Room has to be found on our Universities blog to flag the official UK launch yesterday of FutureLearn and its MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The Open Universitty is behind FutureLearn, and it has announced the details of 20 pilot courses, which are set to begin in October this year. Edinburgh and Southampton are just two examples of universities providing ...
University Electronics
The latest electronics news from UK universities
SDN-enabled optical circuit switching at ECOC 2013
Bristol University is highlighting that a live demonstration of a hybrid packet-optical circuit switched software-defined network (SDN) will take place at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) event in London next week. The technology has been developed jointly by the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol and Polatis, specialists in “all-optical” switches. The aim of the ...
Exeter, Flybe host aviation-themed Future Engineers event
Become an aeronautical engineer for the day. That was the concept of this year’s aviation-themed Future Engineers event, jointly organised by the University of Exeter, Exeter College, Flybe and the Fleet Air Arm Museum. It ran on Friday 13th September, bringing together 200 teenagers from 20 schools across the region. The locations for the students taking part in the event ...
University angel investors get new President
Michael Queen, former CEO of private equity firm 3i, has been appointed as President of business angel group The Surrey 100 Club, which has close links with Surrey University. With its close ties to the Surrey Research Park and Surrey Space Incubation Centre (SSI), the not-for-profit organisation provides mentoring, business support and training as well as raising finance. According to Surrey ...
Newcastle drives removal of rare earth metals from electric vehicles
Newcastle University is taking the lead in a £16 million programme – funded by the Technology Strategy Board – to investigate the benefits of high-speed motors for hybrid and electric vehicles. Newcastle has already researched novel, sustainable and efficient motors, but the new project will see such motors being fitted into the Jaguar Land Rover Evoque within the next two ...
Iridescent butterfly wings holds promise for photonics
Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Exeter set off a development in photonics? Scientists at the University of Exeter have been studying the iridescent wings of the tropical blue Morpho butterfly. Apparently, it holds promise for a variety of applications, such as photonic security tags and industrial sensors Exeter says it has been collaborating with General Electric (GE) ...
SETsquared company wins millions in funding for 801.11ad WiGig
SETsquared is the University of Bristol’s incubator and it has announced the first of its Enterprise Zone companies to successfully close a multi-million dollar funding round. The company? Blu Wireless Technology. The amount? £2 million, through angel investors and funding acceleration groups. Bristol University writes: Blu Wireless will use the money to drive further growth and double its staff numbers ...
Haptic feedback guides robotic device to help child handwriting
University of Leeds researchers are working on a robotic device to helps children to practise and improve their hand coordination. It involves a computer game that is designed to help writing and uses haptic technology to guide the child’s hand. The research has been led by Professor Mark Mon-Williams (pictured top) and Dr Liam Hill at the University of Leeds, ...
Bristol speeds MPC cryptographic breakthrough
Bristol University is claiming a breakthrough in cryptography that could result in more secure computing. It is collaborating with Aarhus University, of Denmark, in developing a protocol called SPDZ (as in “speedz”) that implements a theoretical idea called “Multi-Party Computation”, performing computations on secret data. According to Bristol, the idea is to “enable two or more people to compute any ...
Graphene manufacturer attracted to Manchester by university
Manchester. City of Graphene. It would be a good title to have, not least because of the inward investment, it seems… The University of Manchester is boasting that it has attracted a “major graphene manufacturer” to the city – Bluestone Global Tech was apparently attracted by the University’s graphene expertise and has decided to locate there for its European production ...