Today's design engineers are always looking for ways to innovate and compete in today's global design environment. The 21st century has opened up a plethora of connected workflows that allow for seemingly real-time data interaction, no matter where you are in the world. The days of the central data center and being tied to the office or factory are over. Powerful mobile devices are in our pockets, with us at our bedside tables and more cost effective than ever. We are at an inflection point; forward thinking engineers will have the advantage if they implement technology from the edge, AI and the IIoT worlds.

The Knowledge and Intelligence Design section in the Department of Sustainable Design Engineering of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) offers a PhD position for a duration of four years. The PhD candidate will be supervised by Prof. Alessandro Bozzon. The research work will be conducted in the context of a collaboration between TU Delft, the Amsterdam City Archive, and the CTO Office of Municipality of Amsterdam. The goal is to investigate human-centered artificial intelligence methods for the preservation of large collections of archival documents which are a valuable source of knowledge for cultural, social and urban research of a given city. To fully unlock the knowledge contained in the archives and facilitate the exploration and exploitation of the collections, there is a need for techniques to digitize the archives; to extract structured data, namely Named Entities (NEs) such as persons, locations, events, from unstructured archival documents; and to link the extracted entities to knowledge bases.

Enjoy dinner drinks and a chance to meet… Leslie Nooteboom is Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Humanising Autonomy, an AI tech startup with $6m funding, on a mission to improve human interaction with autonomous vehicles. Humanising Autonomy build human-centered tools that define how autonomous systems will interact with people. Their pedestrian intent prediction platform makes autonomous vehicles safer and more efficient in urban environments, with the aim of making cities more pleasant for every type of vulnerable road user. This dinner is perfect for… Startup founders and management level at startups working on AI, smart cities and/or sustainability solutions. This dinner is open to a limited number of service providers / advisors (unless a TableCrowd partner).

Provost Ian Walmsley welcomed Education Secretary Damian Hinds to the College's South Kensington Campus The Department for Education's leadership team were given an insight into the College's pioneering research, education and innovation. On Thursday 11 October Provost Ian Walmsley and President Alice Gast welcomed the Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds MP, to the College for the Department for Education board's away day. Before the board meeting began, Anne Milton MP, Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills, a number of senior civil servants and non-executive directors from the Department for Education met Provost Ian Walmsley, Vice-Provost (Education) Professor Simone Buitendijk and a number of students and academics from across the College. The visit included tours and demonstrations at the Aerial Robotics Lab, the Carbon Capture Pilot Plant and the Dyson School of Design Engineering. Director Dr Mirko Kovac gave a presentation on the work of the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial's Department of Aeronautics.

The concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) has been around for a few years now, but it's only been in the last 18 months where there has been a significant acceleration in communications, whitepapers, products and articles. There seems to be a disconnect, however, between that hype and real-world manufacturing operations. The perception is that Industry 4.0 is just something for the future. The reality is that it can provide OEMs with competitive advantage, and help manufacturers respond to demand and decrease costs today. Industry 4.0 encompasses a lot of different technologies, but let's focus on four areas that can be used right now to move a company's automation engagement towards that futuristic Smart Factory concept, while benefitting in the meantime.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your seafaring Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Within the last 30 years half of all corals have died already. However, there are selective measures in restoring coral reefs by cultivating and eventually statically outplanting them on reefs.