On the 7th and 8th of December 2020, the GW4 Data Science Network hosted an online workshop to identify areas of strengths for Data-Centric Engineering to capitalise on across the four universities. Its aim was also to provide a networking opportunity to enable collaborations in the future.
Led by the University of Exeter, with input from academic leads Tim Dodwell (Exeter), Paul Wilcox (Bristol), Abhishek Kundu (Cardiff) and Andreas Kyprianou (Bath) the workshop facilitated discussion between engineers and data scientists across the GW4 Alliance to explore research questions of mutual interest in data-driven engineering and data science/AI methods and provided the opportunity for researchers to make links across Universities and the Turing Institute.
Sixty five attendees from across the GW4 Alliance attended the online event which was held as two hour sessions over two consecutive days, with a mixture of presentations and networking sessions. Academics provided talks on the following themes, video of which can be viewed below:
Themes:
Material characterisation
- Mahmoud Mostafavi, University of Bristol
- Anthony Croxford, University of Bristol
- Beate Ehrhardt, University of Bath
- Konstantinos Agathos, University of Exeter
Hydrology/water/environmental
Fluid mechanics/aerodynamics
Digital twins/autonomous systems
- Omer Rana, Cardiff University
- George De Anth, University of Exeter
- Rebecca Hamilton, Cardiff University
- Carol Featherston, Cardiff University
- Haijiang Li, Cardiff University
Future opportunities
The workshop stimulated important discussions across research disciplines and expertise and highlighted possible opportunities available for the GW4 Alliance to build on, including:
- Composites for air industry and general development of digital technologies for the air industry, as well as capitalising on industrial partnerships in the aviation section.
- Structures and physics for lightweight structures research, with synergies across GW4 and methodological opportunities. For example: advanced computing, combining expertise, composites, experience in materials, LW structure design optimisation, NDE, monitoring, machine learning.
- The West of England Space Hub - specifically to develop data science and data centric engineering collaborations through this platform.
- Water Centres/groups/themes are well established with a significant research capacity across all the Institutions. Their strategic priorities can be boosted by a collaboration with data scientists and engineers.
- The development of large, holistic projects around cradle-to-grave digital twin research projects.
- Digital solutions for nuclear research challenges within the Net Zero regional and national strategy.
The GW4 Data Science Hub will continue to support the development of networks in the areas described above and further information can be provided, please contact gw4-data-science-network@bristol.ac.uk.
