Monthly Archives: March 2018

New breed of memristors?

This new ‘breed’ of memristor (a component in brain-like/neuromorphic computing) is a kind of thin film. First, here’s an explanation of neuromorphic computing from the Finnish researchers looking into a new kind of memristor, from a January 10, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

The internet of things [IOT] is coming, that much we know. But still it won’t; not until we have components and chips that can handle the explosion of data that comes with IoT. In 2020, there will already be 50 billion industrial internet sensors in place all around us. A single autonomous device – a smart watch, a cleaning robot, or a driverless car – can produce gigabytes of data each day, whereas an airbus may have over 10 000 sensors in one wing alone.

Two hurdles need to be overcome. First, current transistors in computer chips must be miniaturized to the size of only few nanometres; the problem is they won’t work anymore then. Second, analysing and storing unprecedented amounts of data will require equally huge amounts of energy. Sayani Majumdar, Academy Fellow at Aalto University, along with her colleagues, is designing technology to tackle both issues.

Majumdar has with her colleagues designed and fabricated the basic building blocks of future components in what are called “neuromorphic” computers inspired by the human brain. It’s a field of research on which the largest ICT companies in the world and also the EU are investing heavily. Still, no one has yet come up with a nano-scale hardware architecture that could be scaled to industrial manufacture and use.

An Aalto University January 10, 2018 press release, which originated the news item, provides more detail about the work,

“The technology and design of neuromorphic computing is advancing more rapidly than its rival revolution, quantum computing. There is already wide speculation both in academia and company R&D about ways to inscribe heavy computing capabilities in the hardware of smart phones, tablets and laptops. The key is to achieve the extreme energy-efficiency of a biological brain and mimic the way neural networks process information through electric impulses,” explains Majumdar.

Basic components for computers that work like the brain

In their recent article in Advanced Functional Materials, Majumdar and her team show how they have fabricated a new breed of “ferroelectric tunnel junctions”, that is, few-nanometre-thick ferroelectric thin films sandwiched between two electrodes. They have abilities beyond existing technologies and bode well for energy-efficient and stable neuromorphic computing.

The junctions work in low voltages of less than five volts and with a variety of electrode materials – including silicon used in chips in most of our electronics. They also can retain data for more than 10 years without power and be manufactured in normal conditions.

Tunnel junctions have up to this point mostly been made of metal oxides and require 700 degree Celsius temperatures and high vacuums to manufacture. Ferroelectric materials also contain lead which makes them – and all our computers – a serious environmental hazard.

“Our junctions are made out of organic hydro-carbon materials and they would reduce the amount of toxic heavy metal waste in electronics. We can also make thousands of junctions a day in room temperature without them suffering from the water or oxygen in the air”, explains Majumdar.

What makes ferroelectric thin film components great for neuromorphic computers is their ability to switch between not only binary states – 0 and 1 – but a large number of intermediate states as well. This allows them to ‘memorise’ information not unlike the brain: to store it for a long time with minute amounts of energy and to retain the information they have once received – even after being switched off and on again.

We are no longer talking of transistors, but ‘memristors’. They are ideal for computation similar to that in biological brains.  Take for example the Mars 2020 Rover about to go chart the composition of another planet. For the Rover to work and process data on its own using only a single solar panel as an energy source, the unsupervised algorithms in it will need to use an artificial brain in the hardware.

“What we are striving for now, is to integrate millions of our tunnel junction memristors into a network on a one square centimetre area. We can expect to pack so many in such a small space because we have now achieved a record-high difference in the current between on and off-states in the junctions and that provides functional stability. The memristors could then perform complex tasks like image and pattern recognition and make decisions autonomously,” says Majumdar.

The probe-station device (the full instrument, left, and a closer view of the device connection, right) which measures the electrical responses of the basic components for computers mimicking the human brain. The tunnel junctions are on a thin film on the substrate plate. Photo: Tapio Reinekoski

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Electrode Dependence of Tunneling Electroresistance and Switching Stability in Organic Ferroelectric P(VDF-TrFE)-Based Tunnel Junctions by Sayani Majumdar, Binbin Chen, Qi Hang Qin, Himadri S. Majumdar, and Sebastiaan van Dijken. Advanced Functional Materials Vol. 28 Issue 2 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201703273 Version of Record online: 27 NOV 2017

© 2017 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

How small can a carbon nanotube get before it stops being ‘electrical’?

Research, which began as an attempt to get reproducible electronics (?) measurements, yielded some unexpected results according ta January 3, 2018 news item on phys.org,

Carbon nanotubes bound for electronics not only need to be as clean as possible to maximize their utility in next-generation nanoscale devices, but contact effects may limit how small a nano device can be, according to researchers at the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University [UK] in collaboration with researchers at Rice University [US].

ESRI Director Andrew Barron, also a professor at Rice University in the USA, and his team have figured out how to get nanotubes clean enough to obtain reproducible electronic measurements and in the process not only explained why the electrical properties of nanotubes have historically been so difficult to measure consistently, but have shown that there may be a limit to how “nano” future electronic devices can be using carbon nanotubes.

Swansea University Issued a January 3, 2018 press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains the work in more detail,

Like any normal wire, semiconducting nanotubes are progressively more resistant to current along their length. But conductivity measurements of nanotubes over the years have been anything but consistent. The ESRI team wanted to know why.

“We are interested in the creation of nanotube based conductors, and while people have been able to make wires their conduction has not met expectations. We were interested in determining the basic sconce behind the variability observed by other researchers.”

They discovered that hard-to-remove contaminants — leftover iron catalyst, carbon and water — could easily skew the results of conductivity tests. Burning them away, Barron said, creates new possibilities for carbon nanotubes in nanoscale electronics.

The new study appears in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

The researchers first made multiwalled carbon nanotubes between 40 and 200 nanometers in diameter and up to 30 microns long. They then either heated the nanotubes in a vacuum or bombarded them with argon ions to clean their surfaces.

They tested individual nanotubes the same way one would test any electrical conductor: By touching them with two probes to see how much current passes through the material from one tip to the other. In this case, their tungsten probes were attached to a scanning tunneling microscope.

In clean nanotubes, resistance got progressively stronger as the distance increased, as it should. But the results were skewed when the probes encountered surface contaminants, which increased the electric field strength at the tip. And when measurements were taken within 4 microns of each other, regions of depleted conductivity caused by contaminants overlapped, further scrambling the results.

“We think this is why there’s such inconsistency in the literature,” Barron said.

“If nanotubes are to be the next generation lightweight conductor, then consistent results, batch-to-batch, and sample-to-sample, is needed for devices such as motors and generators as well as power systems.”

Annealing the nanotubes in a vacuum above 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit) reduced surface contamination, but not enough to eliminate inconsistent results, they found. Argon ion bombardment also cleaned the tubes, but led to an increase in defects that degrade conductivity.

Ultimately they discovered vacuum annealing nanotubes at 500 degrees Celsius (932 Fahrenheit) reduced contamination enough to accurately measure resistance, they reported.

To now, Barron said, engineers who use nanotube fibers or films in devices modify the material through doping or other means to get the conductive properties they require. But if the source nanotubes are sufficiently decontaminated, they should be able to get the right conductivity by simply putting their contacts in the right spot.

“A key result of our work was that if contacts on a nanotube are less than 1 micron apart, the electronic properties of the nanotube changes from conductor to semiconductor, due to the presence of overlapping depletion zones” said Barron, “this has a potential limiting factor on the size of nanotube based electronic devices – this would limit the application of Moore’s law to nanotube devices.”

Chris Barnett of Swansea is lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Cathren Gowenlock and Kathryn Welsby, and Rice alumnus Alvin Orbaek White of Swansea. Barron is the Sêr Cymru Chair of Low Carbon Energy and Environment at Swansea and the Charles W. Duncan Jr.–Welch Professor of Chemistry and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice.

The Welsh Government Sêr Cymru National Research Network in Advanced Engineering and Materials, the Sêr Cymru Chair Program, the Office of Naval Research and the Robert A. Welch Foundation supported the research.

Rice University has published a January 4, 2018 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which is almost (95%) identical to the press release from Swansea. That’s a bit unusual as collaborating institutions usually like to focus on their unique contributions to the research, hence, multiple news/press releases.

Dexter Johnson, in a January 11, 2018 post on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website,  adds a detail or two while writing in an accessible style.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Spatial and Contamination-Dependent Electrical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes by Chris J. Barnett, Cathren E. Gowenlock, Kathryn Welsby, Alvin Orbaek White, and Andrew R. Barron. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b03390 Publication Date (Web): December 19, 2017

Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Brain-like computing and memory with magnetoresistance

This is an approach to brain-like computing that’s new (to me, anyway). From a January 9, 2018 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

From various magnetic tapes, floppy disks and computer hard disk drives, magnetic materials have been storing our electronic information along with our valuable knowledge and memories for well over half of a century.

In more recent years, the new types [sic] phenomena known as magnetoresistance, which is the tendency of a material to change its electrical resistance when an externally-applied magnetic field or its own magnetization is changed, has found its success in hard disk drive read heads, magnetic field sensors and the rising star in the memory technologies, the magnetoresistive random access memory.

A new discovery, led by researchers at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates the existence of a new kind of magnetoresistance involving topological insulators that could result in improvements in future computing and computer storage. The details of their research are published in the most recent issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications (“Unidirectional spin-Hall and Rashba-Edelstein magnetoresistance in topological insulator-ferromagnet layer heterostructures”).

This image illustrates the work,

The schematic figure illustrates the concept and behavior of magnetoresistance. The spins are generated in topological insulators. Those at the interface between ferromagnet and topological insulators interact with the ferromagnet and result in either high or low resistance of the device, depending on the relative directions of magnetization and spins. Credit: University of Minnesota

A January 9, 2018 University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering news release, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“Our discovery is one missing piece of the puzzle to improve the future of low-power computing and memory for the semiconductor industry, including brain-like computing and chips for robots and 3D magnetic memory,” said University of Minnesota Robert F. Hartmann Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jian-Ping Wang, director of the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Structures (C-SPIN) based at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study.

Emerging technology using topological insulators

While magnetic recording still dominates data storage applications, the magnetoresistive random access memory is gradually finding its place in the field of computing memory. From the outside, they are unlike the hard disk drives which have mechanically spinning disks and swinging heads—they are more like any other type of memory. They are chips (solid state) which you’d find being soldered on circuit boards in a computer or mobile device.

Recently, a group of materials called topological insulators has been found to further improve the writing energy efficiency of magnetoresistive random access memory cells in electronics. However, the new device geometry demands a new magnetoresistance phenomenon to accomplish the read function of the memory cell in 3D system and network.

Following the recent discovery of the unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance in a conventional metal bilayer material systems, researchers at the University of Minnesota collaborated with colleagues at Pennsylvania State University and demonstrated for the first time the existence of such magnetoresistance in the topological insulator-ferromagnet bilayers.

The study confirms the existence of such unidirectional magnetoresistance and reveals that the adoption of topological insulators, compared to heavy metals, doubles the magnetoresistance performance at 150 Kelvin (-123.15 Celsius). From an application perspective, this work provides the missing piece of the puzzle to create a proposed 3D and cross-bar type computing and memory device involving topological insulators by adding the previously missing or very inconvenient read functionality.

In addition to Wang, researchers involved in this study include Yang Lv, Delin Zhang and Mahdi Jamali from the University of Minnesota Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and James Kally, Joon Sue Lee and Nitin Samarth from Pennsylvania State University Department of Physics.

This research was funded by the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN) at the University of Minnesota, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corp. (MARCO) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Unidirectional spin-Hall and Rashba−Edelstein magnetoresistance in topological insulator-ferromagnet layer heterostructures by Yang Lv, James Kally, Delin Zhang, Joon Sue Lee, Mahdi Jamali, Nitin Samarth, & Jian-Ping Wang. Nature Communications 9, Article number: 111 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02491-3 Published online: 09 January 2018

This is an open access paper.

An exoskeleton for a cell-sized robot

A January 3, 2018 news item on phys.org announces work on cell-sized robots,

An electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing machine the size of a human cell? Is that even possible?

Cornell physicists Paul McEuen and Itai Cohen not only say yes, but they’ve actually built the “muscle” for one.

With postdoctoral researcher Marc Miskin at the helm, the team has made a robot exoskeleton that can rapidly change its shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in its environment. And, they claim, these microscale machines – equipped with electronic, photonic and chemical payloads – could become a powerful platform for robotics at the size scale of biological microorganisms.

“You could put the computational power of the spaceship Voyager onto an object the size of a cell,” Cohen said. “Then, where do you go explore?”

“We are trying to build what you might call an ‘exoskeleton’ for electronics,” said McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. “Right now, you can make little computer chips that do a lot of information-processing … but they don’t know how to move or cause something to bend.”

Cornell University has produced a video of the researchers discussing their work (about 3 mins. running time)

For those who prefer text or need it to reinforce their understanding, there’s a January 2, 2018 Cornell University news release (also on EurekAlert but dated Jan. 3, 2018) by Tom Fleischman, which originated the news item,

The machines move using a motor called a bimorph. A bimorph is an assembly of two materials – in this case, graphene and glass – that bends when driven by a stimulus like heat, a chemical reaction or an applied voltage. The shape change happens because, in the case of heat, two materials with different thermal responses expand by different amounts over the same temperature change.

As a consequence, the bimorph bends to relieve some of this strain, allowing one layer to stretch out longer than the other. By adding rigid flat panels that cannot be bent by bimorphs, the researchers localize bending to take place only in specific places, creating folds. With this concept, they are able to make a variety of folding structures ranging from tetrahedra (triangular pyramids) to cubes.

In the case of graphene and glass, the bimorphs also fold in response to chemical stimuli by driving large ions into the glass, causing it to expand. Typically this chemical activity only occurs on the very outer edge of glass when submerged in water or some other ionic fluid. Since their bimorph is only a few nanometers thick, the glass is basically all outer edge and very reactive.

“It’s a neat trick,” Miskin said, “because it’s something you can do only with these nanoscale systems.”

The bimorph is built using atomic layer deposition – chemically “painting” atomically thin layers of silicon dioxide onto aluminum over a cover slip – then wet-transferring a single atomic layer of graphene on top of the stack. The result is the thinnest bimorph ever made. One of their machines was described as being “three times larger than a red blood cell and three times smaller than a large neuron” when folded. Folding scaffolds of this size have been built before, but this group’s version has one clear advantage.

“Our devices are compatible with semiconductor manufacturing,” Cohen said. “That’s what’s making this compatible with our future vision for robotics at this scale.”

And due to graphene’s relative strength, Miskin said, it can handle the types of loads necessary for electronics applications. “If you want to build this electronics exoskeleton,” he said, “you need it to be able to produce enough force to carry the electronics. Ours does that.”

For now, these tiniest of tiny machines have no commercial application in electronics, biological sensing or anything else. But the research pushes the science of nanoscale robots forward, McEuen said.

“Right now, there are no ‘muscles’ for small-scale machines,” he said, “so we’re building the small-scale muscles.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Graphene-based bimorphs for micron-sized, autonomous origami machines by Marc Z. Miskin, Kyle J. Dorsey, Baris Bircan, Yimo Han, David A. Muller, Paul L. McEuen, and Itai Cohen. PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] 2018 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1712889115 published ahead of print January 2, 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Emergence in Toronto and Ottawa and brains in Vancouver (Canada): three April 2018 events

April 2018 is shaping up to be quite the month where art/sci events are concerned. I just published a March 27, 2018 posting titled ‘Curiosity collides with the quantum and with the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada in Vancouver (Canada)‘ and I’ve now received news about more happenings in Toronto and Ottawa.  Plus, there’s a science-themed meeting organized by ARPICO (Society of Italian Researchers &; Professionals in Western Canada) featuring brains and brain imaging in Vancouver.

Toronto’s and Ottawa’s Emergence

There’s an art/sci exhibit opening, from a March 27, 2018 Art/Sci Salon announcement (received via email),

You are invited!

FaceBook event:

The Oakwood Village Library and Arts Centre event:

341 Oakwood Avenue, Toronto, ON  M6E 2W1

I check the library webpage listed in the above and found this artist’s statement,

Artist / Scientist Statement [Stephen Morris]

I am interested in self-organized, emergent patterns and textures. I make images of patterns both from the natural world and of experiments in my laboratory in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. Patterns naturally attract casual attention but are also the subject of serious scientific research. Some things just evolve all by themselves into strikingly regular shapes and textures. Why? These shapes emerge spontaneously from a dynamic process of growing, folding, cracking, wrinkling, branching, flowing and other kinds of morphological development. My photos are informed by the scientific aesthetic of nonlinear physics, and celebrate the subtle interplay of order and complexity in emergent patterns. They are a kind of “Scientific Folk Art” of the science of Emergence.

While the official opening is April 5, 2018, the event itself runs from April 1 – 30, 2018.

Next, there’s another March 27, 2018 announcement (received via email) from the Art/Sci Salon but this one concerns a series of talks about ’emergence’, Note: Some of the event information was a little difficult to decipher so I’ve added a note to the relevant section).

What is Emergent Form?

Nature teems with self-organized forms that seem to spring spontaneously from the smooth background of things, by mechanisms that are not always apparent. Think of rippled sand on a beach or regular stripes in the clouds.  Plants, insects and animals exhibit spirals and spots and stripes in an exuberant riot of colours.  Fluid flows in amazingly regular swirls and eddies.  The emergence of form is ubiquitous, and presents a challenge and an inspiration to both artists and scientists. In mathematics, patterns appear as solutions of the nonlinear partial differential equations in the continuum limit of classical physics, chemistry and biology. In the arts and humanities, “emergent form” addresses the entangled ways in which humans, plants animals, microorganisms inevitably co-exist in the universe; the way that human intervention and natural transformation can generate new landscapes and new forms of life.

With Emergent Form, we want to question the idea of a fixed world.

For us, Emergent Form is not just a series of natural and human phenomena too complicated to understand, measure or predict, but also a concept to help us identify ways in which we can come to term with, and embrace their complexity as a source of inspiration.

Join us in Toronto and Ottawa for a series of interdisciplinary discussions, performances and exhibitions on Emergent Form on Apr 10, 11, 12 (Toronto) and Apr. 14 [2018] (Ottawa).

This series is the result of a collaboration among several parties. Each event of the series is different and has its dedicated RSVP 

Tue. Apr 10 The Fields Institute, 222 College Street

Emergent form: an interdisciplinary concept 6:00-8:00 pm Pier Luigi Capucci, Accademia di Belle Arti Urbino. Founder and director, Noemalab*, Charles Sowers, Independent artist and exhibit designer, the Exploratorium, Stephen Morris, Professor of of Physics University of Toronto, Ron Wild, smART Maps

CLICK HERE FOR MORE AND TO RSVP

Wed. Apr 11 The Fields Institute6:00-8:00 pm

Anatomy of an Interconnected SystemA Performative Lecture with Margherita Pevere, Aalto University, Helsinki

CLICK HERE FOR MORE AND TO RSVP

Thu. Apr 12 (Note: I believe that from 5 – 6 pm, you’re invited to see Pevere’s exhibit and then proceed to Luella Massey Studio Theatre for performances)

5:00 pm  Cabinets in the Koffler Student Centre [I believe this is at the University of Toronto] Anatomy of an Interconnected System An exhibition by Margherita Pevere

6:00 pm Luella Massey Studio Theatre, 4 Glen Morris Ave., Toronto biopoetriX – conFiGURing AI

6:00-8:00 pm Performance: 

6:00pm Performance “Corpus Nil. A Ritual of Birth for a Modified Body” conceived and performed by Marco Donnarumma

6.30pm LAB dance: Blitz media posters on labs in the arts, sciences and engineering

7.10pm Panel: Performing AI, hybrid media and humans in/as technologyMarco Donnarumma, Doug van Nort (Dispersion Lab, York U.), Jane Tingley (Stratford User Research & Gameful Experiences Lab –SURGE-, U of Waterloo), Angela Schoellig (Dynamic Systems Lab, U of T)

Panel animators: Antje Budde (Digital Dramaturgy Lab) and Roberta Buiani (ArtSci Salon)

8.15pm Reception at the Italian Cultural Institute, 496 Huron St, Toronto

CLICK HERE FOR MORE AND TO RSVP

Ottawa. Sat. Apr. 14 National Arts Centre, 1 Elgin Street11:00 am-1:00 pm

Emergent Form and complex phenomenaA creative panel discussion and surprise demonstrationsWith Pier Luigi Capucci, Margherita Pevere, Marco Donnarumma, Stephen Morris

CLICK HERE FOR MORE AND TO RSVP

This event would not be possible without the support of The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Science, The Italian Embassy, the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. Many thanks to our community partner BYOR (Bring your own Robot)

I wonder if some of the funding from Italy is in support of Italian Research in World Day. This is the inaugural year for the event, which will be held annually on April 15.

Vancouver’s brains

The Society of Italian Researchers and Professionals in Western Canada (ARPICO) is hosting an event in Vancouver (from a March 22, 2018 ARICO announcement received via email),

Our second speaking event of the year, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver, has been scheduled for Wednesday, April 11th, 2018 at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Professor Vesna Sossi’s talk will be examining how positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has contributed to better understanding of the brain function and disease with particular focus on Parkinson’s disease. You can read a summary of Prof. Sossi’s lecture as well as her short professional biography at the bottom of this message.

This event is organized in collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver to celebrate the newly instituted Italian Research in the World Day, as part of the Piano Straordinario “Vivere all’Italiana” – Giornata della ricerca Italiana nel mondo. You can read more on our website event page.

We look forward to seeing everyone there.

Please register for the event by visiting the EventBrite link or RSVPing to info@arpico.ca.

The evening agenda is as follows:

  • 6:45 pm – Doors Open
  • 7:00 pm – Lecture by Prof. Vesna Sossi
  • ~8:00 pm – Q & A Period
  • Mingling & Refreshments until about 9:30 pm

If you have not yet RSVP’d, please do so on our EventBrite page.

Further details are also available at arpico.ca, our facebook page, and Eventbrite.


Imaging: A Window into the Brain

Brain illness, comprising neurological disorders, mental illness and addiction, is considered the major health challenge in the 21st century with a socio-economic cost greater than cancer and cardiovascular disease combined. There are at least three unique challenges hampering brain disease management: relative inaccessibility, disease onset often preceding the onset of clinical symptoms by many years and overlap between clinical and pathological symptoms that makes accurate disease identification often difficult. This talk will give examples of how positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has contributed to better understanding of the brain function and disease with particular focus on Parkinson’s disease. Emphasis will be placed on the interplay between scientific discoveries and instrumentation and data analysis development as exemplified by the current understanding of the brain function as comprised by interactions between connectivity networks and neurochemistry and advancement in multi-modal imaging such as simultaneous PET and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Vesna Sossi is a Professor in the University of British Columbia (UBC) Physics and Astronomy Department and at the UBC Djavad Mowafaghian Center for Brain Health. She directs the UBC Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging centre, which is known for its use of imaging as applied to neurodegeneration with emphasis on Parkinson’s disease. Her main areas of interest comprise development of imaging methods to enhance the investigation of neurochemical mechanisms that lead to an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and mechanisms that contribute to treatment-related complications. She uses PET imaging to explore how alterations of the different neurotransmitter systems contribute to different trajectories of disease progression. Her other areas of interest are PET image analysis, instrumentation and multi-modal, multi-parameter data analysis. She published more than 180 peer review papers, is funded by several granting agencies, including the Michael J Fox Foundation, and sits on several national and international review panels.


WHEN: Wednesday, April 11th, 2018 at 7:00pm (doors open at 6:45pm)
WHERE: Roundhouse Community Centre, Room B – 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2W3
RSVP: Please RSVP at EventBrite (https://imaging-a-window-into-the-brain.eventbrite.ca) or email info@arpico.ca


Tickets are Needed

  • Tickets are FREE, but all individuals are requested to obtain “free-admission” tickets on EventBrite site due to limited seating at the venue. Organizers need accurate registration numbers to manage wait lists and prepare name tags.
  • All ARPICO events are 100% staffed by volunteer organizers and helpers, however, room rental, stationery, and guest refreshments are costs incurred and underwritten by members of ARPICO. Therefore to be fair, all audience participants are asked to donate to the best of their ability at the door or via EventBrite to “help” defray costs of the event.

You can find directions for the Roundhouse Community Centre here

I have one idle question. What’s going to happen these groups if Canadians change their use of  Facebook or abandon the platform as they are threatening to do in the face of Cambridge Analytica’s use of their data? A March 25, 2018 article on huffingtonpost.ca outlines the latest about Canadians’ reaction to the Cambridge Analytical news according to an Angus Reid poll,

A survey by Angus Reid Institute suggests 73 per cent of Canadian Facebook users say they will make changes, while 27 per cent say it will be “business as usual.”

Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) said they would use Facebook less in the future, and 41 per cent of users said they would check and/or change their privacy settings.

The survey also found that one in 10 say they plan to abandon the platform, at least temporarily.

Facebook has been under fire for its ability to protect user privacy after Cambridge Analytica was accused of lifting the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

There you have it.

*Well, a bit more information about one of the “Emergent’ speakers was received in an April 4, 2018 ArtSci Salon email announcement,

Do make sure to check out Pier Luigi Capucci’s EU-based (but with international breadth) Noemalab platform. https://noemalab.eu/ since the mid-nineties, this platform has been an important node of information for New Media Art and the relation between the arts and science.

noemalab’s blog regularly hosts reviews of events and conferences occurring around the world, including  the Subtle Technologies Festival between 2007 and 2014. you can search its archives here http://blogs.noemalab.eu/

Capucci has been writing several reflections on emergent forms of Life and theorized what he called the “third life”. See a recent essay https://noemalab.eu/memo/events/evolutionary-creativity-the-inner-life-and-meaning-of-art/ here is a picture which I would love him to explain during Emergent Form. Intrigued? come listen to him!

EuroScience Open Forum in Toulouse, France from July 9 to July 14, 2018

A March 22, 2018 EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2018 announcement (received via email) trumpets some of the latest news for this event being held July 9 to July 14, 2018 in Toulouse, France. (Located in the south in the region known as the Occitanie, it’s the fourth largest city in France. Toulouse is situated on the River Garonne. See more in its Wikipedia entry.) Here’s the latest from the announcement,

ESOF 2018 Plenary Sessions

Top speakers and hot topics confirmed for the Plenary Sessions at ESOF 2018

Lorna Hughes, Professor at the University of Glasgow, Chair of the Europeana Research Advisory Board, will give a plenary keynote on “Digital humanities”. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, famous for his PLoS Medicine paper on “Why most Published Research Findings are False”, will talk about “Reproducibility”. A third plenary will involve Marìa Teresa Ruiz, a Chilean astronomer and the 2017 L’Oreal UNESCO award for Women in Science: she will talk about exoplanets.

 

ESOF under the spotlights

French President’s high patronage: ESOF is at the top of the institutional agendas in 2018.

“Sharing science”. But also putting science at the highest level making it a real political and societal issue in a changing world. ESOF 2018 has officially received the “High Patronage” from the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron. ESOF 2018 has also been listed by the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs among the 27 priority events for France.

A constellation of satellites around the ESOF planet!

Second focus on Satellite events:
4th GEO Blue Planet Symposium organised 4-6 July by Mercator Ocean.
ECSJ 2018, 5th European Conference of Science Journalists, co-organised by the French Association of Science Journalists in the News Press (AJSPI) and the Union of European Science Journalists’ Associations (EUSJA) on 8 July.
– Esprit de Découvertes (Discovery spirit) organised by the Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Toulouse on 8 July.

More Satellite events to come! Don’t forget to stay long enough in order to participate in these focused Satellite Events and … to discover the city.

The programme for ESOF 2018 can be found here.

Science meets poetry

As has become usual, there is a European City of Science event being held in Toulouse in concert (more or less) with and in celebration of the ESOF event. The City of Science event is being held from July 7 – July 16, 2018.

Organizers have not announced much in the way of programming for the City of Science other than a ‘Science meets Poetry’ meeting,

A unique feature of ESOF is the Science meets Poetry day, which is held at every Forum and brings poets and scientists together.

Indeed, there is today a real artistic movement of poets connected with ESOF. Famous participants from earlier meetings include contributors such as the late Seamus Heaney, Roald Hoffmann [sic] Jean-Pierre Luminet and Prince Henrik of Denmark, but many young and aspiring poets are also involved.

The meeting is in two parts:

  • lectures on subjects involving science with poetry
  • a poster session for contributed poems

There are competitions associated with the event and every Science meets Poetry day gives rise to the publication of Proceedings in book form.

In Toulouse, the event will be staged by EuroScience in collaboration with the Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, the Société des Poètes Français and the European Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters, under patronage of UNESCO. The full programme will be announced later, but includes such themes as a celebration of the number 7 in honour of the seven Troubadours of Toulouse, who held the first Jeux Floraux in the year 1323, Space Travel and the first poets and scientists who wrote about it (including Cyrano de Bergerac and Johannes Kepler), from Metrodorus and Diophantes of Alexandria to Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Poetry of Ecology, Lafayette’s ship the Hermione seen from America and many other thought-provoking subjects.

The meeting will be held in the Hôtel d’Assézat, one of the finest old buildings of the ancient city of Toulouse.

Exceptionally, it will be open to registered participants from ESOF and also to some members of the public within the limits of available space.

Tentative Programme for the Science meets Poetry day on the 12th of July 2018

(some Speakers are still to be confirmed)

  • 09:00 – 09:30 A welcome for the poets : The legendary Troubadours of Toulouse and the poetry of the number 7 (Philippe Dazet-Brun, Académie des Jeux Floraux)
  • 09:30 – 10:00 The science and the poetry of violets from Toulouse (Marie-Thérèse Esquerré-Tugayé  Laboratoire de Recherche en Sciences Végétales, Université Toulouse III-CNRS)
  • 10:00 –10:30  The true Cyrano de Bergerac, gascon poet, and his celebrated travels to the Moon (Jean-Charles Dorge, Société des Poètes Français)
  • 10:30 – 11:00  Coffee Break (with poems as posters)
  • 11:00 – 11:30 Kepler the author and the imaginary travels of the famous astronomer to the Moon. (Uli Rothfuss, die Kogge International Society of German-language authors )
  • 11:30 – 12:00  Spoutnik and Space in Russian Literature (Alla-Valeria Mikhalevitch, Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences  Saint-Petersburg)
  • 12:00 – 12:30  Poems for the planet Mars (James Philip Kotsybar, the ‘Bard of Mars’, California and NASA USA)
  • 12:30 – 14:00  Lunch and meetings of the Juries of poetry competitions
  • 14:00 – 14:30  The voyage of the Hermione and « Lafayette, here we come ! » seen by an American poet (Nick Norwood, University of Columbus Ohio)
  • 14:30 –  15:00 Alexandria, Toulouse and Oxford : the poem rendered by Eutrope and Fermat’s Last Theorem (Chaunes [Jean-Patrick Connerade], European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, UNESCO)
  • 15:00 –15:30  How biology is celebrated in contemporary poetry (Assumpcio Forcada, biologist and poet from Barcelona)
  • 15:30 – 16:00  A book of poems around ecology : a central subject in modern poetry (Sam Illingworth, Metropolitan University of Manchester)
  • 16:00 – 16:30  Coffee break (with poems as posters)
  • 16:30 – 17:00 Toulouse and Europe : poetry at the crossroads of European Languages (Stefka Hrusanova (Bulgarian Academy and Linguaggi-Di-Versi)
  • 17:00 – 17:30 Round Table : seven poets from Toulouse give their views on the theme : Languages, invisible frontiers within both science and poetry
  • 17:30 – 18:00 The winners of the poetry competitions are announced
  • 18:00 – 18:15 Chaunes. Closing remarks

I’m fascinated as in all the years I’ve covered the European City of Science events I’ve never before tripped across a ‘Science meets Poetry’ meeting. Sadly, there’s no contact information for those organizers. However, you can sign up for a newsletter and there are contacts for the larger event, European City of Science or as they are calling it in Toulouse, the Science in the City Festival,

Contact

Camille Rossignol (Toulouse Métropole)

camille.rossignol@toulouse-metropole.fr

+33 (0)5 36 25 27 83

François Lafont (ESOF 2018 / So Toulouse)

francois.lafont@toulouse2018.esof.eu

+33 (0)5 61 14 58 47

Travel grants for media types

One last note and this is for journalists. It’s still possible to apply for a travel grant, which helps ease but not remove the pain of travel expenses. From the ESOF 2018 Media Travel Grants webpage,

ESOF 2018 – ECSJ 2018 Travel Grants

The 5th European Conference of Science Journalists (ECSJ2018) is offering 50 travel + accommodation grants of up to 400€ to international journalists interested in attending ECSJ and ESOF.

We are looking for active professional journalists who cover science or science policy regularly (not necessarily exclusively), with an interest in reflecting on their professional practices and ethics. Applicants can be freelancers or staff, and can work for print, web, or broadcast media.

More information

ESOF 2018 Nature Travel Grants

Springer Nature is a leading research, educational and professional publisher, providing quality content to its communities through a range of innovative platforms, products and services and is home of trusted brands including Nature Research.

Nature Research has supported ESOF since its very first meeting in 2004 and is funding the Nature Travel Grant Scheme for journalists to attend ESOF2018 with the aim of increasing the impact of ESOF. The Nature Travel Grant Scheme offers a lump sum of £400 for journalists based in Europe and £800 for journalists based outside of Europe, to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation to attend ESOF2018.

More information

Good luck!

(My previous posting about this ESOF 2018 was Sept. 4, 2017 [scroll down about 50% of the way] should you be curious.)

Curiosity collides with the quantum and with the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada in Vancouver (Canada)

There are a couple of events coming up in April and an opportunity to submit your work for inclusion in a Curiosity Collider event or two. There’s also a Science Writers and Communicators conference being held from April 12 – 15, 2018. All of this is happening in Vancouver, Canada.

Curiosity Collider events, etc.

Colliding with the Quantum

From a March 23, 2018 announcement (received via email) from CuriosityCollider.org,

MOA [Museum of Anthropology] Night Shift: Quantum Futures

In the quantum realm, what is observable and what is not? What happens when we mix art and science? 

Join us at UBC Museum of Anthropology on the evening of April 5 [2018] and immerse yourself in quantum physics through dance, spoken word, projection sculpture, virtual reality, and hands-on activities.

This event is curated by Curiosity Collider Art-Science Foundation with collaborations from UBC Physics & Astronomy and Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute.

Let us know you are coming on Facebook | See list of participating artists/scientists

For anyone who needs directions, clicking on this UBC Museum of Anthropology link for Getting Here should help.

I wanted a few more details about the event and found them on Curiosity Collider’s Night Shift webpage,

Doors/Bar/Art & Science Activities 6 pm | Live Show 7:30 pm | Entry with museum admission ($10; free for UBC students & staff, Indigenous peoples, children under 6, and MOA Members)| Family Friendly

This event is curated by Curiosity Collider Creative Managing Director Char Hoyt.

The artwork gathered together for this event is a delightful blending of some of the most famous theories in Quantum Mechanics with both traditional and new artistic practices. When science is filtered through a creative expression it can both inspire and reveal new ways of seeing and understanding the concepts within. Our performers have crafted thoughtful experiences through dance, spoken word, sound, and light, that express the weirdness of the quantum realm and how it is reflected in our daily lives. We have also worked closely with scientists to develop hands-on activities that embody the same principles to create experiences that engage your creativity in understanding the quantum world. We encourage you to interact with the artists and scientists and let their work guide you through the quantum realm.

Participating artists and scientists

Most of these folks are associated with the Quantum Matter Institute.

Call for submissions

From a March 23, 2018 announcement (received via email) from CuriosityCollider.org,

Call for Submissions:
Women in STEM Exhibition

Interstitial: Science Innovations by Canadian Women is a two-week exhibition (June 1-14) and events showcasing work by female artists featuring women in STEM. We are looking for one more 2D artist/illustrator to join the exhibition and will accept existing work. Deadline April 6. To submit, visit our website.

This exhibition is funded by the Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science and Technology (WWEST) and eng-cite.

#Sciart & #Scicomm at Science World on April 12, 2018 (a Science Writers and Communicators of Canada [SWCC] reception)

From a March 23, 2018 announcement (received via email) from CuriosityCollider.org,

#Sciart & #Scicomm at Science World

On April 12, Curiosity Collider is bringing art+science to the Science Writers and Communications of Canada Annual Conference here in Vancouver. The public evening event will include performances and activities by Curiosity Collider, Science Slam, Beaker Head (Alberta) [sic], and SFU (Simon Fraser University) Faculty of Applied Science. We will also be hosting a silent auction to showcase local #sciart and support future art+science project, including our annual exhibition SPARK!

Get your tickets now! | Let us know you are coming on Facebook

I found more information about this event at something called allevents.in/vancouver,

SciComm Social with SWCC and STAN

Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC) and Science Technology Awareness Network (STAN) are hosting their annual conferences in Vancouver in April. This joint reception event featuring #scicomm and #sciart is free for conference delegates and also open to the public … . [emphasis mine]

Friends, family, and fans of science communication & communicators welcome!

This evening event will include performances and activities from:
* Beakerhead – Power Point Karaoke, hosted by Banff SciComm/Beakerhead alumni: A deck of slides is provided. Brave participants, who have never seen the slides before, improvise the talk. Hilarity ensues, egged on by an enthusiastic audience.
* Curiosity Collider – #sciart silent auction, stage performances, and art installation
* SFU Applied Sciences – interactive technology exhibits
* Science Slam Canada – Whether it’s a talk, a poem, a song, a dance, or something completely unexpected, the possibilities are endless. Our only two rules? Five minute slams, and no slideshows allowed!

Get your tickets – available until April 10! This is a 19+ event. Performances starting at 7:30, doors at 7 pm.

Weirdly, no mention is made of the cost. Tickets are $25. for anyone who’s not attending the conference and you can register for and purchase your ticket here. As for location, this event is being held at Science World at Telus World of Science (known locally as Science World), here’s where you find directions for how to get to Science World.

Science Writers and Communicators Conference in Vancouver from April 12 – 15, 2018

Before getting to the costs here a couple of peeks at the programme. First, there’s a March 25, 2018 posting on the SWCC blog by Ashley EM Miller about one of the conference sessions,

Art can be a way to engage the public with science through the the simple fact that novelty sparks curiosity. Artists in the emerging field of sci-art utilize science concepts, methods, principles and information within their practice. Their art, along with the work of science illustrators, can facilitate a deeper emotional connection to science, particularly in those who don’t regularly pay attention or feel welcome.

However, using artwork in science communication is not as simple as inserting a picture into a body of text and referencing the artist in MLA style.

For those coming from the sciences, citing your sources, as laborious as that may be, is a given. While that is fine for incorporating  information, that isn’t always adequate for artwork. In the art world, artists know how to ask other artists to use their work. If a scientist or science communicator does not have an “in” with the art community, they may not know where to find legal information about using art.


Anyone interested in using artwork in their science communication practice, should attend the upcoming SWCC conference’s professional development session “On Copyright, Ethics and Attribution: Interdisciplinary Collaborations Between Artists and Scientists”. The panel discussion will be moderated by Theresa Liao of Curiosity Collider and Sarah Louadi of Voirelia, both of whom are intimately familiar with combining art and science in their respective organizations. Sarah and Theresa will lead a much-needed conversation about the benefits and best practices of partnerships between artists and science communicators.


The session boasts a well-rounded panel. Attendees will gain insights on aspects of the art world with panelists Kate Campbell, a science illustrator, and Steven J. Barnes, a psychologist and artist. Legal and ethical considerations will be provided by Lawrence Chan, an intellectual property lawyer, and April Britski, the National Executive Director of Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC). For those unfamiliar, CARFAC is a federal organization that acts as a voice for visual artists in Canada and outlines minimum fee guidelines among other things.

Science communicators and bloggers will certainly benefit from the session, particularly early-career freelancers. When working independently, there are no organizational policies and procedures in place for you to follow. It means that you have to check everything yourself, and this session will give you a crash course of what to look for in artist collaborations, what to ask and how to ask it. Even researchers will benefit from the discussion, by learning about the opportunities for working with science illustrators and about what to expect.


On Copyright, Ethics and Attribution: Interdisciplinary Collaborations Between Artists and Scientists”. will take place at 3:15 pm on Saturday April 14th as part of the conference’s concurrent Professional Development sessions. …

There’s a programme schedule for the 2018 conference here and it includes both an “At a glance’ version and a more fulsome description of the various sessions such as these,

THURSDAY APRIL 12

Act your Science – Interactive Improvisation Training

10:00 am – 12:00 pm Innovation Lab

Come and share a taste of a communication program developed by Jeff Dunn, in collaboration with SWCC, the Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary and the University of Calgary. The goal of this presentation is to provide a taste of how improvisation can be used to improve communication skills in science fields. This hands-on exercise will help participants build capacity to communicate science to various audiences by learning how to fail gracefully in public (to help reduce presentation anxiety), how to connect with your audience and how to recognize and use status in personal interactions.

The full program is 10hrs of training, in this shorter session, we will sample the program in a fun interactive environment. Be prepared to release your inner thespian. Space is limited to 20 people

Jeff Dunn has been a research scientist in brain and imaging for over 30 years. He has a strong interest in mentoring science trainees to broaden their career skills and has recently been developing programs to improve science communication. One class, gaining traction, is “Act your Science”, a custom designed course using improvisation to improving science communication skills for science trainees. He is an alumni of the Banff Science Communication program where he first experienced improvisation training for science. He has held a Canada Research Chair and has Directed the Experimental Imaging Centre at the University of Calgary since 2004. He has over 150 science publications in diverse journals ranging from Polar Biology to the Journal of Neurotrauma. He has supervised scores of graduate students and taught on subjects including MRI, optical imaging and brain physiology at altitude. His imaging research currently includes multiple sclerosis, brain cancer and concussion.

Video Booth: How I SciComm – go ahead and tell all, we want to know! 

 Available 10:am – 2:30pm: Exploration Lab

A camera team will be on hand to help you record and upload your 1 minute video about who you are, and how you do your science communications. Here are some questions for you to think about:

1. Who are you?

2. How do you do your science communications?

3. What’s your favourite science trivia? What’s something cool you learned when researching a storyWhat’s your favourite jargon? What’s a word you had to memorizing pronunciation or spelling for a story

A Community of Innovators: 50 Years of TRIUMF

2:30 -3:30 pm  Science Theatre

 

Ask TRIUMF’s spirited founders and emeriti about the humble beginnings of Canada’s particle accelerator centre and you will invariably hear: “This used to be just a big pile of dirt.” You could imagine TRIUMF’s founding members five decades ago standing at the edge of the empty lot nestled between the forest and the sea, contemplating possibilities. But not even TRIUMF’s founders could have imagined the twists and turns of the lab’s 50-year journey, nor the impact that the lab would have on the people of Canada and the world.

Today, on that same 12.8-acre plot of land, TRIUMF houses world-leading research and technology, and fuels Canada’s collective imagination for the future of particle and nuclear physics and accelerator science. Join TRIUMF’s Director Jonathan Bagger and colleagues for an exploration of TRIUMF’s origins, impacts, and possibilities – a story of collaboration that over five decades celebrates a multifaceted community and growing family of 20 Canadian member universities and partners from around the world. www.triumf50.com  @TRIUMFlab

FRIDAY, APRIL 13 

Frontiers in SciComm Policy & Practice

Canada 2067 – Building a national vision for STEM learning

10:30 Room 1900

Canada 2067 is an ambitious initiative to develop a national vision and goals for youth learning in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Significant and scalable changes in education can be achieved by aligning efforts towards shared goals that support all children and youth in Canada.  A draft framework has been developed that builds on research into global policy, broad-based public input, five youth summits, consultation with millennials and a national leadership conference. It calls for action by diverse stakeholders including students, educators, parents, community organizations, industry and all levels of governments.  In this workshop, participants will learn about the initiative and discuss the inherent challenges of catalyzing education change in Canada. Participants will also review the framework and provide feedback that will be incorporated into the final version of the Canada 2067 framework. Input into the design of phase 2 will also be encouraged.

Bonnie Schmidt, C.M., Ph.D.

Founder and President, Let’s Talk Science

Dr. Bonnie Schmidt is the founder and president of Let’s Talk Science, a national charitable organization that helps Canadian youth prepare for future careers and citizenship roles by supporting their engagement in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Annually, Let’s Talk Science is accessed by more than 40% of schools in over 1,700 communities, impacting nearly 1 million youth. More than 3,500 volunteers at 45 post-secondary sites form our world-class outreach network. Bonnie currently serves as Chair of the National Leadership Taskforce on Education & Skills for the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) and is on the Board of Governors of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015 and has received an Honorary Doctorate (Ryerson University), the Purvis Memorial Award (Chemical Institute of Canada), Community Service Award (Life Sciences Ontario), and a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Award. @BMSchmidt

Infographics: Worth a Thousand Words with Kate Broadly and Sonya Odsen

1:15 Room 1520

Infographics have become a popular way to present results to non-specialist audiences, and they are a very effective tool for sharing science on social platforms. Infographics are more likely to be shared online, where they increase engagement with scientific content on platforms like Twitter.

No art skills? No problem! This session will guide you through the process of creating your own infographic, from crafting your story to telling that story visually, and will include strategies to design effective visuals without having to draw (unless you want to!). Topics will include developing your key messages, making your visuals functional rather than decorative, tips for giving your visuals a professional edge, and the best software options for each artistic skill level. Our goal is to empower you to create a visually-pleasing infographic regardless of your art or drawing experience. At the end of this active session, you will have a draft of your own unique infographic ready to be made digital.

The skills you develop during this session will be readily transferable to other visual media, such as talks, posters, or even creating visuals for blog posts.

Kate Broadley

Sonya Odsen

Kate Broadley and Sonya Odsen are Science Communicators with Fuse Consulting. Located in Edmonton, Alberta, Fuse is dedicated to communicating cutting-edge research to different audiences in creative and innovative ways. Their ultimate goal is to bring knowledge to life and empower audiences to apply that knowledge in policy, conservation, research, and their day-to-day lives. Every day, Kate and Sonya tackle complex topics and transform them for specific audiences through writing and design. Infographics are one of their favourite tools for conveying information in fun and accessible ways. Their past and current design projects include interpretive signage for Nature Conservancy Canada, twitter-optimized visual abstracts for the Applied Conservation Ecology lab at the University of Alberta, and a series of science-inspired holiday cards. You can see examples of their work at http://www.fuseconsulting.ca/see-our-work/. Kate and Sonya are also ecologists by training, each holding an M.Sc. from the University of Alberta.

Should this excite your interest,  get going as registration ends March 29, 2018. Here are the rates and the registration link is at the end,

Everyone is Welcome

RATES

Early Bird Registration

SWCC Members: $300

Non-members: $400

Regular Registration 

SWCC Members: $400

  Non-members: $500

Student Rates

SWCC student members: $150

Non-member students: $200

Beakerhead Course: $500

(includes day rate + course fee)

Day Rate: $150

Victoria Half Day Rate: $75

Snorkel Safari: snorkeler $120

Snorkel Safari: ride along $90

Social Evening, April 12

  TELUS Science World, 7:00-10:00pm additional single event tickets: $25.00 (limited)

DATES

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION OPENS: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2018

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION CLOSES: FRIDAY MARCH 9, 2018

REGISTRATION FINAL DEADLINE: THURSDAY MARCH 29, 2018

Conference Dates

April 12, TELUS Science World with STAN

April 13 & 14, SFU Harbour Centre

April 15, Vancouver tours & Victoria day Royal BC Museum

Travel and Accommodation information is available here

Register Here

Have fun!

Café Scientifique Vancouver (Canada) talk on March 27, 2018: Everything I Needed To Know In Life I Learned From a Shark

From a March 6, 2018 Café Scientifique notice (received via email,

Our next café will happen on TUESDAY, MARCH 27TH at 7:30PM in the back
room at YAGGER'S DOWNTOWN (433 W Pender). Our speaker for the
evening will be DR. DAVID SHIFFMAN, Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research
Fellow at Simon Fraser University, where he studies the sustainability
of shark fisheries. David is an award-winning science communicator with
bylines in the Washington Post, Slate, and Gizmodo, and has been
interviewed for over 200 media outlets including National Public Radio
and the New York Times.

EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW IN LIFE I LEARNED FROM A SHARK

Sharks are some of the most fascinating and misunderstood animals on
the planet. Come learn from SFU marine conservation biologist Dr. David
Shiffman about lessons learned from a life obsessed with sharks.

I dug up a bit more about Shiffman; he has his own website, a Twitter feed, and a number of blog postings at southernfriedscience.com.

How to get people to trust artificial intelligence

Vyacheslav Polonski’s (University of Oxford researcher) January 10, 2018 piece (originally published Jan. 9, 2018 on The Conversation) on phys.org isn’t a gossip article although there are parts that could be read that way. Before getting to what I consider the juicy bits (Note: Links have been removed),

Artificial intelligence [AI] can already predict the future. Police forces are using it to map when and where crime is likely to occur [Note: See my Nov. 23, 2017 posting about predictive policing in Vancouver for details about the first Canadian municipality to introduce the technology]. Doctors can use it to predict when a patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying to give AI imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences.

Many decisions in our lives require a good forecast, and AI agents are almost always better at forecasting than their human counterparts. Yet for all these technological advances, we still seem to deeply lack confidence in AI predictions. Recent cases show that people don’t like relying on AI and prefer to trust human experts, even if these experts are wrong.

The part (juicy bits) that satisfied some of my long held curiosity was this section on Watson and its life as a medical adjunct (Note: Links have been removed),

IBM’s attempt to promote its supercomputer programme to cancer doctors (Watson for Onology) was a PR [public relations] disaster. The AI promised to deliver top-quality recommendations on the treatment of 12 cancers that accounted for 80% of the world’s cases. As of today, over 14,000 patients worldwide have received advice based on its calculations.

But when doctors first interacted with Watson they found themselves in a rather difficult situation. On the one hand, if Watson provided guidance about a treatment that coincided with their own opinions, physicians did not see much value in Watson’s recommendations. The supercomputer was simply telling them what they already know, and these recommendations did not change the actual treatment. This may have given doctors some peace of mind, providing them with more confidence in their own decisions. But IBM has yet to provide evidence that Watson actually improves cancer survival rates.

On the other hand, if Watson generated a recommendation that contradicted the experts’ opinion, doctors would typically conclude that Watson wasn’t competent. And the machine wouldn’t be able to explain why its treatment was plausible because its machine learning algorithms were simply too complex to be fully understood by humans. Consequently, this has caused even more mistrust and disbelief, leading many doctors to ignore the seemingly outlandish AI recommendations and stick to their own expertise.

As a result, IBM Watson’s premier medical partner, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, recently announced it was dropping the programme. Similarly, a Danish hospital reportedly abandoned the AI programme after discovering that its cancer doctors disagreed with Watson in over two thirds of cases.

The problem with Watson for Oncology was that doctors simply didn’t trust it. Human trust is often based on our understanding of how other people think and having experience of their reliability. …

It seems to me there might be a bit more to the doctors’ trust issues and I was surprised it didn’t seem to have occurred to Polonski. Then I did some digging (from Polonski’s webpage on the Oxford Internet Institute website),

Vyacheslav Polonski (@slavacm) is a DPhil [PhD] student at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research interests are located at the intersection of network science, media studies and social psychology. Vyacheslav’s doctoral research examines the adoption and use of social network sites, focusing on the effects of social influence, social cognition and identity construction.

Vyacheslav is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum. He was awarded the Master of Science degree with Distinction in the Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford in 2013. He also obtained the Bachelor of Science degree with First Class Honours in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2012.

Vyacheslav was honoured at the British Council International Student of the Year 2011 awards, and was named UK’s Student of the Year 2012 and national winner of the Future Business Leader of the Year 2012 awards by TARGETjobs.

Previously, he has worked as a management consultant at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and gained further work experience at the World Economic Forum, PwC, Mars, Bertelsmann and Amazon.com. Besides, he was involved in several start-ups as part of the 2012 cohort of Entrepreneur First and as part of the founding team of the London office of Rocket Internet. Vyacheslav was the junior editor of the bi-lingual book ‘Inspire a Nation‘ about Barack Obama’s first presidential election campaign. In 2013, he was invited to be a keynote speaker at the inaugural TEDx conference of IE University in Spain to discuss the role of a networked mindset in everyday life.

Vyacheslav is fluent in German, English and Russian, and is passionate about new technologies, social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, philosophy and modern art.

Research interests

Network science, social network analysis, online communities, agency and structure, group dynamics, social interaction, big data, critical mass, network effects, knowledge networks, information diffusion, product adoption

Positions held at the OII

  • DPhil student, October 2013 –
  • MSc Student, October 2012 – August 2013

Polonski doesn’t seem to have any experience dealing with, participating in, or studying the medical community. Getting a doctor to admit that his or her approach to a particular patient’s condition was wrong or misguided runs counter to their training and, by extension, the institution of medicine. Also, one of the biggest problems in any field is getting people to change and it’s not always about trust. In this instance, you’re asking a doctor to back someone else’s opinion after he or she has rendered theirs. This is difficult even when the other party is another human doctor let alone a form of artificial intelligence.

If you want to get a sense of just how hard it is to get someone to back down after they’ve committed to a position, read this January 10, 2018 essay by Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. This is just one of the cases (Note: Links have been removed),

Davontae Sanford was 14 years old when he confessed to murdering four people in a drug house on Detroit’s East Side. Left alone with detectives in a late-night interrogation, Sanford says he broke down after being told he could go home if he gave them “something.” On the advice of a lawyer whose license was later suspended for misconduct, Sanders pleaded guilty in the middle of his March 2008 trial and received a sentence of 39 to 92 years in prison.

Sixteen days after Sanford was sentenced, a hit man named Vincent Smothers told the police he had carried out 12 contract killings, including the four Sanford had pleaded guilty to committing. Smothers explained that he’d worked with an accomplice, Ernest Davis, and he provided a wealth of corroborating details to back up his account. Smothers told police where they could find one of the weapons used in the murders; the gun was recovered and ballistics matched it to the crime scene. He also told the police he had used a different gun in several of the other murders, which ballistics tests confirmed. Once Smothers’ confession was corroborated, it was clear Sanford was innocent. Smothers made this point explicitly in an 2015 affidavit, emphasizing that Sanford hadn’t been involved in the crimes “in any way.”

Guess what happened? (Note: Links have been removed),

But Smothers and Davis were never charged. Neither was Leroy Payne, the man Smothers alleged had paid him to commit the murders. …

Davontae Sanford, meanwhile, remained behind bars, locked up for crimes he very clearly didn’t commit.

Police failed to turn over all the relevant information in Smothers’ confession to Sanford’s legal team, as the law required them to do. When that information was leaked in 2009, Sanford’s attorneys sought to reverse his conviction on the basis of actual innocence. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy fought back, opposing the motion all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. In 2014, the court sided with Worthy, ruling that actual innocence was not a valid reason to withdraw a guilty plea [emphasis mine]. Sanford would remain in prison for another two years.

Doctors are just as invested in their opinions and professional judgments as lawyers  (just like  the prosecutor and the judges on the Michigan Supreme Court) are.

There is one more problem. From the doctor’s (or anyone else’s perspective), if the AI is making the decisions, why do he/she need to be there? At best it’s as if AI were turning the doctor into its servant or, at worst, replacing the doctor. Polonski alludes to the problem in one of his solutions to the ‘trust’ issue (Note: A link has been removed),

Research suggests involving people more in the AI decision-making process could also improve trust and allow the AI to learn from human experience. For example,one study showed people were given the freedom to slightly modify an algorithm felt more satisfied with its decisions, more likely to believe it was superior and more likely to use it in the future.

Having input into the AI decision-making process somewhat addresses one of the problems but the commitment to one’s own judgment even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a perennially thorny problem. The legal case mentioned here earlier is clearly one where the contrarian is wrong but it’s not always that obvious. As well, sometimes, people who hold out against the majority are right.

US Army

Getting back to building trust, it turns out the US Army Research Laboratory is also interested in transparency where AI is concerned (from a January 11, 2018 US Army news release on EurekAlert),

U.S. Army Research Laboratory [ARL] scientists developed ways to improve collaboration between humans and artificially intelligent agents in two projects recently completed for the Autonomy Research Pilot Initiative supported by the Office of Secretary of Defense. They did so by enhancing the agent transparency [emphasis mine], which refers to a robot, unmanned vehicle, or software agent’s ability to convey to humans its intent, performance, future plans, and reasoning process.

“As machine agents become more sophisticated and independent, it is critical for their human counterparts to understand their intent, behaviors, reasoning process behind those behaviors, and expected outcomes so the humans can properly calibrate their trust [emphasis mine] in the systems and make appropriate decisions,” explained ARL’s Dr. Jessie Chen, senior research psychologist.

The U.S. Defense Science Board, in a 2016 report, identified six barriers to human trust in autonomous systems, with ‘low observability, predictability, directability and auditability’ as well as ‘low mutual understanding of common goals’ being among the key issues.

In order to address these issues, Chen and her colleagues developed the Situation awareness-based Agent Transparency, or SAT, model and measured its effectiveness on human-agent team performance in a series of human factors studies supported by the ARPI. The SAT model deals with the information requirements from an agent to its human collaborator in order for the human to obtain effective situation awareness of the agent in its tasking environment. At the first SAT level, the agent provides the operator with the basic information about its current state and goals, intentions, and plans. At the second level, the agent reveals its reasoning process as well as the constraints/affordances that the agent considers when planning its actions. At the third SAT level, the agent provides the operator with information regarding its projection of future states, predicted consequences, likelihood of success/failure, and any uncertainty associated with the aforementioned projections.

In one of the ARPI projects, IMPACT, a research program on human-agent teaming for management of multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicles, ARL’s experimental effort focused on examining the effects of levels of agent transparency, based on the SAT model, on human operators’ decision making during military scenarios. The results of a series of human factors experiments collectively suggest that transparency on the part of the agent benefits the human’s decision making and thus the overall human-agent team performance. More specifically, researchers said the human’s trust in the agent was significantly better calibrated — accepting the agent’s plan when it is correct and rejecting it when it is incorrect– when the agent had a higher level of transparency.

The other project related to agent transparency that Chen and her colleagues performed under the ARPI was Autonomous Squad Member, on which ARL collaborated with Naval Research Laboratory scientists. The ASM is a small ground robot that interacts with and communicates with an infantry squad. As part of the overall ASM program, Chen’s group developed transparency visualization concepts, which they used to investigate the effects of agent transparency levels on operator performance. Informed by the SAT model, the ASM’s user interface features an at a glance transparency module where user-tested iconographic representations of the agent’s plans, motivator, and projected outcomes are used to promote transparent interaction with the agent. A series of human factors studies on the ASM’s user interface have investigated the effects of agent transparency on the human teammate’s situation awareness, trust in the ASM, and workload. The results, consistent with the IMPACT project’s findings, demonstrated the positive effects of agent transparency on the human’s task performance without increase of perceived workload. The research participants also reported that they felt the ASM as more trustworthy, intelligent, and human-like when it conveyed greater levels of transparency.

Chen and her colleagues are currently expanding the SAT model into bidirectional transparency between the human and the agent.

“Bidirectional transparency, although conceptually straightforward–human and agent being mutually transparent about their reasoning process–can be quite challenging to implement in real time. However, transparency on the part of the human should support the agent’s planning and performance–just as agent transparency can support the human’s situation awareness and task performance, which we have demonstrated in our studies,” Chen hypothesized.

The challenge is to design the user interfaces, which can include visual, auditory, and other modalities, that can support bidirectional transparency dynamically, in real time, while not overwhelming the human with too much information and burden.

Interesting, yes? Here’s a link and a citation for the paper,

Situation Awareness-based Agent Transparency and Human-Autonomy Teaming Effectiveness by Jessie Y.C. Chen, Shan G. Lakhmani, Kimberly Stowers, Anthony R. Selkowitz, Julia L. Wright, and Michael Barnes. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science May 2018. DOI 10.1080/1463922X.2017.1315750

This paper is behind a paywall.

Canada’s ‘Smart Cities’ will need new technology (5G wireless) and, maybe, graphene

I recently published [March 20, 2018] a piece on ‘smart cities’ both an art/science event in Toronto and a Canadian government initiative without mentioning the necessity of new technology to support all of the grand plans. On that note, it seems the Canadian federal government and two provincial (Québec and Ontario) governments are prepared to invest in one of the necessary ‘new’ technologies, 5G wireless. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Shawn Benjamin reports about Canada’s 5G plans in suitably breathless (even in text only) tones of excitement in a March 19, 2018 article,

The federal, Ontario and Quebec governments say they will spend $200 million to help fund research into 5G wireless technology, the next-generation networks with download speeds 100 times faster than current ones can handle.

The so-called “5G corridor,” known as ENCQOR, will see tech companies such as Ericsson, Ciena Canada, Thales Canada, IBM and CGI kick in another $200 million to develop facilities to get the project up and running.

The idea is to set up a network of linked research facilities and laboratories that these companies — and as many as 1,000 more across Canada — will be able to use to test products and services that run on 5G networks.

Benjamin’s description of 5G is focused on what it will make possible in the future,

If you think things are moving too fast, buckle up, because a new 5G cellular network is just around the corner and it promises to transform our lives by connecting nearly everything to a new, much faster, reliable wireless network.

The first networks won’t be operational for at least a few years, but technology and telecom companies around the world are already planning to spend billions to make sure they aren’t left behind, says Lawrence Surtees, a communications analyst with the research firm IDC.

The new 5G is no tentative baby step toward the future. Rather, as Surtees puts it, “the move from 4G to 5G is a quantum leap.”

In a downtown Toronto soundstage, Alan Smithson recently demonstrated a few virtual reality and augmented reality projects that his company MetaVRse is working on.

The potential for VR and AR technology is endless, he said, in large part for its potential to help hurdle some of the walls we are already seeing with current networks.

Virtual Reality technology on the market today is continually increasing things like frame rates and screen resolutions in a constant quest to make their devices even more lifelike.

… They [current 4G networks] can’t handle the load. But 5G can do so easily, Smithson said, so much so that the current era of bulky augmented reality headsets could be replaced buy a pair of normal looking glasses.

In a 5G world, those internet-connected glasses will automatically recognize everyone you meet, and possibly be able to overlay their name in your field of vision, along with a link to their online profile. …

Benjamin also mentions ‘smart cities’,

In a University of Toronto laboratory, Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia researches connected vehicles and smart power grids. “My passion right now is enabling smart cities — making smart cities a reality — and that means having much more immediate and detailed sense of the environment,” he said.

Faster 5G networks will assist his projects in many ways, by giving planners more, instant data on things like traffic patterns, energy consumption, variou carbon footprints and much more.

Leon-Garcia points to a brightly lit map of Toronto [image embedded in Benjamin’s article] in his office, and explains that every dot of light represents a sensor transmitting real time data.

Currently, the network is hooked up to things like city buses, traffic cameras and the city-owned fleet of shared bicycles. He currently has thousands of data points feeding him info on his map, but in a 5G world, the network will support about a million sensors per square kilometre.

Very exciting but where is all this data going? What computers will be processing the information? Where are these sensors located? Benjamin does not venture into those waters nor does The Economist in a February 13, 2018 article about 5G, the Olympic Games in Pyeonchang, South Korea, but the magazine does note another barrier to 5G implementation,

“FASTER, higher, stronger,” goes the Olympic motto. So it is only appropriate that the next generation of wireless technology, “5G” for short, should get its first showcase at the Winter Olympics  under way in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Once fully developed, it is supposed to offer download speeds of at least 20 gigabits per second (4G manages about half that at best) and response times (“latency”) of below 1 millisecond. So the new networks will be able to transfer a high-resolution movie in two seconds and respond to requests in less than a hundredth of the time it takes to blink an eye. But 5G is not just about faster and swifter wireless connections.

The technology is meant to enable all sorts of new services. One such would offer virtual- or augmented-reality experiences. At the Olympics, for example, many contestants are being followed by 360-degree video cameras. At special venues sports fans can don virtual-reality goggles to put themselves right into the action. But 5G is also supposed to become the connective tissue for the internet of things, to link anything from smartphones to wireless sensors and industrial robots to self-driving cars. This will be made possible by a technique called “network slicing”, which allows operators quickly to create bespoke networks that give each set of devices exactly the connectivity they need.

Despite its versatility, it is not clear how quickly 5G will take off. The biggest brake will be economic. [emphasis mine] When the GSMA, an industry group, last year asked 750 telecoms bosses about the most salient impediment to delivering 5G, more than half cited the lack of a clear business case. People may want more bandwidth, but they are not willing to pay for it—an attitude even the lure of the fanciest virtual-reality applications may not change. …

That may not be the only brake, Dexter Johnson in a March 19, 2018 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website), covers some of the others (Note: Links have been removed),

Graphene has been heralded as a “wonder material” for well over a decade now, and 5G has been marketed as the next big thing for at least the past five years. Analysts have suggested that 5G could be the golden ticket to virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and promised that graphene could improve technologies within electronics and optoelectronics.

But proponents of both graphene and 5G have also been accused of stirring up hype. There now seems to be a rising sense within industry circles that these glowing technological prospects will not come anytime soon.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last month [February 2018], some misgivings for these long promised technologies may have been put to rest, though, thanks in large part to each other.

In a meeting at MWC with Jari Kinaret, a professor at Chalmers University in Sweden and director of the Graphene Flagship, I took a guided tour around the Pavilion to see some of the technologies poised to have an impact on the development of 5G.

Being invited back to the MWC for three years is a pretty clear indication of how important graphene is to those who are trying to raise the fortunes of 5G. But just how important became more obvious to me in an interview with Frank Koppens, the leader of the quantum nano-optoelectronic group at Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) just outside of Barcelona, last year.

He said: “5G cannot just scale. Some new technology is needed. And that’s why we have several companies in the Graphene Flagship that are putting a lot of pressure on us to address this issue.”

In a collaboration led by CNIT—a consortium of Italian universities and national laboratories focused on communication technologies—researchers from AMO GmbH, Ericsson, Nokia Bell Labs, and Imec have developed graphene-based photodetectors and modulators capable of receiving and transmitting optical data faster than ever before.

The aim of all this speed for transmitting data is to support the ultrafast data streams with extreme bandwidth that will be part of 5G. In fact, at another section during MWC, Ericsson was presenting the switching of a 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) channel based on the technology.

“The fact that Ericsson is demonstrating another version of this technology demonstrates that from Ericsson’s point of view, this is no longer just research” said Kinaret.

It’s no mystery why the big mobile companies are jumping on this technology. Not only does it provide high-speed data transmission, but it also does it 10 times more efficiently than silicon or doped silicon devices, and will eventually do it more cheaply than those devices, according to Vito Sorianello, senior researcher at CNIT.

Interestingly, Ericsson is one of the tech companies mentioned with regard to Canada’s 5G project, ENCQOR and Sweden’s Chalmers University, as Dexter Johnson notes, is the lead institution for the Graphene Flagship.. One other fact to note, Canada’s resources include graphite mines with ‘premium’ flakes for producing graphene. Canada’s graphite mines are located (as far as I know) in only two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Québec, which also happen to be pitching money into ENCQOR. My March 21, 2018 posting describes the latest entry into the Canadian graphite mining stakes.

As for the questions I posed about processing power, etc. It seems the South Koreans have found answers of some kind but it’s hard to evaluate as I haven’t found any additional information about 5G and its implementation in South Korea. If anyone has answers, please feel free to leave them in the ‘comments’. Thank you.