Tag Archives: MyResearch

Conflicted about cost-benefit analysis of international conferences

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Decorative image of an aircraftLast week I wrote about my stimulating experience of attending a conference in Orlando, Florida and presenting our recent research to the experimental mechanics community for the first time in four years.  Whilst there, I was conscious of the ecological footprint of my trip – the venue was making extensive use of single use plastics on a scale that surprised me.  However, my trans-Atlantic flight had an order of magnitude larger impact.  It is difficult to find a reliable estimate of the carbon emissions for a return flight between the UK and Florida but 1,267 kg CO2 from the Guardian newspaper website lies between a lower bound estimate of 856 kg CO2 from iata.org and and an upper bound of 2,200 kg CO2 from myclimate.org.  This is equivalent to about one-sixth of my annual domestic carbon footprint of 9,000 kg CO2 using the calculator on the World Wildlife Fund website.  The UK average footprint is 9,300 kg CO2/capita and the global average is 6,300 kg CO2/capita.  The question is whether it is justifiable to generate additional emissions to attend a research conference?  The prime motivation of the research that I presented is to support the development of aircraft which are lighter with less embedded carbon and use less energy while also having a longer useful life.  Ultimately, supporting the aviation industry to achieve its target of zero-net emissions by 2050.  The carbon emissions of the global aviation industry in 2021 were 720 Mt CO2 [see IEA report]; hence, if my research contributes towards one hundredth of a percent reduction in these emissions then this would be 72,000 kg CO2/year.  It seems reasonable to cause a tenth of this annual saving each year (7,200 kg CO2/year) for the next ten years in order to deliver the required technology, i.e., committing one year’s savings to achieve an annual saving in perpetuity.  The problem is that I do not have a reliable estimate of the carbon footprint of my research activities.  I supervised an MSc student a couple of years ago who conducted a carbon audit of the School of Engineering and estimated the carbon emissions due to research alone to be 61,531 kg CO2 excluding heating, lighting and travel.  My group might be responsible for 10% of these emissions, i.e., about 6000 kg CO2; hence, adding about 1,200 kg CO2 to interact with other researchers at a conference seems reasonable and within a budget of 7,200 kg CO2. However, it is difficult to find reliable data to use in estimating carbon emissions for these activities and so perhaps the key conclusion is that we need more and better carbon audits to allow more informed decision-making.  In the meantime, perhaps attendence at an international conference once every four years is sufficient.

Image: Tayeb Mezahdia

Busman’s holiday

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Decorative image of fountain and palm treeA couple of weeks ago, I travelled to my first international conference following the pandemic lockdowns.  It was stimulating to hear presentations from well-established researchers who I had not seen in person for four or five years and to meet new researchers who had joined our community since 2019.  It was exciting to present our own research to an international audience for the first time and get instant feedback on it.  Of course, it helped that we met in Orlando, Florida.  If a change is as good as a rest then I had a four day rest from my usual work routines.  You could call it a holiday in the sense that a holiday is a day of festivity during which we celebrate in a joyful or exuberant way, according to the dictionary, and I felt we joyfully celebrated our research.  I gave three presentations on our work on low-cost, real-time crack monitoring described in ‘Seeing small changes is a big achievement’ on October 26th, 2022; on additive manufacture of reinforced flat plates (see ‘On flatness and roughness’ on January 19th, 2022); and on a further development of the research described in ‘Less certain predictions’ on August 2nd 2017.  Listening to other speakers caused my own thoughts to wander and I found myself using my phone as a mental prosthetic or expert system [see ‘Thinking out of the skull’ on March 18th, 2015] to provide me with information about definitions, to remind me about previous research, both ours and other people’s, as well as to refresh my memory on previous ideas via this blog [see ‘Amplified intelligence’ on January 4th, 2023].  Susan Greenfield, feared that such devices and activity might lead to formation of smaller neuronal assemblies in the brain and consequential loss of creativity [see ‘Digital hive mind’ on November 30th 2016]; instead, I found myself making faster connections and creating new ideas for future research.  However, I recorded them, as Leonardo di Vinci would have done – in my notebook!  My excuse is that my phone was too busy being an expert system and writing my notes by hand allowed my brain to connect the fragments of ideas and thoughts into some sort of coherency [see ‘Space between the words’ on July 6th, 2022].  Besides writing four posts for this blog in as many days, I have a list of new ideas to accelerate existing projects and start new ones.  So, whilst post-pandemic I will not be returning to business as usual in terms of international travel, a small number of infrequent trips would appear to be worthwhile, especially if our research helps move our economies towards their zero emissions targets.

Image: photograph from entrance to conference hotel.

Fairy lights and decomposing multi-dimensional datasets

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A time-lapsed series of photographs showing the sun during the day at North Cape in NorwayMany years ago, I had a poster that I bought when I visited North Cape in Norway where in summer the sun never sets.  The poster was a time-series of 24 photographs taken at hourly intervals showing the height of the sun in the sky during a summer day at North Cape, similar to the thumbnail.  We can plot the height of the sun as a function of time of day with time on the horizontal axis and height on the vertical axis to obtain a graph that would be a sine wave, part of which is apparent in the thumbnail.  However, the brightness of the sun also appears to vary during the day and so we could also conceive of a graph where the intensity of a line of symbols represented the height of the sun in the sky.  Like a string of fairy lights in which we can control the brightness of each one individually  – we would have a one-dimensional plot instead of a two-dimensional one.  If we had a flat surface covered with an array of lights – a chessboard with a fairy light in each square – then we could represent three-dimensional data, for instance the distribution of elevation over a field using the intensity of the lights – just as some maps use the intensity of a colour to illustrate elevation.  We can take this concept a couple of stages further to plot four-dimensional data in three-dimensional space, for instance, we could build a three-dimensional stack of transparent cubes each containing a fairy light to plot the variation in moisture content in the soil at depths beneath as well as across the field.  The location of the fairy lights would correspond to the location beneath the ground and their intensity the moisture content.  I chose this example because we recently used data on soil moisture in a river basin in China in our research (see ‘From strain measurements to assessing El Nino events’ on March 17th 2021).  We can carry on adding variables and, for example if the data were available, consider the change in moisture content with time and three-dimensional location beneath the ground – that’s five-dimensional data.  We could change the intensity of the fairy lights with time to show the variation of moisture content with time.  My brain struggles to conceive how to represent six-dimensional data though mathematically it is simple to continue adding dimensions.  It is also challenging to compare datasets with so many variables or dimensions so part of our research has been focussed on elegant methods of making comparisons.  We have been able to reduce maps of data – the chessboard of fairy lights – to a feature vector (a short string of numbers) for some time now [see ‘Recognizing strain’ on October 28th, 2015 and ‘Nudging discoveries along the innovation path’ on October 19th, 2022]; however, very recently we have extended this capability to volumes of data – the stack of transparent cubes with fairy lights in them.  The feature vector is slightly longer but can be used track changes in condition, for instance, in a composite component using computer tomography (CT) data or to validate simulations of stress or possibly fluid flow [see ‘Reliable predictions of non-Newtonian flows of sludge’ on March 29th, 2023].  There is no reason why we cannot extend it further to six or more dimensional data but it is challenging to find an engineering application, at least at the moment.

Photo by PCmarja2006 on Flickr

Slicing the cake equally or engineering justice

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Decorative photograph of sliced chocolate cakeIn support of the research being performed by one of the PhD students that I am supervising, I have been reading about ‘energy justice’.  Energy justice involves the equitable sharing of the benefits and burdens of the production and consumption of energy, including the fair treatment of individuals and communities when making decisions about energy.  At the moment our research is focussed on the sharing of the burdens associated with energy production and ways in which digital technology might improve decision-making processes.  Justice incorporates the distribution of rights, liberties, power, opportunities, and money – sometimes known as ‘primary goods’.  The theory of justice proposed by the American philosopher, John Rawls in the 1970’s is a recurring theme: that these primary goods should be distributed in a manner a hypothetical person would choose, if, at the time, they were ignorant of their own status in society.  In my family, this is the principle we use to divide cakes and other goodies equally between us, i.e., the person slicing the cake is the last person to take a slice.  While many in society overlook the inequalities and injustices that sustain their privileged positions, I believe that engineers have a professional responsibility to work towards the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of engineering on the individuals and communities, i.e., ‘engineering justice’ [see ‘Where science meets society‘ on September 2nd, 2015].  This likely involves creating a more diverse engineering profession which is better equipped to generate engineering solutions that address the needs of the whole of our global society [see ‘Re-engineering engineering‘ on August 30th, 2017].  However, it also requires us to rethink our decision-making processes to achieve  ‘engineering justice’.  There is a clear and close link to ‘procedure justice’ and ‘fair process’ [see ‘Advice to abbots and other leaders‘ November 13th, 2019] which involves listening to people, making a decision, then explaining the decision to everyone concerned.  In our research, we are interested in how digital environments, including digital twins and industrial metaverses, might enable wider and more informed involvement in decision-making about major engineering infrastructure projects, with energy as our starting point.

Sources:

Derbyshire J, Justice, fairness and why Rawls still matters today, FT Weekend, April 20th, 2023.

MacGregor N, How to transcend the culture wars, FT Weekend, April 29/30th, 2023.

Rawls J, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1971

Sovacool BK & Dworkin MH, Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles and Practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Image: https://www.alsothecrumbsplease.com/air-fryer-chocolate-cake/