional Conference, should help bring science promotion higher on the agenda in each of the participating countries and secure the sustainability of wider engagement of science in society.

Attending this Conference will give you the opportunity to join your colleagues from the region, exchange ideas, get inspired by presentations of top experts in the field of science promotion, and contribute to the drafting of the concrete Action Plan for the enhancement of impact and visibility of science in our society.

Find out more about Science Festivals, Science Workshops and Science Events, and the Conference programme: http://cpn.rs/conference/programme.php#sessionC

You can register here for free: http://cpn.rs/conference/registration.php

More about the The Center for the Promotion of Science: http://www.cpn.rs/?lang=en

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European Inventor Award 2013 ceremony in Amsterdam

Editorial Board — Tue, 28 May 2013 00:06:39 +0000

As one of the most prestigious competitions of its kind, the European Inventor Award each year pays tribute to the creativity of inventors, whose quest for new ideas drives technological progress and economic growth, shapes our society and improves our daily lives. The award not only gives inventors the recognition they deserve, it also encourages future innovation.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the European Patent Convention from which the European Patent Office (EPO) was born. The event, which takes place in Amsterdam, will feature a prestigious award ceremony and bring together some of the world’s brightest innovators, along with key decision makers in business, politics, media and the sciences.

The 2013 edition of the European Inventor Award will be presented by the EPO on Tuesday 28 May, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. At the award ceremony, 15 inventors from eleven countries (link) in five nomination categories will be honoured for their outstanding contribution to technical progress and economic growth, and five of them will be distinguished as winners of the European Inventor Award. In addition, a Popular prize will be awarded for the first time to one of the 15 nominees.

Some 500 guests will attend the award ceremony at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, including Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, Sander Dekker, the Netherlands Minister for Education, Culture and Science, and Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services.

The event will open at 09.30 hrs CET with a joint press conference of EPO President Benoît Battistelli and EU Commissioner Michel Barnier, followed by a Q/A session.

The award ceremony starts at 10.45 hrs CET with the arrival of HRH Princess Beatrix, and is scheduled to close at about 12.45 hrs CET.

The following contents are offered for the event on 28 May (all times are CET):

Live Transmission:

· Via Europe by Satellite (to be announced on http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/ebs/schedule.cfm)

09:15 – 10:30 hrs Press Conference

10:45 – 13:15 hrs European Inventor Award ceremony

· Live stream on the Internet website of the EPO:

09:15 – 10:30 hrs Press Conference

10:45 – 13:15 hrs European Inventor Award ceremony

For further information, please contact: Oswald Schröder Spokesperson, EPO oschroeder@epo.org

Image source: http://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/event-1.html

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Annual AIFST Convention to Reel in Registrations with Unique Session Line-

Editorial Board — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:01:11 +0000

The 46th Annual Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology Convention is the premier food technology conference in Australia for industry, research and government organisations, locally and overseas.

Date: 14th – 16th July 2013 / Location: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia

The upcoming 46th Annual AIFST conference has an array of international and local speakers where attendees can learn about cutting edge food science and technology innovation including seafood science, digestive health and even about a laser fence that shoots down mosquitoes!

To be held in Brisbane from July 14th – 16th 2013, session highlights include:

Seafood makes a splash – Australians consume around 16kg of fish and seafood per person a year, making it the nation’s fifth largest producing industry and worth more than $2.2 billion to the economy annually. Microbiologist Graham Fletcher will provide insight
into the seafood industry and share exciting innovations from around the world after 30 years of research. Fletcher is a trusted expert
in seafood safety, packaging, optimisation of chilled fish, ultra high pressure processing of seafood and horticultural products.

Neuroscience of leadership – Award-

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BioGrid Australia wins People¹s Choice Excellence in BI Award for 2012

Editorial Board — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:09:32 +0000

BioGrid Australia has won the hotly contested People¹s Choice Excellence in Business Intelligence Award for 2012 for its application of information technology in e-health.

The Excellence in Business Intelligence Award, sponsored by BusinessMinds, was won by Telstra for a customer centric solution using nearreal time BI.

In the People’s Choice Award, the delegates at the Big Data Summit in Sydney held 29-30 October, voted BioGrid Australia as a clear winner. The award recognises how the BI solutions BioGrid Australia provides researchers helps to save lives.

Maureen Turner, CEO of BioGrid Australia, said This award recognises the value and importance of BioGrids collaborative technology which connects data from multiple institutions to enable research projects with sample sizes of thousands of patients allowing Australian research to compete on an international scale.

She said the award was a clear demonstration of the not for profit organisation¹s skills and ability in establishing, maintaining and using business intelligence to drive results.

In essence, BioGrid Australia is paving the direction for the future of how e-health in Australia will operate in the future, enabling a more comprehensive view of a patient, their history and how they have been treated.

The organisation links 26 health services and research organisations across Australia using a web based platform. Data is physically located across jurisdictions and dynamically queried and analysed using SAS statistical analysis software.

BioGrid was initially set up by clinical researchers who were trying to find more effective solutions to clinical problems. Their aim was to use a federated platform to connect individual data and enable researchers to use it effectively.

Recent research using BioGrid showed the significant impact of the national bowel screening program as researchers were able to analyse data from more than 1200 bowel cancer patients from 19 sites around Australia.

The analysis produced showed the government the importance of the bowel screening program. It indicated that early diagnosis of bowel cancer not only significantly improves the chances of patient survival but it also reduces the cost of treatment per patient as advanced bowel cancer requires expensive drugs to treat. The 2012 federal budget included $50 million to extend the program for another four years.

The People Choice Award highlights the recognition within the business world as well as IT and medical research of the role that BioGrid is playing: it is enabling research that will inform and change the way patients are viewed and treated, she said.

The other finalists in the BI Awards were Commonwealth Bank, NRMA and Open Universities Australia.

More info on BioGrid Australia (www.biogrid.org.au).

Image.

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OKFN Australia Group re-launching again

Editorial Board — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:16:43 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation is dedicated to promoting the creation, sharing and application of Open Knowledge in the Digital Age.

Yesterday, a working group at OKFN Australia gathered data geeks from around the country. The opening the Australian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation happened via a Google hang-out. The group includes internet public servants, data scientists, data visualisation specialists, data journalists, and others dedicated to the idea that, when it comes to knowledge and information, open is better.

OKFN Au is a community initiative to create a bridge between the many and varied open knowledge communities in Australia, including hackers, data journalists, scientists, Gov 2.0 and open data peeps, knowledge and change management enthusiasts and civil society.

OKFN Au is part of the global OKFN community, established originally in the UK. It brings together people interested and active in opening up and using data to create and share knowledge.

The goal of OKFN Au is to support, promote and bring together the active and diverse open knowledge communities in Australia. Member communities come from a variety of backgrounds where open knowledge is already being practically applied. Australia has some well established tech communities, research groups, open government communities, emerging data journo communities and loads more that could all benefit through being connected to each other, even if just peripherally. It makes it easier to understand the breadth and skills of our community which, in turn, makes it easier to connect with each other and collaborate on common goals or projects.

Check out the OKFN Au site for more information.

Image source.

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Ada Lovelace Day: celebrating women in science, technology, engineering and maths

Jessie — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 06:56:19 +0000

In the 1800s, Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician, worked with inventor Charles Babbage on a plan for an “analytical engine.

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The “POLI

Editorial Board — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:20:16 +0000

This article is part of Media and Learning month’s newsletter, dedicated series on lecture capture. It is provided by the Lifelong Learning project REC:all, which aims to explore new ways in which lecture capture can become more pedagogically valuable and engaging, and which is investigating a variety of learning design, technical and legal issues related to lecture capture. Marta Cabedo Fabrés from Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain – describes how.

The new educational paradigm due to the Bologna process, presents a teaching model in which the professor acts as facilitator of learning and the students assume an active and autonomous role. Based on these points the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed and implemented a number of tools (POLIMEDIA, POLITUBE and POLICONECTA) and a Virtual Learning Environment (POLIFORMAT), in order to adapt to the European Higher Education Area and to improve teaching quality.

POLIMEDIA is a system designed at the UPV for creating multimedia content (videos, instruction clips, knowledge clips, etc.), and POLITUBE is a free access portal enabled by the UPV to store educational videos that are used to support and complement classroom teaching.

The materials and resources available in POLITUBE and POLIMEDIA, after a rigorous review, are recognized as learning objects and become part of Riunet (UPV institutional repository). Riunet provides access from the Internet to the scientific, academic and corporate production of this university following the international movement of Open Access.

POLIFORMAT is a tele-education platform used in the UPV. It is based on Sakai and it offers a standardised interface for accessing to a Web 2.0 toolkit. It facilitates autonomous and collaborative learning to students.

Each subject has its own space in POLIFORMAT and it is accessible only to teachers and students enrolled in the subject. The tools available include news, calendar, repository of resources, tasks, contents, on-line exams, chat, internal mail, discussion forum, wiki and student’s personal space. Some of these tools can be activated during a specified period of time, according to the needs of the subjects.

POLICONECTA is a videoconferencing tool developed at the Lifelong Learning Center of the UPV for distance learning. It is based on
the use of commercial software Adobe Connect, and allows virtual meetings, video conferencing and remote lectures, which can be
recorded. It also includes the ability to share documents, applications or a whiteboard.

For the delivery of courses or seminars at a distance UPV makes more than 30 classrooms available which are properly equipped with multiple cameras, microphones, projector, monitors, and interactive whiteboard. Some classrooms also have “Paper Show” (a special notebook that records what you write or draw with a pen in a computer). The only equipment required by students is a broadband Internet connection, headphones and a microphone.

All tools and platform described in this article have already been used with a high degree of acceptance by more than 250 lecturers and approximately 36000 students at the UPV. In the last six years more than 3000 videos have been produced using these technologies and actual experiences show that the use of lecture captures results in a substantial improvement of teaching quality. Find out more.

UPV’s experience in lecture capture will be presented during the REC:all workshop taking place on 13 November.

Source

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Media & Learning Brussels 2012 – Conference Programme Available

Editorial Board — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 08:09:31 +0000

[Press release]

The Media & Learning Conference taking place in Brussels on 14 and 15 November 2012 is aimed at anyone who wants to find new and effective ways to use media to enhance the learning process. It has three main themes; mapping future trends and developments in media-enhanced learning in all sectors, boosting skills and competences in media production, use and re-use of media-enhanced content and tracking the importance of media literacy and wisdom as fundamental building blocks in the creation of innovative, inclusive and futureproof education and training.

The conference programme is now available online. Keynote speakers include Xavier Prats Monné, Deputy Director-General for Education at the European Commission and Guus Wijngaards who will present his take on the educational media trends of the future based on the recent highly rated NMC Horizon Report. Andrew Keen, author of “Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

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The Mathematics of War

Markus — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:35:04 +0000

Scientists often exercise a certain detachment when doing their work. I’ve often seem friends and colleagues get “lost in the numbers” and forget precisely what it is they’re looking at and what those numbers actually mean. However, in some cases this may not be a bad thing. For instance, in the analysis of conflict data.

Putting aside any personal reactions and moral implications of what you’re really looking at may not be easy for everyone, but analysis of conflict data is important in predicting the behaviour of wars and potentially minimising risks and harm in the future. Technology is marching on, and as a result the amount of data being collected from war zones is huge. With the state of social media, internet resources like Twitter and Facebook have proven to be valuable sources of information, providing a quick way to share information with people trapped in the middle of troubled areas – a remarkably significant use which I’m sure no one could have ever predicted when these services originally started up. The problem for researchers lies in how exactly to use that data. Constructing a model of how a conflict will unfold and making predictions from it may be vital in stopping things from escalating out of control. Unfortunately, such predictions aren’t easily made.

The idea that the movements of masses of people could be predicted is not a new one. In fact, in his typically insightful manner, the idea was first devised by Isaac Asimov who created the fictional science of psychohistory, featured in his 1951 novel Foundation. Asimov’s ideas weren’t without firm basis in reality, and while the details may be different, it seems like the concept of psychohistory may not be quite so fictional after all.

Predicting the Afghan War Diaries

The Afghan National Army at Kabul Military Training Centre (2009)

Between then, a group of researchers based in Edinburgh and Sheffield in the UK and New York decided to try a different approach. They noted that most of the data analysed previously didn’t go beyond simply visualising what had been seen and recorded. Actual predictions had proved too challenging, not least because it hadn’t been clear how to actually model the data available.

This group of researchers, led by Guido Sanguinetti, constructed a set of methods to use statistical dynamic modelling to make predictions on conflicts such as the recent war in Afghanistan. They needed to look at the times and locations, as well as how information was transported from place to place. They decided that the best way to analyse how a conflict unfolded was to treat it the way other researchers model environmental events and the spread of infectious diseases. In many ways, these events proceed in ways very similar to outbreaks of violence during conflicts.

In this case though, Sanguinetti and his colleagues had an ace up their sleeve. Courtesy of the now infamous whistleblowers at WikiLeaks, a huge disclosure of US military logs from the Afghan conflict had been made in 2010. Known as the Afghan War Diary, this set of records drew a lot of attention internationally on its release and also served to be the ideal way of testing the effectiveness of any predictions. Essentially, Sanguinetti and the others could use their models to make predictions on the conflict and then check against the released reports to see how accurate they’d been.

Conflict climates

Remarkably, based entirely on written reports between 2004 and 2009, they were able to predict with impressive accuracy, what events would occur in 2010. In short, using nothing but some clever mathematics, the researchers could tell what would likely happen next. Where conflicts would increase in intensity and where things would remain quiet. And this isn’t even a comprehensive model yet. There are many adjustments which can still be made to improve the accuracy still further. Even accounting for sudden changes, like the dramatic increase of US forces in Afghanistan in 2010, the predictions remained accurate. Evidently, events will continue unabated despite any large military offensives which may be taking place.

The war in Afghanistan has not been of the traditional type between two armies. Instead, the conflict there has been irregular, involving a huge number of loosely connected groups. This may be the reason why a relatively simple model works so well in predicting the behaviour of those groups – where and when violence would escalate. This sort of behaviour is typically the sort that large scale armies have trouble in countering due to the lack of any centralised organisation. Mathematically speaking, it genuinely becomes a lot like trying to predict the weather.

To me, this kind of work offers some hope in resolving serious conflicts as quickly as possible. Being a pacifist myself, I abhor violence of any kind, and the ability to predict and avoid any serious bloodshed is certainly a good thing. Whatever your feelings on it, the ability to predict violence in conflict situations the same way meteorologists predict the weather has some potentially very useful possibilities.

A visualisation of the increasing number of events recorded in the Afghan War Diaries (A) compared with predictions of events occurring (B-F).

Cite this article:
Hammonds M (2012-08-30 00:35:04). The Mathematics of War. Australian Science. Retrieved: Apr 28, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/news/the-mathematics-of-war/

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We Support the Petition to End the Faroe Islands’ Whale & Dolphin Slaughter

Editorial Board — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 07:19:10 +0000

Thousands of signatures have now been presented in person to the Faroe Islands Government. Add your voice to this petition to keep up the demand until this cruel whale slaughter is banned.

Hundreds of pilot whales are slaughtered every year on the Faroe Islands, a small group of islands north of Europe. Faroe men go out with boats to drive these animals into a fjord using nets to block their way back to sea. The whales then beach themselves, or are pulled ashore with a blunt hook lodged in their blowholes. Once beached and defenceless these whales are killed by having their spinal cords and major blood vessels cut. It can take up to three and a half minutes for a whale to eventually die.

Other than pilot whales, several species of dolphins are also killed using these same methods.

Due to the harsh climate that makes it difficult to grow food on the Faroe Islands, the meat and blubber of these animals was once an important part of the diet of the Faroe people. But nowadays their food supply is diverse and plentiful, the cruel whale and dolphin hunt continues primarily for the sake of ‘tradition’.

Please show the Faroe Islands that the international community is strongly opposed to this cruel slaughter by signing this petition to the Faroe Islands Prime Minister. Petition Tally by August 16 2012: 81,718 signatures.

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Events – Australian Science

The First Science Promotion Conference in Southeast Europe

European Inventor Award 2013 ceremony in Amsterdam

Annual AIFST Convention to Reel in Registrations with Unique Session Line-­

BioGrid Australia wins People¹s Choice Excellence in BI Award for 2012

OKFN Australia Group re-launching again

Ada Lovelace Day: celebrating women in science, technology, engineering and maths

The “POLI

Media & Learning Brussels 2012 – Conference Programme Available

The Mathematics of War

Predicting the Afghan War Diaries

Conflict climates

We Support the Petition to End the Faroe Islands’ Whale & Dolphin Slaughter

Annual AIFST Convention to Reel in Registrations with Unique Session Line-