As commerce and society feel the impact of digitization, automation proliferates along assembly lines and deployment of robotics gathers pace, an influential U.K. academic at the operating helm of the country's engineering academy says the time has come to ditch old clichés and have an apolitical holistic dialogue about future engineering skills. Meet Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who reckons such broader changes make it a "very interesting time" for engineers with the so-called Industry 4.0 or the next industrial revolution now firmly among us. "People should look at the ongoing transformation from a prism of not how many jobs will go, but rather at the changing nature and scope of roles and tasks. We should be optimistic that there would be many new jobs created partly through the fact that technology would enable us to do things we could not previously do." Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says the broader societal changes we are witnessing make it a "very interesting time" for engineers.Calum McCarron Looking at the size of the opportunity in a global context, engineers are not only among those feeling the first effects of Industry 4.0 but are also the drivers of a shift towards a technologically astute low carbon economy, she adds.

As commerce and society feel the impact of digitization, automation proliferates along assembly lines and deployment of robotics gathers pace, an influential U.K. academic at the operating helm of the country's engineering academy says the time has come to ditch old clichés and have an apolitical holistic dialogue about future engineering skills. Meet Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who reckons such broader changes make it a "very interesting time" for engineers with the so-called Industry 4.0 or the next industrial revolution now firmly among us. "People should look at the ongoing transformation from a prism of not how many jobs will go, but rather at the changing nature and scope of roles and tasks. We should be optimistic that there would be many new jobs created partly through the fact that technology would enable us to do things we could not previously do." Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says the broader societal changes we are witnessing make it a "very interesting time" for engineers.Calum McCarron Looking at the size of the opportunity in a global context, engineers are not only among those feeling the first effects of Industry 4.0 but also the drivers of the shift towards a technologically astute low carbon economy, she adds.

Professor Mark Girolami will study how engineering can use big data to improve practice, including the development of'digital twins'. Professor Girolami, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial, has been appointed the Lloyd's Register Foundation / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data-Centric Engineering. He will lead a five-year project to explore how big data can be incorporated into engineering practice, including the development of new data-centric techniques to monitor the safety of physical structures that will be trialled on the world's first 3D printed stainless steel pedestrian bridge. As part of this, Professor Girolami will develop novel methods and software to create virtual copies of physical structures, also known as digital twins, in order to model what might happen in real life. He is currently Chair of Statistics at Imperial and Strategic Programme Director for the Turing-Lloyd's Register Foundation Data-Centric Engineering Programme at The Alan Turing Institute.

NEW DELHI: Bennett University launched an artificial intelligence (AI) initiative in association with 50 zonal partners to set up research groups across the country. The project was inaugurated by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) chairman Anil Sahsrabudhe at the Bennett University campus on Tuesday. The zonal partners will be doubled to 100 with AICTE support. Each zonal partner will work in the area of deep learning to create useful products and innovations. Each will act as a hub for 10 more institutions, thus adding up to a total of 1,000.

The 25-year-old inventor of a machine learning tool to help brands uncover future ideas, has been named as the UK's most promising young technology entrepreneur by the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub. Nick Schweitzer, founder of Klydo, has received the JC Gammon Award, which provides £15,000 of funding and membership of the Enterprise Hub, as the winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering's Launchpad Competition – a nationwide search for the UK's greatest entrepreneurs in the engineering and technology sector, between the ages of 19 and 25. Up to 90% of attempted innovation in business fails. Nick aims to change this by creating a web tracking and machine learning technology that offers novel solutions to business problems, using the internet as its source of inspiration. It identifies what the future of an industry should be, helping business innovation succeed where it currently fails.

The first UK Robotics Week took place from 27 June to 1 July, with events and activities around the country showcasing leading UK technology and engineering research in robotics and autonomous design. Co-ordinated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network, and supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the week sees robotic research groups from around the world visiting the UK to demonstrate their latest technologies in surgical robotics, field robotics, autonomous driving and unmanned aerial vehicles, while other challenges are set to engage and inspire school, college and university students. On 29 June, the Academy hosted a panel discussion on robotic ethics. The event also featured a Pepper and a NAO robot, from London Design and Engineering UTC, which will be some of the first in the UK to be used in an educational setting. The panel discussion can be found on Twitter at @RAEngNews.

Lecture Title: Machines that learn: big data or explanatory models? Abstract: A leading question about machines that learn concerns two distinct styles of learning. Will they turn out to depend more on probabilistic models that explain the data, or on networks that react to data and are trained on data at ever greater scale? In machine vision systems, for instance, this boils down to the comparative roles of two paradigms: analysis-by-synthesis versus empirical recognisers. Each approach has its strengths, and empirical recognisers especially have made great strides in performance in the last few years, through deep learning.

Three early-career engineers who are making a big difference in three very different areas of technology are to receive the Royal Academy's prestigious Silver Medal at the Academy Awards Dinner at the Tower of London on Thursday 23 June 2016. The Silver Medal celebrates outstanding personal contributions to UK engineering, which has resulted in successful market exploitation. Professor Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FREng FRS, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says: "Damian Gardiner, Demis Hassabis and Tong Sun have all demonstrated the power of use-inspired research in taking ideas they have developed in academia and applying them to solve real-world problems. They are working with colleagues all over the world and making an enormous impact early in their careers that is both enriching academic knowledge and generating real economic benefit for the UK." Dr Damian Gardiner is taking the world of product authentication by storm, with his Cambridge University start-up company ilumink Limited acquired by Johnson Matthey's Process Technologies Division in 2015. They were keen to adopt his unique method of printing'liquid crystal' material onto any surface using an ink-jet printer.