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  • Touring Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne Manufacturing Facility In Long Beach, California

    The IET  SoCal LN  organizes 60-person tour of Virgin Orbit's Long Beach manufacturing plant to learn about its vehicles, the LauncherOne rocket and its 747-400 flying launch pad, dubbed Cosmic Girl.   I think one of the highlights for the  SoCal LN  event calendar this year will be the March 17, 2018 visit to, and tour of, Virgin Orbit's headquarters located in a 180,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Long Beach, California, adjacent to a taxi way at the Long Beach airport. Nearly 60 members and ther guests lined up ,on a cool Saturday morning, to pass through security and assemble in the main production area.  For the first time, we had more attendees under 45 (~36) than over 45 (~23), including 24 school children under 18, a testament to the interest in STEM activities and rockets…

    David
    David

  • A Snickers Day

    In the UK, Snickers bars used to be called Marathons and this is what the March Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting turned out to be for some of us.  March is one of the three days when the main boards and Council meet before the BOT so for yours truly and a lot of others the day starts at 1000 and finishes at about 1930 for a much-needed dinner.   The format of the day is that the main board meetings, whose members are also Council members, start at 1000 and continue until 1445 allowing a 15-minute break before the formal, full Council meeting which starts at 1500.  The Trustees leave at 1700 to go to the BOT meeting until 1930 when dinner is served.  Council continues with a feedback session and a networking dinner. At the March meeting, all of the main boards are looking to consider what amendments…

    Virginia
    Virginia

  • Local PATW Competition 2018

    Once gain we held the annual PATW competition, this year at the University of Sheffield's Arts Tower building. We had a record 'eleven' contestants presenting a wide range of varied topics which they were either interested in or involved with as a project within the course they're taking at University. All the presentations were very impressive and delivered to the 'three judges' this year being - Alan Chater Immediate Past chairman & Brian Heathcote the Hon Secretary from the IET SYLN and Peter Ingham the Immediate Past Chairman of the IMechE Yorkshire Region. The winner this year was Nathan Edge, who's an Engineer with Rolls-Royce and presented a talk on Nuts and Bolts: Fasteners in Engineering, highlighting the significance and integrity which these often under-appreciated items play as…

    Alan Chater
    Alan Chater

  • Dr Feng, CEng: Making A Difference To Engineers In China

    During his own personal CEng registration journey, Feng Deng-Chao was invited to train as an IET Professional Registration Interviewer (PRI), so that he could go on to support other professional engineers in his region.  Dr Feng Deng-Chao CEng is a distinguished research fellow in China Institute of Industrial Technology in China Science and Technology City and an associate professor at the North China Institute for Aerospace Engineering, where he has worked as the Director of the Integrated Application Lab of remote sensing, GNSS and GIS for close to a decade. A graduate of Tianjin University, he completed his PhD in 2008 for research in fields including flight safety in low altitude airspace, the construction of a three dimensional aerial corridor and pattern recognition technology.  The…

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Industry 4.0: Cyber Security Resilience And GDPR, 14-Mar-2018

    IET Central London Evening Lecture, Savoy Place, London, 14th March 2018. The audience in the Turing Lecture Theatre   appreciated the  talk given by Shadi Razak, the Chief Technology Officer of CyNation, a top cyber security company.    We are entering a new world: the world of things, and the boundaries are blurring ... Prepare to be scared, very scared; ask the right questions, put up our defences and  adopt the concept of cyber safety. Important note: These are the author's personal recollections and interpretations, which are likely to suffer from errors and selectivity. There is no endorsement from the IET or the speaker.   Data is the new oil: we're all fountains of data and it's valuable.  There's been a move from products to services, with the providers holding billions of items of…

  • The IET Kent Local Network Thanks Dungeness B For The Site Tour And SMR Lecture

    27 IET members were welcomed to Dungeness B for an Exploring Electricity tour followed by a lecture on Small Modular Reactors organised by Jins Arambankudy for the IET Kent Local Network on Wednesday the 21st of February.  The site tour was fully booked, and the talk was attended by an additional 20 personnel.  Alison Prentice, Visitor Centre Co-ordinator at Dungeness B Visitors centre, is working with the IET Kent Network to make the Exploring Electricity tour a regular event in the future in the IET local programme run for its members, in addition to hosting an IET promotional event to encourage more IET membership from Dungeness employees.  The IET Kent Network would like to offer a big thank you to Manus O’Donnell, Head of Development at EDF Energy for kindly accepting the IET request to…

    Brian Dury
    Brian Dury

  • The Importance Of Determining Device Identity In A Secure Online World ( IET Kent Network ).

    Almost like watching an episode of MacGyver, Professor  Gareth Howells, Professor of Secure Electronic Systems at the University of Kent, UK and Founder and Director of Metrarc Ltd described a very sophisticated cyber platform and described how components of any system can be broken down using mathematical understanding. Once the variables of digital features are known ( my favourite was the pulsing of an antenna signal to identify antenna variations ) normalisation and calibration are the vital next step to help baseline digital device activity. This involves analysing device features in different dimensions to create a baseline of default behaviour. It’s this behaviour that is further mapped to eventually allow authentication to occur. A typical smart device can go through many changes and…

    Rimesh Patel
    Rimesh Patel

  • The IET Healthcare Technologies Student And Early Career Awards – 2017 Winner’s Story: Anas Imtiaz

    Winnning the J A Lodge Award in IET Healthcare Technologies has helped to recognise Anas' research into sleep disorders.  It has motivated him to continue his work, creating wearable devices for sleep monitoring and diagnosis and helped to shorten the time to eventual diagnosis of sleep disorders. This research is having an impact and improving people's lives. Intelligent wearable devices can be used for monitoring and diagnosis of sleep disorders if they can automatically detect sleep abnormalities. This requires designing low-complexity algorithms and low-power systems capable of operating for extended periods of time. This work explores the development of one such algorithm, for automatic sleep staging, and its subsequent implementation as an ultra-low power system-on-chip. Syed Anas Imtiaz…

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Amazing Opportunity For Biomedical Engineering Students To Gain Recognition From The Healthcare Technologies Community

    Winnning the J A Lodge Award in IET Healthcare Technologies has helped to recognise Anas' research into sleep disorders.  It has also personally, motivated him to continue his work, creating wearable devices for sleep monitoring and diagnosis and helped to shorten the time to eventual diagnosis of sleep disorders. This research is having an impact and improving people's lives. Intelligent wearable devices can be used for monitoring and diagnosis of sleep disorders if they can automatically detect sleep abnormalities. This requires designing low-complexity algorithms and low-power systems capable of operating for extended periods of time. Anas' work explores the development of one such algorithm, for automatic sleep staging, and its subsequent implementation as an ultra-low power system-on-chip…

  • AWE Educational Collection Visit

    Visit to the AWE Educational Collection on the 12 th   February This was a unique opportunity for the small group of visitors to see what is probably the only physical historic collection of the UK’s nuclear weapons through the ages. The event included both multimedia presentations and a guided tour of the museum. The UKs nuclear development program started with the Frisch–Peierls memorandum which was the first technical exposition of a practical nuclear weapon. It was written by expatriate German physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in March 1940 while they were both at the University of Birmingham during World War II.   The museum has a copy of the document to peruse as the start of the history. The memorandum contained the first calculations about the size of the critical mass of fissile…

    Andrew Stickland
    Andrew Stickland

  • W Is For Work Experience - Support From The IET (TWAVES)

    It may not be so obvious to some people that work experience can count towards CPD as well. At the same time, not everything that we do at work is a new experience, a lesson to learn. Many people have their daily routine at work and some tasks may be quite repetitive. From time to time (or maybe even every day!) we face some challenges and problems that need to be solved and as we attempt to overcome them we gain some additional knowledge. We can also learn something new from our colleagues. We tend to learn a lot more in a short space of time when we change jobs or get promoted and start a new role within the same company. Although the IET cannot directly provide this form of activity/experience (unless you are employed by the IET), it can definitely offer some support that may improve your…

    Matylda
    Matylda

  • Living In The Internet Of Things: A PETRAS, IoTUK & IET Conference, Forum & Exhibition

    This conference will provide insight into how society can benefit from the power of interconnected devices (the IoT) while remaining safe, secure and resilient.   The conference will cover 5 main areas:   - Adoption and acceptability - Harnessing economic value - Privacy and trust - Safety and security - Standards, governance and policy   Combining speakers, panels, posters and networking opportunities over 2 days, this looks to be an exciting and interesting event   This new event is next week and there are just a few places left – make sure you don’t miss out, register now !!! Have you already registered? I'd love to hear what part of the event you're most looking forward to

    Former Staff Member
    Former Staff Member

  • IET Northumbria 2018 Students' Projects Competition

    The results of the IET Northumbria 2018 inter-university students' projects competition.  The IET Northumbria 2018 Students' Projects Competition was this year held at Durham University on the Wednesday 14th March 2018 and was a great success. The competition which was between final-year engineering degree and masters students from the four local universities Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Durham comprised two categories i.e.  posters and live presentations. The topics covered were varied, of a high standard, and presented the judges, Richard Burnard (Principal EC&I Engineer, Wood Plc.) and Nicholas Kasch (Research Scientist, Big Solar -Poweroll) with difficult choices.  In the end the First Prize of a £50 gift token and a certificate in the posters category was awarded to Alex Ashton…

    Tom Fry
    Tom Fry

  • IET Malaysia Team Building - impression from a Singapore Volunteer

    IET Malaysia YP Teambuilding Event  3rd/4th Feb 2018 at Carpe Diem QuCheng and I were invited to represent IET SG YP at the IET Malaysia YP Teambuilding Event which was held near Kuala Lumpur. Organised by the Malaysia YP Section, this event involved forty participants, numerous On-Campus groups from both nearby universities but also as far afield as Perlis and Sabah along with a few attendees from overseas networks such as Singapore and Brunei.   After a fun icebreaking session where we each had to introduce ourselves with two true and one false statement which the others would have to guess, we spent most of the rest of the afternoon taking part in an almighty treasure hunt testing not only our physical prowess and courage but also our sleuthing capabilities to find the next clue. This was…

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Industry 4.0: Cyber Security Resilience And GDPR. ( IET London Network ).

    “It’s not how the data is accessed, it's what accesses the data “ Shadi A. Razak , CTO of CyNation, gave a talk on how Industry 4.0 considers supply chain activities alongside compliance. He talked through how GDPR can strengthen your security risk profile and sometimes the simplest of security solutions are the best ones. Notably that taking security back to basics is often the best starting point for an assessment. Whilst the concepts of CIA holds true currently, for Industry 4.0 environments, it will need to adapt as the boundaries where defence in depth models might have been applied, will need to envelope into new physical barriers i.e. cars, fridges, toys and other IoT based systems. For example for IoT devices, how can you block malicious data theft? or prevent accidental data loss …

  • EUCAP 2018 - Less than a month to go!

    It’s that time of year again –  EUCAP 18 ! The conference will be held in London this year! The IET are the Professional Conference Organisers, so the IET office has been buzzing with EUCAP activity as we count down to the conference!! The full programme has been released, there will be a wide ranging exhibition and there are various social activities planned throughout the week. If you haven’t got your tickets there is still time to register   The Communities and Publishing teams will be at Stand 116-118 from Monday evening, when the exhibition kicks off during the welcome reception – make sure to come visit us at the stand!   In the lead up to the conference, I would love to hear your memories of previous EUCAP’s. What are you looking forward to this year?         Photos courtesy of EUCA

    Former Staff Member
    Former Staff Member

  • TV Connect

    TV Connect returns to Olympia London in 2018, running over the 9th and 10th of May. TV Connect is dedicated to video distribution over IP, as well as covering more conventional methods, and as such aims to help to define the future of the industry, putting attendees face-to-face with the latest innovations and technologies that will affect the ways audiences consume video and how broadcasters, operators and content providers and OTT players will operate as businesses.  The Multimedia Communications Network is pleased to be involved in TV Connect in a number of areas, including providing Workshops at Savoy Place which take place on the 8th of May, the day before TV Connect proper opens.  These workshops will cover UHD/HDR and content protection technologies and the Workshops and TV Connect Congress…

    Graham Turner
    Graham Turner

  • Opportunity To Travel For YP In Toronto

    If you are under 30 years of age and want to get active in IET Toronto Local Network, there is an opporunity for you to travel t o Singapore this summer. Email  iet.toronto@theiet.org now for more information and get nominated.

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Stepping Into Alan's Size 12 Shoes

    A previous Vice President (Alan Watts) started a VP Blog providing some insight into the working's of the Board of Trustees. I've been asked if I will step into his shoes to continue the blog.  It rather reminds me of the pictures you see of small children after getting into the dressing up box tottering around in high heel shoes way too big and since I normally wear a dainty size 5 this might be a good analogy!  If you want to know what happened at the most recent Board of Trustees meeting held in February 2018 then ...     Before I blog about the most recent Board of Trustees meeting, a bit about me.  I’ve been a volunteer since I was a YP (in the last millennium!) when I got involved in Solent Network, care of my Dad who was also a Fellow of the Institution.  I’ve had roles both within Solent…

    Virginia
    Virginia

  • Midlands Power Group - Student Poster Evening

    Last night we held the annual MPG Student Poster event where students from our local universities present their ongoing project work to a panel of judges.  This year the event was hosted by Aston University - our sincere thanks go to Lee and Wen for organising the event in the Great Hall.  We had 22 excellent posters presented with both post-grad and under-grad submissions from Aston, Birmingham, Coventry, Staffordshire and Warwick.  All the posters and accompanying presentations were of a very high standard which made the judging decisions particularly challenging.  For the first time, we also included a student vote where all participating students could vote for their favourite poster.    In total seven prizes were awarded, some sponsored by the IET and others from two corporate sponsors…

    David Swanson
    David Swanson

  • Tom Hlaing - Volunteering Has Helped My Career And Presented Opportunities Beyond My Day-to-day Work

    Tom Hlaing talks about how being an IET volunteer has greatly benefitted his career and presented opportunities beyond his day-to-day work.  From his journey as a Student Member, to volunteering with IET Local Networks, Boards and Committees , he has learnt valuable skills to get ahead in industry and is now influencing international strategy and operational business improvements with the IET.    Tom has made a difference to how the IET is run both at a local and international level. He came on board as a student to fight for a wider range of lecture topics and industry events and as he’s risen up the volunteering ranks he’s more recently been involved in managerial and structural changes. Watch Tom's story... Read the full supporting article about Tom's journey as an IET Member and volunteer…

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Let It Snow! (Actually, Please Don’t) Millimetre-wave And Terahertz Colloquium 2018

    We weren’t going to let the snow stop us – find out more about the MMwave and ThZ colloquium held on 1 st March in Austin Court   Despite the ‘Beast from the East’ causing more than a few travel issues and some very cold delegates and organisers (!), the IET Colloquium on Millimetre-wave and Terahertz Engineering & Technology 2018 went ahead last week in Austin Court, Birmingham. The delegates who battled the cold to make it, heard a diverse and interesting programme  with speakers from the QMUL, Lancaster University, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and of course the University of Birmingham. The last minute amendments even meant we were able to hear about the University of Birmingham’s new facilities, which a lot of the speakers were then interested in visiting! During the breaks…

    Former Staff Member
    Former Staff Member

  • Join The IET Project Controls Network Executive Team

    The IET Project Controls Network are currently recruiting members to join their team. The Executive members act as ambassadors for the network, the IET, and the wider community. As part of a dynamic and focused group, the team regularly participate in various activities such as:  attending team meetings; sourcing and delivering new content/events; engaging in the online community & Social Media; developing the annual strategy; working with Project Controls contacts to deliver hot topics. Team members benefit from: extensive networking opportunities; training and professional development; the opportunity to promote your area of interest to a wider audience. Are you interested in applying? We encourage you to apply for this unique chance to give something back to your community.  Please send…

    Former Community Member
    Former Community Member

  • Midlands Power Group Event - Generator Control Systems

    On 21st February the Midlands Power Group were delighted to welcome Mark Horley, a Senior Power System Engineer, of National Grid to Austin Court to deliver a talk on the transmission owner/operator experience of connecting generators to the power system.   Mark talked in considerable detail about how National Grid goes about ensuring generator compliance with the requirements of the Grid Code and Connection Agreement through a structured programme of data evaluation and control system testing.against a range of conditions. The talk was well attended and generated many questions which Mark proceeded to answer during his presentation.  MPG has received some very positive feedback from attendees including one example " ..... thanks for organising an excellent lecture on Wednesday, it made the…

    David Swanson
    David Swanson

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