The University and the Earlham Institute have been appointed by BioFAIR to lead a new consortium to establish the Methods Commons, the first spoke of the £34 million BioFAIR programme.

The Methods Commons will provide researchers with national-scale capabilities for the discovery, execution, sharing and reuse of the computational workflows, tools and notebooks that underpin modern data-driven life sciences.

Led by Professor Carole Goble at The University of Manchester, the consortium will develop services designed to improve the reproducibility, reliability and reuse of computational methods across UK bioscience.

The Methods Commons will deliver eight core capabilities for UK life sciences researchers, including Galaxy and Nextflow workflow execution, support for containerised bespoke workflows on HPC, a national workflow registry with a community-endorsement mechanism, a “workflow observatory” providing trust and quality assurance, a shared Jupyter notebook environment, and API standards for ingesting input data and sharing workflow results.

Tony Burdett, BioFAIR Director, said: “The Methods Commons tackles one of the longest-standing problems in computational bioscience — reproducibility and reuse of methods that produce the results to be included in publications as research outputs. We had a strong field of applicants, and the appointed consortium combines real delivery track record with deep roots in the UK and international workflow communities. Establishing the Methods Commons is a major milestone for BioFAIR as it’s the first spoke in our federated BioCommons and the point at which the services needed by our users really start to take shape.”

The consortium — which includes support from Nextflow, Seqera — was selected following a competitive two-stage process that opened with an Expression of Interest call in December 2025, followed by invited full proposals reviewed by an independent expert panel. BioFAIR is investing up to £4 million over an initial two-year period, with the expectation that the partnership will extend to deliver the full programme of work through to June 2029 and beyond.

Carole Goble, Methods Commons Project Lead, said: “We’re proud to be establishing the Methods Commons as part of BioFAIR. Computational workflows are how modern bioscience gets done, and giving UK researchers a trusted, national-scale set of services to find, run and share them — without having to reinvent the plumbing each time — is overdue. We’re looking forward to working with the BioFAIR Hub, the Fellows and Pathfinder Projects to make sure what we build is shaped by real user needs from day one.”

The Methods Commons will adopt an incremental, user-driven delivery model, with early value delivered to exemplar communities — including the first cohort of BioFAIR Pathfinder Projects — before scaling to national reach. It will operate alongside the forthcoming Data Commons, People Commons, Knowledge Hub and BioFAIR Portal in a hub-and-spokes federated infrastructure coordinated from the BioFAIR Hub at the Earlham Institute.

As large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini have rapidly improved in recent years, many widely used benchmarks have become less informative. In 2023, leading models were found to pass the Turing test and, separately, in 2025, achieved gold medal-level performance on International Mathematical Olympiad questions, achieving over 80% accuracy.

Now, two Manchester mathematicians, Dr Cesare Giulio Ardito and Dr Igor Chernyavsky, have joined nearly 1,000 expert contributors worldwide to create a multidisciplinary academic test called “Humanity’s Last Exam” (HLE), which sets AI systems a fresh challenge.

The test consists of 2,500 rigorously reviewed questions spanning dozens of disciplines, from mathematics and the natural sciences to humanities. Questions are deliberately precise, closed-ended and resistant to simple internet search or memorisation, with some using both textual and image data.

Every question in HLE was tested against leading AI models before inclusion. If an AI system could answer a question correctly at the time the benchmark was designed, it was rejected.

The study, now published in Nature, found they passed fewer than 10% of the HLE questions when the dataset was first released in early 2025, despite scoring above 80% on more conventional benchmarks.

Although the rapid pace of AI development has enabled some systems to significantly improve their scores in less than a year, the top-ranked models still reach just below 40%. The results also show that many AI systems still frequently express high confidence in incorrect answers to the HLE questions. However, their capability in self-assessing knowledge gaps has gradually improved.

Dr Cesare Giulio Ardito said: “I'm happy that the University of Manchester is represented among contributors from all over the world. This was a human team effort and, so far, we appear to still have an edge.”

Although this new AI benchmark only measures performance on closed-ended, expert-level questions at the frontier of current knowledge, the authors hope it will help identify remaining limitations and potentially capture emerging generalist research capabilities.

This research was published in the journal Nature

Full title: A benchmark of expert-level academic questions to assess AI capabilities

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09962-4 

The initiative, known as the Resource for AI Science in Europe (RAISE), brings together computing power, data, expertise and funding to support researchers in applying AI to scientific discovery across all disciplines.

Following an announcement at the AI in Science Summit in Copenhagen, the SCIANCE (AI in Science) consortium, which includes researchers at The University of Manchester, has been invited to enter into a grant agreement to support the development and pilot phase of RAISE under Horizon Europe.

SCIANCE will coordinate AI-enabled science across Europe through a bottom-up, community-driven approach, bringing together top research organisations and major research facilities from across Europe, focusing on five key areas of science: physics and astronomy, materials science, life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences and humanities.

The project will, among other things, deliver:

• A Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for AI in Science
• An implementation roadmap for infrastructure upgrades
• The RAISE Secretariat for AI in science, to support long-term collaboration, capacity building, and alignment with European policy objectives.

The University of Manchester brings an interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Professor Anna Scaife, who will act at the Scientific Coordinator for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Dr Rebecca Bowler, also from Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, supported by Professor Sami Kaski from the Manchester Centre for AI Fundamentals. 

RAISE is a flagship initiative under the European Strategy for AI in Science and aims to position Europe as a global leader in AI-enabled research by supporting scientists to develop and apply AI for transformative discoveries.

Jonas L’Haridon, Project Coordinator, ESF, said: “SCIANCE represents a unique opportunity to coordinate AI-enabled science across Europe - connecting research communities, infrastructures and AI expertise in a way that truly reflects scientific priorities.”

In a study published today in Nature, the team demonstrate a completely new way of probing the tiny “ticking” of the thorium-229 nucleus without needing a specialised transparent crystal – a breakthrough that could underpin a new class of timekeeping so precise it could transform navigation, communications, earthquake and volcano prediction, and deep-space exploration.

The advance builds on a landmark achievement last year, when the team succeeded  in using a laser to excite the nucleus of thorium-229 inside a transparent crystal - a feat the team has been working on for the past 15 years.

Now, researchers have achieved the same results using a tiny fraction of the material and with a method so simple and inexpensive that it opens the door to real-world nuclear clock technology.

“Previously, the transparent crystals needed to hold thorium-229 were technically demanding and costly to produce, which placed real limits on any practical application,” explained Dr Harry Morgan, co-author of the research and Lecturer in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry at The University of Manchester. “This new approach is a major step forward for the future of nuclear clocks and leaves little doubt that such a device is feasible and potentially much closer than anyone expected.”

In the new study, the team instead excited the thorium nucleus inside a microscopic thin film of thorium oxide, made by electroplating a minute amount of thorium onto a stainless-steel disc – a process similar to gold-plating jewellery and a radical simplification of their previous method.

The thorium nuclei absorb energy from a laser and then, after a few microseconds, transfer that energy to nearby electrons so it can be measured directly as an electric current. This method, known as conversion electron Mössbauer spectroscopy, has been in use for years, but normally requires high-energy gamma rays at special facilities. This is the first time it has  been demonstrated with a laser in an ordinary lab.

Crucially, it shows that thorium-229 can be studied inside far more common materials than previously thought, removing one of the biggest obstacles to building practical nuclear clocks.

The technique also offers new insight into how thorium-229 behaves and decays, which could one day inform new types of nuclear materials and future energy research.

“We had always assumed that in order to excite and then observe the nuclear transition the thorium needed to be embedded in a material that was transparent to the light used to excite the nucleus. In this work, we realized that is simply not true,” said UCLA physicist Eric Hudson., who led the research. “We can still force enough light into these opaque materials to excite nuclei near the surface and then, instead of emitting photons like they do in transparent materials like the crystals, they emit electrons which can be detected simply by monitoring an electrical current – which is just about the easiest thing you can do in the lab.”

Like atomic clocks, nuclear clocks rely on the natural “ticking” of single atoms. But in atomic clocks that process involves electrons, while nuclear clocks use oscillations within the nucleus itself. This makes them far less sensitive to external disturbances, giving them the potential to be orders of magnitude more accurate.

Nuclear clocks could even be used to predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Because of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, nuclear clocks should be sensitive to small changes in the Earth’s gravity due to the movement of magma and rock deep underground. By placing nuclear clocks all over earthquake zones, like Japan, Indonesia, or Pakistan, we could watch what’s going on beneath our feet in real time and predict tectonic events before they happen.

Dr Morgan added: “In the long term, this technology could revolutionise our ability to prepare for natural disasters. It’s incredibly exciting to think that thorium clocks can do things we previously thought were impossible, as well as improving everything we currently use atomic clocks for.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, and also included physicists from the University of Nevada Reno, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Ziegler Analytics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität at Mainz, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

This research was published in the journal Nature

Full title: Laser-based conversion electron Mössbauer spectroscopy of 229ThO2 

DOI:10.1038/s41586-025-09776-4 

URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09776-4 [nature.com] 

In a boon for the future of data storage technologies, the researchers have made a new single-molecule magnet that retains its magnetic memory up to 100 Kelvin (-173 °C) – around the temperature of the Moon at night.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, is a significant advance on the previous record of 80 Kelvin (-193 °C). While still a long way from working in a standard freezer, or at room temperature, data storage at 100 Kelvin could be feasible in huge data centres, such as those used by Google.

If perfected, these single-molecule magnets could pack vast amounts of information into incredibly small spaces – possibly more than three terabytes of data per square centimetre. That’s around half a million TikTok videos squeezed into a hard drive that’s the size of a postage stamp.

The research was led by The University of Manchester, with computational modelling led by the Australian National University (ANU).

David Mills, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at The University of Manchester, said: “This research showcases the power of chemists to deliberately design and build molecules with targeted properties. The results are an exciting prospect for the use of single-molecule magnets in data storage media that is 100 times more dense than the absolute limit of current technologies.

“Although the new magnet still needs cooling far below room temperature, it is now well above the temperature of liquid nitrogen (77 Kelvin), which is a readily available coolant. So, while we won’t be seeing this type of data storage in our mobile phones for a while, it does make storing information in huge data centres more feasible.”

Magnetic materials have long played an important role in data storage technologies. Currently, hard drives store data by magnetising tiny regions made up of many atoms all working together to retain memory. Single-molecule magnets can store information individually and don’t need help from any neighbouring atoms to retain their memory, offering the potential for incredibly high data density. But, until now, the challenge has always been the incredibly cold temperatures needed in order for them to function.

The key to the new magnets’ success is its unique structure, with the element dysprosium located between two nitrogen atoms. These three atoms are arranged almost in a straight line – a configuration predicted to boost magnetic performance but realised now for the first time.

Usually, when dysprosium is bonded to only two nitrogen atoms it tends to form molecules with more bent or irregular shapes. In the new molecule, the researchers added a chemical group called an alkene that acts like a molecular pin, binding to dysprosium to hold the structure in place.

The team at the Australian National University developed a new theoretical model to simulate the molecule’s magnetic behaviour to allow them to explain why this particular molecular magnet performs so well compared to previous designs.

Now, the researchers will use these results as a blueprint to guide the design of even better molecular magnets.

The University and the Santa Clara-based company have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), marking a strategic partnership aimed at leveraging the strengths of both organisations to drive advancements in AI applications across multiple sectors, including healthcare, social care, education, and sustainability. 

This collaboration will provide a foundation for joint research projects, academic exchange programs, and curriculum development initiatives that will shape the future of AI-driven solutions.  

Under the terms of the MoU, the partnership will focus on key initiatives, including:  

Research and Development in AI, Robotics, and Automation – Exploring applications of AI in healthcare, education, and sustainability, including the development of AI-powered robotic solutions such as Fari for elderly care and Senpai for special needs education.   

AI for All Initiative – Facilitating upskilling and workforce development programs in AI and robotics for healthcare, social care, and education professionals.  

Joint Degree Programs and Curriculum Development – Establishing specialized programs in AI, robotics, and automation, incorporating theoretical and practical components with hands-on experience using InGen Dynamics’ technologies, including Fari, Senpai, and Origami AI.  

Social Care Testbed Collaboration – Deploying and evaluating AI-driven robotics solutions in real-world environments to improve care delivery and assess the impact of AI in social care settings.  

AI Ethics and Responsible AI Initiatives – Promoting transparency, accountability, and ethical AI development through collaborative research and policy discussions.  

Global Exchange Programs – Enabling international knowledge-sharing by connecting students and researchers from the University of Manchester with InGen Dynamics’ Futurenauts initiative in India and beyond.  

The collaboration will be overseen by a Steering Committee co-chaired by Professor Andrew Weightman, Professor of Medical Mechatronics the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Arshad Hisham, Founder & CEO of InGen Dynamics. The committee will meet biannually to define strategic roadmaps and identify new areas of mutual interest.  

Mr Hisham, said: “This partnership with The University of Manchester is a significant step toward advancing AI and robotics research that has real-world impact.

“By combining our industry expertise with the academic excellence of Manchester, we aim to accelerate innovation and create transformative AI solutions for global challenges.”  

Professor Weightman added: “We are excited to collaborate with InGen Dynamics to drive forward research and education in AI and automation.

“This MoU will enable us to integrate cutting-edge technology into our programs while fostering innovation that benefits society.”  

 The University of Manchester is globally renowned for its pioneering research, outstanding teaching and learning, and commitment to social responsibility. We are a truly international university – ranking in the top 50 in a range of global rankings – with a diverse community of more than 44,000 students, 12,000 staff and 550,000 alumni from 190 countries.  Sign up for our e-news to hear first-hand about our international partnerships and activities across the globe. 

The programme will be jointly led by five leading research institutions in the UK: the Universities of Dundee, Manchester, Nottingham, Swansea and West of England, and will address challenges associated with enhancing data access and analysis within TREs – secure environments where approved researchers can access sensitive data for research to benefit the public, such as national public health and population-level surveys.

The eScience Lab in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester is leading the TREvolution approach to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and transparent analysis of sensitive data. The eScience Lab is expanding on its effort in the federated analytics programme in Health Data Research UK, building on two decades of experience providing computational analysis and data infrastructure to internationally support open research practices in life sciences and other disciplines.

The programme was awarded £4.94 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the DARE UK (Phase 2) Transformational Programme.

TREs in the UK are internationally renowned for establishing the Five Safes framework, but they have some limitations for researchers. The manual application processes and disclosure checks make it challenging to keep up with today's scientific needs, like federated learning, analysis across sectors and research domains, and large-scale correlation studies.

TREvolution will address these challenges to evolve UK TRE capabilities across three themes:

• TRE reference architecture and implementations: Standardising UK TRE architectures to enable seamless interoperability.
• AI and semi-automated output checking: Enhancing research output review processes to ensure non-disclosure of personal information.
• Federated analysis: Enabling secure analysis of datasets stored in multiple TREs located across the UK.

The work will be delivered in collaboration with NHS Scotland, Lancashire Teaching Hospital, Durham University, Lancaster University, University College London, University of Queensland, University of Basel and University of Cape Town.

It builds on existing work done by the delivery partners, with experience across the themes, as well as the DARE UK (Phase 1) Driver Projects, which developed initial versions of some of the key components of TREvolution.

In the first collaboration, The University of Manchester established Five Safes RO-Crate: a mechanism of structurally documenting the evidence of computational processes, along with the chain of human reviews for legally accessing sensitive data. Five Safes RO-Crate is based on open Web standards and wider community efforts and has been adopted by several research projects in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) including EOSC-ENTRUST, and forms the basis for the common metadata standard of TREvolution.

TREvolution is the first of three initiatives under the DARE UK (Phase 2) Transformational Programme, advancing the further development and testing of core TRE components and capabilities developed in the first phase of the DARE UK programme.

Further funding will also be provided to support the early adoption of these capabilities by UK TREs and data services and to demonstrate their application through real-world research exemplars. The goal is to showcase the potential for a connected and efficient national network of secure data infrastructures.

DARE UK Interim Director, Professor Emily Jefferson, said: “TREvolution marks a step change in our efforts to transform the UK’s secure data research ecosystem. This important work will ensure that key capabilities—such as federated analysis and enhanced output checking supporting the training of AI models—are not just theoretical advancements but practical, real-world solutions that enhance the UK’s ability to do impactful research. We look forward to working closely with the TREvolution team to advance these innovations and drive meaningful progress in how sensitive data is accessed and used for the public good."

The TREvolution team will work closely with the DARE UK Delivery Team and early adopter TREs, fostering stronger collaboration and synergy as these critical capabilities are integrated into the UK’s secure data research infrastructure ecosystem.

Follow DARE UK on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter), and subscribe to their newsletter to follow TREvolution’s progress.

Metascience is the application of scientific methodology to study how research is undertaken. It is hoped that the approach will help to improve the quality and efficiency of UK research.

The successfully funded project at the University is on ‘Supporting Research and Researchers through the deployment of Digital Notebooks: A framework for implementation and impact.’ The research will follow both Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute’s implementation and The Research Lifecycle Programme’s deployment of digital notebooks across the University, and to evaluate the impact of targeted interventions across the various organisational scales.

Speaking about the project, principal investigator Andrew Stewart, Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Computer Science, said: “This grant is an exciting investment in The University of Manchester; recognising the importance of metascience. It will help us to demonstrate the benefits that digital notebooks can make to open, reproducible, and responsible research and provide other higher education institutions with a framework for implementation.”

Co-Investigator, Andrew Porter, Research Integrity and Training Adviser at the Manchester Institute, said: “Teams here are already starting to make use of digital notebooks to document their work. We're keen to see these powerful tools made accessible to researchers across the University to help support and grow open, reproducible and responsible research practices.”

The Research Lifecycle Programme’s (RLP) project to deploy digital notebooks is currently engaging with academics and research technical professionals to gather functional requirements for any proposed notebook solutions, and to assess demand for integrated sample inventories. The needs of all schools and faculties are to be captured, to ascertain where functional diversity can be catered for. 

• Find out and apply for the research associate vacancy supporting this research.
• Find out more about RLP's digital notebooks project and how to contribute.
• Find out more about the UK Metascience Unit, including their latest funding opportunity.
• See Prof Andrew Stewart’s post on LinkedIn.

The team comprised researchers from Dalhousie University in Canada and the University of Manchester. They measured metal concentrations in honey collected by citizen scientist beekeepers in northwest England. 

Greater Manchester was a major industrial powerhouse. Unfortunately, historical industrial activities often leave behind a legacy of pollution and have been linked to environmental contamination. Metal contaminants in soil and water from historical industrial activities do not easily disappear. They can be remobilized as dust during activities like building and road construction, or farming. Likewise, metals in surface water and groundwater may also be transferred into flowers via plant roots. 

Honey samples were collected by local beekeepers to help determine the distribution of metal pollution across Greater Manchester. Honey samples were gathered over a single season to establish baseline metal concentrations from urban, industrial, residential and agricultural zoning districts. This baseline data can be used in future studies to monitor long-term trends and changes in metal concentrations in the environment. 

Average arsenic and cadmium concentrations in Manchester were higher than global averages. Cadmium and lead concentrations were also higher than the recommended World Health Organization and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization guidelines. 

These high metal concentrations reflect Manchester’s heavy industrial past. They also reveal pollution patterns from current human activities like transportation and construction. 

Read more about the research on The Conversation and ScienceDirect

The substantial investment from the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme, marks the fourth phase of The Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) mission to transform research culture by establishing the principle that reliable, reproducible, and reusable software is necessary across all research disciplines.

The SSI, which is based at the universities of Manchester, Edinburgh, and Southampton, was established in 2010 as the world’s first organisation dedicated to improving software in research, with The University of Manchester playing a central role in its success.

The next phase will focus on tackling critical challenges in research software, including environmental sustainability, equality, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, as well as the rising interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

The next phase of the programme will run from 2024 to 2028 and will be led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

It is fourth time the SSI has been entrusted with public funding to carry out its mission of transforming research culture by establishing the principle that reliable, reproducible, and reusable software is necessary across all research disciplines.

It achieves this by working with, and investing in, individuals and organisations from across the sector. The SSI’s “collaborate, not compete” ethos has allowed research software to move towards becoming a first-class citizen in the research landscape.

Christopher Smith, Executive Chair  of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, said: “Software plays a fundamental role in all disciplines of research. That’s why it’s so important that we invest in supporting the development of research software that is top quality, meets the needs of our research communities, is environmentally sustainable and is ready for the future. 

“This record £10.2 million investment is part of the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme’s ongoing investment in evolving existing capability and supporting new infrastructure. It reflects the SSI’s strong track record and the importance of its work for the future of research. I am delighted that AHRC will be hosting this investment for all UKRI communities for the next four years.”

Neil Chue Hong, SSI Director and Professor of Research Software Policy and Practice, added: “Every modern societal advance is driven by research which relies on software. From weather forecasting to whether we can build new narratives for the next decade, it’s important that we provide equitable access to the digital tools and skills enabling this. This grant - which will see the SSI into its 18th year - enables us to work with the research community to build capability and expertise, ensuring a sustainable future for research software.”

The SSI was founded in 2010 thanks to funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). In 2016, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) joined EPSRC to further invest and help continue the work of the SSI throughout its second phase. The third phase was funded by all UKRI research councils.

In an event at the Pankhurst Building, academics representing all faculties and the University’s Industry partners attended to learn about the establishment of these two leading Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research Centres and hear more about the vision for continued growth. 

The Centres aim to solve real-world challenges through collaborative work utilising AI with other disciplines. Central to this is a focus on the fundamental methods being used to power the AI solutions. Advantages will come from leading-edge research breakthroughs in new methodologies for machine learning, with huge potential for cross-disciplinary benefits. 

The event provided an opportunity to recognise the early success of the Centre in successfully securing funding in three UKRI calls:

• Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship 
• Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Decision Making for Complex Systems 
• AI Hub in Generative Models

This research income is fuelling lots of research at the Centre with AI-focussed work underway that bridges into other fields including robotics, healthcare and sustainability. 

Across AI Fundamentals and the ELLIS unit, currently over 25 PhD studentships are underway. It is anticipated that over 30 PhD students will join in the coming years with diverse and interesting opportunities soon to be advertised across the Centre websites and wider University channels.

The Centre for AI Fundamentals is eager to work collaboratively on high-impact problems we can better solve together. Anyone wanting to become involved with the Centre is welcome to engage with us directly or view the website to learn more.

About the Centre for AI Fundamentals (AI-FUN)
The Centre brings together leading AI expertise in collaboration with experts in a range of fields. Led by Professor Samuel Kaski, the goal is to create and develop cutting-edge machine learning techniques to help solve real-world problems. Learn more.

About the ELLIS Unit Manchester
ELLIS - the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems - is a pan-European AI network of excellence which focuses on fundamental science, technical innovation and societal impact. Led by Professor Magnus Rattray, the Manchester unit is one of 41 across Europe. Learn more. 

The University is one of 21 universities to receive the status by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - the UK's lead technical authority on cyber security.

It is one of several initiatives outlined in the UK government’s National Cyber Strategy ‘Protecting and promoting the UK in a digital world’, which describes how the government is working with academia and industry to make the UK more resilient to cyber attacks.

The scheme aims to enhance the quality and scale of academic cybersecurity research and postgraduate training being undertaken in the UK; make it easier for potential users of research to identify the best cybersecurity research and postgraduate training that the UK has to offer; and help to develop a shared vision and aims among the UK cybersecurity research community, inside and outside academia.

The Centre will be led by colleagues in the University’s Centre of Digital Trust and Society, which has a long history of world-leading cyber security research and will be directed by Professor Nicholas Lord and co-directed by Professor Daniel Dresner and Dr Mustafa Mustafa.

Nicholas Lord, Professor of Criminology at The University of Manchester, said: “We are very proud to be recognised as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. Receiving this status is further recognition of our long-standing commitment to world-leading cyber security research and key to the realisation of our five-year research plan.

“Our cyber security research has been a focal point for the University since founding our Digital Futures platform in 2018, with our sociotechnical approach to cyber security coming together recognisably in 2021 by the creation of our Centre for Digital Trust and Society - a truly unique Centre with a strong interdisciplinary nature.

“Over the next five years we hope that we can use our ACE-CSR recognition to strengthen our collaborations with other ACEs and NCSC, as well as enhance our collaborations with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority with a view to integrating cyber security into the city region’s business community.”

Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research at The University of Manchester, added: “I am thrilled that our University has been recognised as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. This achievement, led by our Centre for Digital Trust and Security, underscores our commitment to pioneering cyber security research and innovation through interdisciplinary collaborative research. This approach and ambition is vital to ensure that the benefits of the rapid pace of technological change are developed in ways that ensure a safe and more secure digital world for our citizens and organisations.”

The University was required to show evidence of NCSC’s tough standards to be considered, including: commitment from the University's leadership team to support and invest in the University's cyber security research capacity and capability; a critical mass of academic staff engaged in leading-edge cyber security research; a proven track record of producing high impact cyber security research; and sustained funding from a variety of sources to ensure the continuing financial viability of the research team's activities.

Chris Ensor, Deputy Director Cyber Growth at NCSC, said: “I’m delighted that 21 universities have been recognised as Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, including four who have received the award for the first time. These recognitions are testament to the dedication of academics, support staff and senior management who have ensured that cyber security remains high on the university’s agenda. And they demonstrate that the UK has a growing number of world-class universities carrying out cutting-edge research into all areas of cyber security. We very much look forward to working with them over the coming years to tackle the most difficult cyber security challenges.”

The Centre for Digital Trust and Society at The University of Manchester is one of few cyber and digital security and trust research centre in the UK led from social science, rather than a computer science or engineering department.

It focuses on barriers to, and enablers of, trust in digital and cyber technologies and has more than 80 active researchers affiliated to the Centre.

The Centre prides itself on its strong interdisciplinary engagement across the University and supports six multi-disciplinary research clusters: Trusted Digital Systems, Digital Technologies and Crime, Workplace and Organisational Security, Democracy and Trust, Privacy and Trust and Advanced Mathematics.

Dr Mustafa, Senior Lecturer in Systems and Software Security at The University of Manchester, said: “While our cybersecurity research across the Department of Computer Science provides the fundamentals and foundations of our Centre’s research, our social science academics provide the societal relevance and context: secure cyber and digital systems are grounded in everyday human behaviours and interactions. It is for this reason that we coordinate our sociotechnical cybersecurity research activities ensuring the people and social factors remain central. We do this by engaging in cross-cluster and cross-disciplinary research activities, realising our sociotechnical work through internally and externally funded research.”

Over the next five years, researchers will work on a wide range of projects from cyber security controls, building secure and safe (AI) software to counter threats, through understanding offending and victimisation of cybercrimes, to the application of cyber security research in development and industry, as well as the cyber risks to political-economic systems and organisational workplaces, and the need for data privacy and security.

The ACE-CSR will continue to hold strong national and international links - in particular - to work with its partners in the Greater Manchester Cyber Ecosystem and the wider North West Cyber Corridor.

Modelling vascular flow is crucial for understanding and treating vascular diseases, but traditional methods are labour and computationally intensive. The new research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, evaluates state-of-the-art methods that accelerate the simulation process while retaining the level of accuracy required for such crucial applications.

The researchers, led by The University of Manchester, found that Reduced Order Modelling (ROM) - a technique for reducing the computational complexity - can be used selectively to accurately accelerate various types of vascular flow modelling problems.

They also found that Machine Learning methods can be used to overcome limitations in ROM techniques or to provide entirely new simulation techniques that can tackle a wide array of vascular flow modelling problems.

The findings have the capacity to revolutionise the vascular medical field.

The review also highlights the significance of these accelerated simulation methods for in-silico trials, which are virtual simulations integral to the development and regulatory approval of new medical devices. Using these simulation acceleration techniques, in-silico trials can be conducted with unprecedented speed and accuracy, reducing reliance on conventional clinical trials that are often expensive and time consuming. 

The research also advocates for a concerted effort to establish a benchmarking framework for simulation acceleration methods. This initiative would establish standardised metrics for evaluating precision and speed-up across different simulation approaches, encouraging transparency and comparability in this rapidly advancing field.

Mr Lambertini encountered the smart bots during an introduction to the Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI, which specialises in applying state-of-the-art AI technologies into the design of robots and autonomous systems for real world applications. 

The ambassador and his team – including Matteo Corradini from the Italian Consul in Manchester – were shown a number of advanced devices, ranging from humanoid robots that are designed to engage with people to highly resilient machines intended for use in hazardous environments like nuclear decommissioning. 

The diplomatic visit to the robotics centre was part of a wider engagement with Greater Manchester, including a meeting with a senior University delegation led by Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor, Luke Georghiou.

In a separate engagement, Mr Lambertini and his delegation also met Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester. 
 

The Manchester research team will combine expertise in AI and psychology to focus on the fact that smart machines still only understand about one-third of the meaning of human language. 

To progress their ability to understand humans more fully robots will act as ‘tutors’ to help children better understand numerical and abstract concepts. This in turn will then help robots engage more meaningfully with older generations of humans. 

Angelo Cangelosi, Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at The University of Manchester, explains that language is the most natural means of communication among people to talk about and share experiences – and for robots to understand and communicate with us. 

For example, humans use concrete words to describe objects and their features (eg ‘Look at this red pen’) and to talk about actions and events (‘I write with the pen’). However, we most commonly use abstract words to describe social situations and relationships (such as, ‘Mary likes John’), emotional states (‘I wish you happiness’), and numbers and quantities (1, 2, 10, or ‘some’, ‘many’, et cetera). 

“In fact, the great majority – a total of 72% – of words we use are abstract words; but today’s robots can only understand the concrete words. So, how can we have meaningful interaction with robots if they cannot understand most of the words we use?” asks Professor Cangelosi. 

To meet this challenge, the ERC Advanced eTALK project will take direct inspiration from the way children and adults use and learn abstract words – and use methods from AI and psychology to develop a new generation of robots capable of communicating with people about internal feelings, numbers, and other abstract words. 

The award of this project builds on, and recognises, the reputation of the Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI, and the expertise from Professor Cangelosi and his team in combining psychological concepts with AI and robotics, to design robots that positively impact society. 

The ERC has announced the awarding of 218 Advanced Grants to outstanding research leaders across Europe, as part of the Horizon Europe programme. The grants – totalling €544 million – support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.

The prize of £1m will be awarded every year for the next ten years, to encourage AI research in the UK.

At 11am on 21 June, 1948 the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicked named ‘The Baby’, started running its first program. It took 52 minutes, running through 3.5 million calculations before it got to the correct answer.

In that process, the Baby became the first computer in the world to run a program electronically stored in its memory, rather than on paper tape or hardwired in.

Speaking in the House of Commons, the Chancellor said: “The world’s first stored program computer was built at The University of Manchester in 1948 and was known as the Manchester Baby. 75 years on the Baby has grown up, so I will call this new national AI award the Manchester Prize in its honour.”

Artificial intelligence research has gone from strength to strength at the University since then, building on the legacy of that achievement. Today the University works on fundamental AI, robotics and autonomous systems, advanced manufacturing systems and neuroscience.

To find out more about these exciting possibilities view our pages below.

Further information

Artificial Intelligence at the University

Robotics at the University of Manchester

Putting the Human back in to the Algorithm

How a 70-year-old ‘Baby’ changed the face of modern computing

Advanced materials and automation: manufacturing's 'dream team'

Radioactive robot Lyra named Best Invention of 2022

Digital Futures

Research Explorer

Through its partnership with HyperionDev, the DfE is offering over 1,400 potential learners the chance to enrol in a government-funded online coding boot camp.

These coding boot camps in Data Science, Software Engineering and Full-Stack Web Development, which can be completed within just 16 weeks, give learners a non-degree certificate from HyperionDev - with limited certifications issued in partnership with The University of Manchester and University of Nottingham Online.

Professor Danielle George, Associate Vice President Blended and Flexible Learning at The University of Manchester said: “Our new partnership with HyperionDev will make a significant contribution in addressing the national digital skills gap. Learning to code through boot camps aligns with our Flexible Learning Strategy and our commitment to prepare young people for an increasingly digital, interconnected and intercultural world.”

Riaz Moola, founder and CEO of HyperionDev says: "According to the UK government 2021 report “Quantifying the UK Data Skills Gap”, 48% of UK businesses were recruiting for roles requiring data skills. Of those, around 46% are struggling to find suitable candidates, meaning that there is a huge skills gap in this area. In the current economic crisis, the ability to code could significantly improve present and future employees' salary expectations. I strongly believe that accessible tech education is the future of upward social mobility for tens of thousands of people across the globe.” 

In a competitive job market, skills such as coding have become crucial both for young people and for experienced professionals looking to reorient their careers. According to Tech Nation’s “People and Skills” 2022 report, tech salaries in the UK are on average nearly 80% higher than non-tech salaries. This reality has increased demand for boot camps such as those designed and delivered by HyperionDev, which has expanded its operations significantly to keep up with the demand for its services. 

The HyperionDev programming boot camp courses are targeted at individuals who are looking to give their careers a boost, explore other career paths or to keep up-to-date with the latest job market requirements. They can generally be completed within three to six months and have been designed to help learners become fully-fledged developers, whether they are from a tech background or not. All students have a specifically designated mentor to help them adapt their level to the courses and advise them on their future professional development. 

The Network will be led by Professor Peter Haynes, Head of the Department of Materials at Imperial College London, and Professor Richard Curry, Vice-Dean for Research & Innovation in the Faculty of Science & Engineering at The University of Manchester. A strategic advisory board will be chaired by Professor Rachel Oliver from the University of Cambridge.

Professor Curry said “This Network will bridge the gap between the major investments in the NQTP and the Henry Royce Institute and help to secure the UK’s future competitiveness in quantum technologies."
 

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory of physics that was introduced to explain the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles. It dominated the twentieth century by enabling the digital revolution that has transformed our economy and society.

We are now poised on the brink of a second revolution where the quantum physics of superposition and entanglement will be exploited at much larger scales. This will lead to transformative technologies for timing, sensing, imaging, communications and computing with applications in major industries including energy, construction, pharmaceuticals, defence, finance, security, telecommunications and information technology.

Like all technologies, quantum devices rely critically upon materials, both at the heart of the quantum system and in the surrounding technology. By comparison with the digital revolution, quantum technologies are currently at the stage of the thermionic valve: remarkable for their time but a long way from today’s products. While the materials of interest include so-called quantum materials such as superconductors and topological insulators, the majority of the needs at the heart of the quantum system will be met by more conventional complex oxides, ferroelectrics, nonlinear optical, 2D materials, engineered impurities in semiconductors, insulating materials, molecular materials, glasses and magnetic alloys, all underpinned by theory & simulation, characterisation and processing.

Professor Peter Haynes said “The EPSRC Materials for Quantum Network is a timely opportunity to harness the UK’s materials research community in addressing the needs of the national quantum programme to develop mature technologies that are sufficiently usable, reliable and cost-effective to take to market."

This certification is a significant accolade that gives students added confidence that they are going forward to deal with cyber security in a way that is "business as usual".

Professor Robert Stevens, Head of Department of Computer Science, said: “I’m delighted that our cyber security pathway has received this certification. Cyber security has always been important, but that importance is growing and I’m pleased that the Department of Computer Science’s contribution to the training of the next generation of cyber security experts has been validated in this way.”

In 2004, The University of Manchester worked with the National Computing Centre to enhance its teaching in computer-related security. This led to a computer security module that quickly became very popular. Over the years it has expanded to a pathway covering computer and network security and was joined by specialist teaching in cryptography and software security. The latter is taught by the world-class Systems and Software Security Research Group, famous for its award-winning testing tools.

This Computer Security pathway is now embedded in the MSc course and has seen over 2000 students through the programme. They get to tackle the challenges of cyber security that encourages them to go on to defend, innovate and grow the systems we rely on day to day. They learn from our academic team and practitioners in the field including Barclays, CISCO, Cyjax, KPMG, McAfee, NCC Group, North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, and Pentest Partners.

Each student engages in a significant research-based dissertation project that sees them tackling fundamental cyber security conundrums within the framework of the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK).

Chris Ensor, NCSC Deputy Director for Cyber Growth, said: “I am delighted that The University of Manchester's MSc in Advanced Computer Science (Security Pathway) is now fully certified by the NCSC. Offering a certified degree helps prospective students make more informed choices about their future career prospects in cyber security and employers can rest assured that graduates of these courses will be well-taught and have valued industry skills.”

Danny Dresner, Professor of Cyber Security at The University of Manchester, said: “Our policy has been to embed cyber security teaching with other opportunities including systems governance and machine learning so that our students can fulfil their learning objectives in computer science with cyber security being dealt with throughout the system's life cycle.”

The event is already attracting leading academics from across the world as they look to influence the development of AI and data science.

Following a hiatus last year, the annual conference is being run again this year on June 20-21 as a hybrid event. The in-person conference will be hosted at The University of Manchester’s newly opened engineering campus and events will also be streamed live from this state-of-the-art venue to virtual audiences.

The programme will feature keynote speakers, networking opportunities and panel sessions, including a big conversation on the ethics of AI that will bring together top academics and relevant business leaders. Conference themes to be discussed will include:

• ethical and responsible AI: as AI-powered systems increasingly become more mainstream in society are we doing enough to futureproof the trustworthiness of this ubiquitous and powerful technology?
• explainable AI (XAI): being able to accurately model AI decision-making systems and ensure they feature fairness, transparency and expected outcomes will be a crucial challenge for AI designers.
• machine learning (ML): this field, which focuses on the use data and algorithms to imitate the way humans learn, has experienced an academic ‘gold rush’ with an exponential increase in research and innovation activities. Applications now range from autonomous machines to cognitive science to genetic sequencing – and machine learning is set to be a huge economic disruptor.
• related topics will include multi-modal data integration and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• also The University of Manchester will reveal more about its new centres-of-excellence in AI Fundamentals and Robotics and AI research and applied innovation.

The conference is attracting world-class researchers and confirmed international speakers and panellists include:

• Virginia Aglietti, Deepmind and Visiting Research Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute
• Nikolaos Aletras, Lecturer in Natural Language Processing, The University of Sheffield
• Umang Bhatt, University of Cambridge
• Sylvie Delacroix, University of Birmingham
• Clyde Fare, IBM
• Melanie Fernandez Pradier, Microsoft Research
• Darminder Ghataoura, Fujitsu
• David Leslie, Director for Ethical and Trustworthy AI, The Alan Turing Institute
• Christina Lioma, Professor in Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
• Andre Martins, Associate Professor, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon
• Naoaki Okazaki, Professor, Okazaki Lab, Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Amy Sharif, Peak AI
• Alfredo Vellido, Polytechnic University of Catalonia

To register for the conference visit this Eventbrite page – or to be considered for a short oral presentation or poster, submit an abstract through the easychair submission page. 

For any other information contact conference manager Matthew Harrison: matthew.harrison@manchester.ac.uk

• designing control systems with a focus on bio-inspired solutions to mechatronics, eg the use of biomimetic sensors, actuators and robot platforms; 
• developing new software engineering and AI methodologies for verification in autonomous systems, with the aim to design trustworthy autonomous systems; 
• researching human-robot interaction, with a pioneering focus on the use of brain-inspired approaches to robot control, learning and interaction; and 
• research in ethics and human-centred robotics issues, for the understanding of the impact of the use of robots and autonomous systems with individuals and society. 

Angelo Cangelosi, Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at Manchester, said the University offers a world-leading position in the field of autonomous systems – a technology that is set to revolutionise our lives and workplaces. 

"Manchester's robotics community has achieved a critical mass of expertise – however, our approach in the designing of robots and autonomous systems for real world applications is distinctive through our novel use of AI-based knowledge," added Professor Cangelosi. 

"Our robot pioneers therefore find themselves on the interface between robotics, autonomy and AI – and their knowledge is drawn from across the University's disciplines, including humanities and biological and medical sciences. 

"Our University now has the potential to build on these solid foundations and further establish itself as a world leader in this important and rapidly growing field with the establishment of the new interdisciplinary Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI." 

The new centre has hosted an inaugural workshop – attracting more than 90 delegates – to bring a strategic focus to the robot and AI community at Manchester, and looks to share expertise and innovation. 

Find out more about the Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI. 

Professor Dongarra is currently a Turing Fellow at The University of Manchester and collaborations with Manchester colleagues include work on batched computations, mixed precision arithmetic algorithms, and the PLASMA software.

As a leading ambassador of high-performance computing, Dongarra led the field in persuading hardware vendors to optimize these methods, and software developers to target his open-source libraries in their work. Ultimately, these efforts resulted in linear algebra-based software libraries achieving nearly universal adoption for high performance scientific and engineering computation on machines ranging from laptops to the world’s fastest supercomputers. These libraries were essential in the growth of the field—allowing progressively more powerful computers to solve computationally challenging problems.

“Today’s fastest supercomputers draw headlines in the media and excite public interest by performing mind-boggling feats of a quadrillion calculations in a second,” explains ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “But beyond the understandable interest in new records being broken, high performance computing has been a major instrument of scientific discovery. HPC innovations have also spilled over into many different areas of computing and moved our entire field forward.

“Jack Dongarra played a central part in directing the successful trajectory of this field. His trailblazing work stretches back to 1979, and he remains one of the foremost and actively engaged leaders in the HPC community. His career certainly exemplifies the Turing Award’s recognition of ‘major contributions of lasting importance.’”

Professor Andrew Hazel, Head of Department, Mathematics at The University of Manchester said: "Jack Dongarra's pioneering work has made it possible for researchers around the world to access high-performance computing. The Department of Mathematics is delighted that his fundamental contributions have been recognised by the ACM Turing Award."

“Jack Dongarra's work has fundamentally changed and advanced scientific computing,” said Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Research and Google Health. “His deep and important work at the core of the world's most heavily used numerical libraries underlie every area of scientific computing, helping advance everything from drug discovery to weather forecasting, aerospace engineering and dozens more fields, and his deep focus on characterizing the performance of a wide range of computers has led to major advances in computer architectures that are well suited for numeric computations.”

Dongarra will be formally presented with the ACM A.M. Turing Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, which will be held this year on Saturday, June 11 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Dongarra has a 25% FTE appointment in the Department of Mathematics as Turing Fellow. He is a member of the Numerical Linear Algebra group and his work in Manchester has been funded by EPSRC and EU Horizon 2020 grants. He has also held Knowledge Transfer Partnerships with NAG Ltd., funded by Innovate UK.

The ‘Agile Software Engineering’ course is designed and delivered in collaboration with IBM, Fuzzy Labs and The Startup Factory, ensuring it meets needs of potential employers. It is funded by the Office for Students (OfS) who awarded £2 million to 22 higher education providers that were successful in a short course trial competition. It forms part of the government’s approach to deliver its new Lifelong Learning Entitlement and help learners gain skills sought after by employers. 

The course is being developed by Academic Lead Dr Suzanne Embury and her team in the University’s Department of Computer Science. What makes it stand out is that it helps learners to take the next steps from a coding bootcamp to a career in software engineering, without having to commit to a full computer science degree. By delivering the skills needed to turn ideas into high quality software, this course addresses a growing employer demand for software engineers.

The standalone course offers students the flexibility to fit learning around their personal schedules or existing careers with the option to study part-time and remotely. Modules will be adapted using a blended and flexible model to allow self-paced and self-directed learning, balanced with personalised support from expert teaching staff.

Exploring how courses can be delivered in new ways to enable lifelong learning is a key priority for the University. Professor Danielle George, Associate Vice President for Blended and Flexible Learning: “With an everchanging job market, we want to offer learners the opportunity to upskill and reskill throughout their careers, in a way that works for them. Traditional full-time courses can be difficult to access for many, including those with certain disabilities, existing careers, or caring responsibilities. While on-campus learning will always be at the heart of our University, we’re also looking at expanding pathways into higher education, from bite-sized chunks of learning to full modular, stackable degrees.”

Dr Suzanne Embury added: “The Agile Software Engineering course is a fantastic example of how in-demand skills can be delivered in a flexible way and I’m thrilled it was selected as part of the short course trial. We’re hoping to learn from and build on this success to offer new pathways into many different subject areas in the future.”

Matt Squire, CTO and co-founder of Manchester-based machine learning operations company Fuzzy, said: "As a fast-growing tech company, we're always looking for talented graduates to join us. By emphasising the methods and tooling that real software companies use every day, the short course in Agile Software Engineering provides students with experience working on realistic software engineering projects, and encourages students from a variety of backgrounds to learn valuable skills that can be put to use in the industry. The kind of flexible route into education offered by this scheme is something that will benefit the whole industry."

Learners on the course will also be eligible to apply for paid work as software developers with Imago, the University of Manchester's student software company, giving them the chance to combine their learning with practical CV-boosting experience.

The course is expected to open for recruitment in June 2022, and to open for enrolment from September 2022. 

Contact Suzanne Embury (suzanne.m.embury@manchester.ac.uk) for more information, or visit https://agile.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ofs-short-course-trial-project.

Both Professor Robert Stevens, Head of the Department of Computer Science, and Dr Amy Bonsall, a Researcher in FSE and Founder and Director of The Women in Academia Support Network, are shortlisted.

The Disability Power 100 is an annual celebration of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK, working to break the stigma around disability and creating a more accessible and inclusive world for all.

A fifth of the UK's population has a disability or impairment; however there is very little recognition of successful and influential disabled people.

Shaw Trust wants to change the public perception of disability, to recognise strong, successful, influential people who are leaders in their field. It aims to encourage the talented leaders of tomorrow to connect with role models and see that aspiration and ambition can be fulfilled regardless of disability or impairment.

The Disability Power 100 is able to influence people from all walks of life, and means something different to everyone on the list. Nikki Fox, BBC Disability Correspondent, was announced as 2020's most influential disabled person in Britain and chaired the 2021 independent judging panel. This year there were more than 550 nominations for the 100 places on the list.

Robert said: "I always wanted to be a scientist and I wouldn't let losing my sight stop me; I hope that my success as an academic will help others in their careers."

Amy - who was also the overall winner of the University's Staff Volunteer of the Year 2021 - added: "Everyone should have free access to the support they need to fulfil their potential."

Congratulations to both Robert and Amy!

Julia is the Chief Technologist for the Air Sector at BAE Systems, responsible for delivering a Technology Strategy that sees BAE Systems collaborate with wider industry and academia on a range of key technologies, including artificial intelligence, data analytics, human augmentation, augmented reality and quantum technologies.

She has held a number of roles within the company, including Chief Avionics Engineer and Mission Systems Design Authority for the UK MoD Taranis UCAV demonstrator. Julia spent ten years in Australia investigating next generation technologies in the field of unmanned systems and information advantage, and is also a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Commenting on the appointment, Julia said: "I'm delighted and honoured to be appointed as Honorary Professor at The University of Manchester, who have one of the most extensive and world leading research centres for computer science in the world."

The online events will take place throughout the week commencing Monday, 14 December as part of wider celebrations across The University of Manchester. They will provide an opportunity for both staff and students to mark winter graduation after physical ceremonies were postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

FSE graduation celebrations will be spread over the week, with events held for mathematics; mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering (MACE) - technical; MACE - management of projects; physics and astronomy; electrical and electronic engineering; international fashion retailing; materials science and engineering; chemical engineering and analytical science; earth and environmental sciences; computer science; and chemistry.

The move online means students will be able to celebrate regardless of where they are currently situated. It shows that while they may not be in the city at the moment, Manchester is behind its graduates as they take their next steps out into the world.

Each subject area will celebrate in its own unique way - either via YouTube or Zoom. Dates and times - and links to those on YouTube - are provided below:

School of Engineering

• Chemical engineering and analytical science - Wednesday, 16 December, 11.30am
• Computer science - Wednesday, 16 December, 9am
• Electrical and electronic engineering - Thursday, 17 December, 11.30am
• Mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering - Technical - Friday, 18 December, 12pm
• Mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering - Management of Projects - Friday, 18 December, 10am

School of Natural Sciences

• Chemistry - Thursday, 17 December, 11am (link available soon)
• Earth and environmental sciences - Monday, 14 December, 10am (link available soon)
• Materials: International fashion retailing - Wednesday, 16 December, 2pm (link available soon)
• Materials science and engineering - Tuesday, 15 December, 2pm (link available soon)
• Mathematics - Wednesday, 16 December, 10am (link available after the event) 
• Physics and astronomy - Tuesday, 15 December, 11am (link available after the event)

A huge congratulations to all of our FSE graduates, and the best of luck for the future!

A collaborative research team led by Prof Mikel Luján, Director of the Arm Centre of Excellence at The University of Manchester, are to work with THG, one of world’s leading e-commerce businesses on a major research project to help prevent cyber security attacks. THG has world-class technical and research teams who will be applying their findings to the cutting edge of UK and global digital security through the project.

The £5.8m project, known as Soteria, runs for three years and three months starting in January 2021. Soteria is being funded by Innovate UK’s Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative which aims to prevent hackers from remotely taking control of digital systems such as autonomous cars, personal computers or smart home security systems, as well as protect businesses from cyberattacks and data breaches.

The Soteria project is also partnering with Oxford University and is one of two new research programmes announced by Innovate UK. Soteria will specifically work with Arm’s technology platform prototype Morello to understand how to improve security and enable the development of new cyber security services and products.

The team at University of Manchester will contribute technical expertise on managed runtimes, such as Java Virtual Machines (JVM), software verification, smart network technologies, and business optimisation. An example of new technology that will be investigated at The University is a JVM capable of harnessing the new security features of the Morello platform central to the DSbD iniative and developed by Arm Ltd.

Managed runtimes are complex software needed to execute the most popular programming languages, such as; Javascript, Java, Python, Ruby, C#. Thus, Soteria has the potential to improve the security of a large share of the software that as society we have come to rely upon.

Research findings from projects such as these are much needed given that almost half of UK businesses reported cyberattacks or breaches last year. The global e-commerce market is also expanding rapidly, a trend which has only been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Online retail in the UK accounted for about 20% of total retail spending in 2019 and is forecast to be well over 50% by 2030.

Dr Richard Allmendinger, Business Engagement Lead at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) and Senior Lecturer in Data Science, said: “It is fantastic to have been awarded this timely grant, and collaborate with THG, a global Manchester-based e-commerce giant, our colleagues from Computer Science, and Oxford University on the emerging technical and productivity-related challenges around cybersecurity.

"Alliance MBS is thrilled to be making use of its research expertise in decision science and innovation to lead the work strand around understanding and quantifying the impact of cyberattacks on productivity, and then using these insights to enable optimised business decisions. The Soteria project also provides a great opportunity to complement the work of the recently launched Productivity Institute at AMBS.”

Professor Mikel Luján, Arm/RAEng Research Chair and Royal Society Wolfson Fellow, said: “The University of Manchester has a world-leading track record collaborating with Arm Ltd., and as such is recognised as an Arm Centre of Excellence. Soteria is a very exciting opportunity to contribute to the Morello platform developed by Arm Ltd. with our expertise in runtime systems (such as JVMs), software verification and computer engineering. This collaboration with THG and Oxford University provides a unique opportunity to transform the security foundations of the digital infrastructure of e-commerce as well as improve the security of UK companies.”

Soteria will complement existing projects led by The University of Manchester such as, Sprite+ and Cyber Foundry which are aimed at researching and improving digital security, privacy, identity and trust.

Digital Security by Design Challenge Director John Goodacre said: “The project led by THG will provide a crucial demonstration of the security benefits DSbD technology can bring to the ecommerce industry.”

The online events took place throughout the week commencing Monday, 27 July as part of wider celebrations across The University of Manchester. They provided an opportunity for both staff and students to mark summer graduation after physical ceremonies were postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

A total of 12 FSE graduations were spread over the week, with events held for mathematics; mechanical, aerospace and civil engineering; physics and astronomy; electrical and electronic engineering; fashion business and technology; materials science and engineering; chemical engineering and analytical science; earth and environmental sciences; computer science; and chemistry.

The move online meant students were able to celebrate despite being situated all across the globe. It showed that while they may not be in the city at the moment, Manchester is behind its graduates as they take their next steps out into the world.

Each subject area celebrated in its own unique way - as shown in the recorded videos below:

School of Engineering

• Chemical engineering and analytical science
• Computer science
• Electrical and electronic engineering
• Mechanical engineering
• Aerospace engineering
• Civil engineering

School of Natural Sciences

• Chemistry
• Earth and environmental sciences
• Fashion business and technology
• Materials science and engineering
• Mathematics
• Physics and astronomy

A huge congratulations to all of our FSE graduates, and the best of luck for the future!

This is why we're doing our very best to keep you updated in the lead-up to the new academic year. As such, we'll be answering your questions in a series of video updates.

In this first video, Education Officer in the Students' Union Chloe Salin speaks to the Heads of Education for our Faculty's two Schools – Professor Peter Green in the School of Engineering and Professor Andrew Horn in the School of Natural Sciences – about their plans for a new-look teaching and learning experience.

You'll hear all about the benefits of blended learning; safety on campus; being part of the Manchester community (and student societies); lab, field and group work; exams and assessment; accessing software; and remote learning.

It's a lot to cover, but we hope the video will help to reassure you that this year's university experience will be what you expect from a university ranked 27^th in the world for two years running.

Please bear in mind that this is what we know right now. We'll provide more information, as and when we have it, in the videos to come.

If you have any questions you would like to ask, please send them through to your Department Admissions or Student Experience Team. They will then be either answered directly, or in one of the upcoming videos.

Manchester is the most targeted university for graduate employers, and last week's announcement of new post-study work visas will be welcomed by many international students hoping to further their studies at the University.

It was confirmed that post-work study visas will be extended for up to three years post-graduation for international PhD graduates, and that international undergraduate and postgraduate-taught students will be able to live and work in the UK for up to two years post-graduation.

The new Graduate Route is to launch in the summer of 2021, meaning any eligible student who graduates next summer or after will be able to apply, including students who have already started their courses.

As well as being the most targeted university for graduate employers, The University of Manchester has a Careers Service team specifically dedicated to helping postgraduate students further their careers.

Find out more about the new Graduate Route and post-study work visa extensions on the British Council website.

As a postgraduate (research) offer-holder, you may have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will affect you and your transition to begin your postgraduate research at the University. In the video, Sarah provides some guidance during this time of uncertainty:

It will still be feasible for most offer-holders to start their PhD in September, but if it makes sense to delay by a month or two, or even until next January, we will be flexible in accommodating your needs and the particular circumstances of your research project. As soon as possible now we would like you to get in touch with your supervisor to consult about your start date.

Please be reassured that whenever you decide to commence your research, we will be as flexible as we possibly can where applicants aren't able to meet the conditions of their offers in the way that they expected, or at the time that they expected, due to the major challenges outside of their control.

Further information for applicants and offer-holders

Full transcript:

Hi, my name is Sarah Heath, I'm Associate Dean for Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Development in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester. I wanted to send a message to you as offer-holders in this time of uncertainty.

I want to start by saying how delighted I am that you have chosen The University of Manchester as the institution where you will undertake your PhD research. In the past three months our staff, students and alumni have done some amazing work to support the global fight against COVID-19 and I am immensely proud to say I work here.

We understand that you will have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic will affect you and your transition to begin your postgraduate research at the University. Obviously, this is not just an issue that affects The University of Manchester, it is affecting Universities all around the world. We want to reassure you that we are monitoring the situation very closely and have significant contingency planning underway, and most importantly, that your health and your safety remains front and centre in our thinking at all times.

Given the considerable disruption to our research projects and laboratories we're reviewing a range of options and thinking creatively, with the goal of giving you the best possible start to your research career in the current circumstances. We believe that most of our postgraduate researchers will be able to commence their research programme with us in the autumn. This is likely to mean that you will begin your research programme remotely, as the restrictions imposed by social distancing measures may make unrestricted access to campus for all difficult for some time to come.

A remote start to your PhD is not a less productive one, it is actually very similar to how most PhDs start in research-intensive universities like ours; in collaboration with your supervisor you will spend the time carefully framing your PhD, formulating your short, medium and long-term aims, and doing much of the preliminary background work which will lead to a productive time once you are back on campus. You will also of course be able to fully participate in other activity, such as research group meetings just as if you were on campus.

As soon as possible we would like you and your supervisor to consult about your start date, to determine if a start this autumn is feasible for the particular circumstances of your research project. Please be reassured that if after consultation you decide that delaying the start to your research until January 2021 would be beneficial, you will be able to do so.

Whenever you decide to commence your research, rest assured that we will be as flexible as we possibly can where applicants aren't able to meet the conditions of their offers in the way that they expected, or at the time that they expected, due to the major challenges outside of their control.

We will of course continue to be guided by government and scientific advice and evidence as the country begins to ease the lockdown, and as in due course we further solidify our plans you'll be notified as soon as possible, and the information will be made available on the University website.

In the meantime, please take the opportunity to visit the applicant and offer-holder information on the University website. Please do keep in regular contact with your supervisor and your departmental support team with any questions or concerns you may have. And above all, please stay safe and look after yourselves and your loved ones.

The University of Manchester and Finland’s Aalto University have entered into a strategic cooperation agreement to further health-AI research.

Aalto University’s excellence in artificial intelligence (AI), combined with The University of Manchester’s strengths in data science and AI combined with health systems, will accelerate vital research and development in data-driven healthcare and related areas.

The new collaboration will apply joint expertise to the innovative use of AI and machine learning in the medical sector. In Manchester the work will be focused around the existing Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology.

The Institute plays a critical role in pulling innovations through from basic research to market ready products and services, which can then be accelerated into clinical use through Greater Manchester’s devolved health and care system and established innovation pathway.

The new alliance with Aalto also supports the activities of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) coordinated by Aalto University. The University of Manchester is a member organisation of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence.

As a part of the agreement, Samuel Kaski, Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University, has joined The University of Manchester as part of a shared professorship between the two universities. As part of this new appointment Prof Kaski will become the Director of the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology, responsible in particular of AI. He will continue his work as Director of the Artificial Intelligence Center of Finland and will remain as Academy Professor until the end of the current transition year.

“My main task will be to set up a strong AI Center in Manchester, and the Pankhurst Institute will give unique opportunities for machine learners interested in working in medicine and health. That is what caught my attention. But there will certainly be opportunities in fundamental AI research as well!” Prof Kaski said. “The mission of the whole Institute is even broader of course, and many contributors are needed and welcome. I am very glad to see a number of excellent people already engaged.”

Professor Martin Schröder, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, said “Professor Kaski has a world-leading reputation in AI, and we are delighted that he is joining us to lead the Pankhurst. Our collaboration with Aalto University strengthens our global reach to deliver new interdisciplinary research, innovation and impact for the benefit of the university, city and region.”

As a postgraduate (taught) offer-holder, you may have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will affect you and your transition to beginning your masters-level study at the University. In the video, Danielle provides some guidance during this time of uncertainty:

We recognise the disruption across universities in the UK and around the world, and we are monitoring the situation closely. We will be as flexible as we can where applicants are not able to meet the conditions of their offers in the way they expected, or at the time they expected, due to major challenges outside of their control.

Further information for applicants and offer-holders

Full transcript:

Hello, my name is Professor Danielle George, I'm the Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Student Experience for the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester. I wanted to take the time to record a personal message for you in this time of uncertainty.

We understand that as offer-holders you have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will affect you and your transition to begin your masters-level study at the University. We recognise the disruption across universities in the UK and around the world and we are monitoring the situation closely.

We will be as flexible as we can where applicants aren't able to meet the conditions of their offers in the way they expected, or at the time they expected, due to major challenges outside of their control.

Given the significant disruption to academic systems, we're reviewing a number of options, including moving provision online for the start of term, as well as delaying the start of term to later in the year. If we do anticipate the need to make changes of a significant nature, you'll be notified as soon as possible and information will be made available on the University website.

We'll also be telling you more about how our staff, students and alumni are supporting the global fight against the coronavirus. I'm sure many of you will have heard about hospitals being built in record time to take care of those needing intensive treatment, or the production of ventilators by companies more used to making vacuum cleaners, car parts or electronics. Our statisticians – including a team from Manchester – are using their modelling expertise to advise the government on how to best protect the UK population and make decisions based on facts and evidence.

I am incredibly proud of all the engineers and scientists working around the clock to support the incredible front-line medical staff to deliver healthcare for the most seriously ill across the world. 

In the meantime, please take the opportunity to visit the applicant and offer holder information from the main University webpage manchester.ac.uk. Please contact our admissions teams with any questions or concerns you may have about your application. Above all, please stay safe and look after yourselves and your loved ones.

As an undergraduate offer-holder, you may have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will affect you and your transition to university. In this video, Danielle provides some guidance for you, your parents and caregivers:

We understand this is a very unsettling time for you and your family, but please be assured that we will do everything we can to ensure these changes won't affect your opportunity to attend our University in the coming academic year.

Further information for applicants and offer-holders

Full transcript:

Hello, my name is Professor Danielle George, I'm the Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Student Experience for the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester. I wanted to take the time to record a personal message for you, your parents and caregivers in this time of uncertainty. 

We understand that as offer-holders you have concerns about how the ongoing coronavirus outbreak will affect you and your transition to university. Some of our UK applicants may have already received notifications about cancelled interviews or offer-holder visit days. Where possible, these will be replaced by webinars and virtual activity with the opportunity for you to ask questions of our admissions teams and some of our current students.

For undergraduate students, following announcements by the UK Department for Education regarding A-levels and the International Baccalaureate, the admissions timetable will run similarly to previous years, and all students will be awarded a grade for any exam they were entered for. We will, of course, consider your needs when addressing any issues with your application and be as flexible as we can. 

Please be assured that we will do everything we can to ensure these changes won't affect your opportunity to attend our University in the coming academic year.

Over the next few months, we'll be increasing the communications we send to you. We'll also be telling you more about how our staff, students and alumni are supporting the global fight against the coronavirus. I'm sure many of you will have heard about hospitals being built in record time to take care of those needing intensive treatment, or the production of ventilators by companies more used to making vacuum cleaners, car parts or electronics. Our statisticians – including a team from Manchester – are using their modelling expertise to advise the government on how to best protect the UK population and make decisions based on facts and evidence.

I am incredibly proud of all the engineers and scientists working around the clock to support the incredible front-line medical staff to deliver healthcare for the most seriously ill across the world. 

In the meantime, please take the opportunity to visit the applicant and offer holder information from the main University webpage manchester.ac.uk. Please contact our admissions teams with any questions or concerns you may have about your application. Above all, please stay safe and look after yourselves and your loved ones.

Users of a new health and wellbeing app are contributing to a publicly-available heat map of people with COVID-19 symptoms, providing a national picture of the outbreak and its spread over time.

The app was developed by UK company, Evergreen Life, in collaboration with data and health scientists. As more people add their responses to the data, the accurate information provided will help fight the virus. The data is being shared with leading universities, including Manchester, who will analyse it with the NHS.

The University of Manchester’s Professor Tjeerd Van Staa and Dr Ian Hall are among those analysing the data. Dr Hall, a Reader in Mathematical Staistics said: “Evergreen Life users are supporting a better understanding of the local experience of COVID19 disease through sharing their data which will be incredibly useful to national and local planning."

The data, based on 25,548 responses shows that at March 27, 10.4% of respondents had reported having the symptoms consistent with COVID-19, up from 8.1% in the initial survey on Sunday 22nd, before lockdown was announced.

Before lockdown, 53% with symptoms were staying at home and after lockdown 89% with symptoms are reporting they are staying at home - showing that the overwhelming majority of those with symptoms are now acting on government advice to self-isolate.

Dr Hall added: “This is an exciting emerging data stream and I look forward to helping interpret the data, with colleagues in Manchester and Liverpool, as it provides situational awareness to users and policy makers alike.”

Dr Hall is also one of a special task force of statisticians who have been analysing data models from the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak to help inform UK Government policy and response. They specialise on risk to communities that are in enclosed places, such as prisons or large vessels like a cruise ship; as well as analysing highly social communities found in schools to much smaller social environments, like our family homes.

Evergreen Life CEO Stephen Critchlow says: “We’ve asked our 750,000 users to help build a heat map of those with symptoms of COVID-19 to help the NHS and researchers better understand how the virus is moving and spreading around the UK. We’ve already heard from over 25,000 people and the questionnaire has been completed over 40,000 times.

“We have compared the situation before and after lockdown. It shows that while many more people are now staying at home, the number of people reporting symptoms has risen from 8.1% to 10.4%.

Users of the app, available from app stores, are being asked to report if they are self-isolating, have a dry cough or a temperature. The anonymised data is being used to create a national picture of those reporting symptoms. People will also be asked to report when they recover to enable further data analysis as the outbreak progresses. App users are also sent personalised information on national guidance, to support them, and optimise their wellbeing. The platform will also be offered to give the special advice from the NHS for users within the 1.5m people with the greatest risk of complications.

Digital health is one of most vibrant research areas at The University of Manchester, building on an exceptionally strong track record with more than 40 years of interdisciplinary research. The University has world-leading capabilities in engineering and research methodology for digital health technologies, as shown through the bio-health informatics research programme at the School of Computer Science.

The Heat Map is available here.

At The University of Manchester, our people are working together and with partners from across society to understand coronavirus (COVID-19) and its wide-ranging impacts on our lives. Make a gift today to support the University’s response to coronavirus or visit the University’s volunteering website to lend a helping hand.

Two students from The University of Manchester have won the highest award possible at this year’s prestigious Undergraduate Awards in Dublin, Ireland.

Aayush Chadha and Stefan Pricopie were the Global Winners in the Engineering and Economics categories, respectively. They took home the Thomas Clarkson Gold Medal for their academic research and presentations, while fellow University student Samanyou Garg was the Regional Winner in the Computer Science category.

Aayush won his award for his final year project, “BL!NK: Detecting, Analysing and Storing Eye Blinks”. He developed a system to detect and track eye blinking, with applications in monitoring Parkinson’s disease.

His work brings together his background in computer science, with elements of physics, health, and engineering. The senor was built using graphene, because “it is very conductive and very sensitive”, says Aayush. It was then connected to a data storage device, where the data could be processed to identify blink characteristics such as frequency.

Speaking about his project, Aayush said; “While the project had elements that directly applied knowledge of Computer Science, most of the work required a good understanding of the physics involved, which was something I had to build up as I went along.”

He added; “Thankfully, I had great support from my supervisory team, Prof Thomas Thomson and Dr Gregory Auton!”

Samanyou won his award for a project on facial recognition in groups of people. “Automatic facial emotion recognition is a challenging task that had gained significant scientific interest,” Samanyou explains, “but the problem of emotion recognition for a group of people has been less extensively studied.”

Samanyou’s project aimed to overcome some of the problems faced in group recognition, such as head and body pose variations, variable lighting conditions, and variable image quality. He used a dataset of more than 10,000 images to train recognition models, using a hybrid machine learning system that incorporated deep neural networks and Bayesian classifiers.

Remarking on the significance of his achievement, Aayush said; “The Undergraduate Award means a much more widespread recognition of the idea’s merit, and its potential to be useful in the future. For a long time, eye blinking wasn’t looked at actively as a potential biomarker for tracking Parkinson’s disease, something which may now change.”

Similarly, Samanyou said; “Receiving the Undergraduate Award is an absolute honour for me. Being recognised by UA for the work that I put in is so very special to me, as it means that my work had some meaningful impact and motivates me to work even harder.”

The students attended a three-day summit in Dublin, where they were presented with their awards, as well as the opportunity to network with other winners and nominees. “I was able to meet people working on similar subjects,” said Aayush, adding; “Not only did that allow me to look at some of the problems I encountered from another perspective, but it also meant that I now have valuable contacts to reach out to in case I want to collaborate, or understand something about my research topic that doesn’t exactly fall in the purview of my project.”

Samanyou said; “It was an amazing experience at the 3-day summit where I had the opportunity to meet and share research with some highly motivated and passionate people from around the world. The future felt far less daunting after hearing solutions to real-world problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

“I would also like to thank The University of Manchester and my supervisor Prof Angelo Cangelosi for their support and for making this trip possible.”

The summit also gave the students the chance to explore Dublin, where they found themselves “drinking Guinness and Jameson’s, dancing to Irish folk music and composing limericks”, says Aayush.

The full list of Undergraduate Award winners from the University is;

· Global Winner – Aayush Chadha (Engineering)

· Global Winner – Stefan Pricopie (Economics)

· Regional Winner – Samanyou Garg (Computer Science)

· Highly Commended – Andrej Ivanon (Computer Science)

· Highly Commended – Igor Wodiany (Computer Science)

· Highly Commended – Matthew Caine (Politics and International Relations)

· Highly Commended – Otilia Vintu (Anthropology and Cultural Studies)

Researchers from The University of Manchester, with colleagues from the universities of Groningen and Utrecht in the Netherlands, say 3D curved microchip structures could be used to develop more powerful – and energy efficient – spin-based computers.

The work, published online in the journal Nano Letters, outlines the main challenges involved in creating 3D curved microchips that rely on the “spin” of electrons to carry and store information. According to Dr Ivan Vera-Marun, a lead researcher on the study, the key issue is that spin-based microchips are usually 2D structures. Therefore, a fundamental challenge when building 3D structures is transporting electrons without losing their unique spin properties. Collectively, the use of electron spin in electronics is known as “spintronics”.

To investigate this, the researchers used ion beams – a form of molecular sandblasting – to carve trenches in a piece of silicon, the material which forms the basis of microchips. They then grew nano-scale aluminium channels across these trenches, through which the electrons could travel. The movement of the electrons through these curved channels, and across the trenches, mimics the movement of electrons through a 3D structure with multiple layers of material. In doing so, the researchers hoped to discover what factors affect the spin and charge of electrons, characteristics which affect the efficiency and speed of electronic devices.

Arguably the most important finding to come from the paper is that the shape and varying thickness of the aluminium channels directly affected these characteristics. “What we discovered is that variations in the trench size would affect spin and charge transport in the channel differently,” explains Dr Kumar Sourav Das, then a PhD student supervised by Dr Vera-Marun. Dr Das added; “Thus, we could independently tune both spin and charge currents based on the channel geometry.” This could help to create more energy efficient electronics, as spintronics is an attractive way of creating low-power devices.

Spintronics are already used in memory storage, and the authors suggest a number of applications for this new research, including the possibility to use it as the basis for a new generation of quantum computer chips.

The study was performed under the umbrella of the FET European project “Curved nanomembranes for Topological Quantum Computation”. The experiments were initiated and supervised by Dr Ivan Vera-Marun, currently at The University of Manchester. Dr Kumar Sourav Das performed the experiments as a part of his PhD project in the group of Prof Bart van Wees, part of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen. The curved created by ion beam were designed at the HZDR Dresden by Dr. Denys Makarov. The theoretical model was created by Dr Carmine Ortix at Utrecht University, with colleagues from Italy.

Alan Turing will be the next face on the £50 note the Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, announced today (Monday, 15 July).

Making the announcement at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, the Governor also revealed the imagery depicting Alan Turing and his work that will be used for the reverse of the note.

The eminent mathematician and computer scientist, who is often dubbed ‘the father of modern computing’, was based at The University of Manchester after World War II. During the war he famously worked with the British Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma machine.

In 1948 Turing was appointed Reader in the Mathematics Department at the then Victoria University of Manchester. Soon afterwards he became Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory where he proposed an experiment now known as the Turing Test and worked on software for one of the earliest true computers – the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1.

Turing’s legacy is still keenly felt at the University today, where he is one of our Heritage Heroes and has a building named after him which houses the Schools of Mathematics and Physics and Astronomy.

President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell said: “We’re thrilled and immensely proud at the news Alan Turing will feature on the £50 note as he is such a strong part of our institution’s rich heritage.

“His pioneering work in mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence helped to distinguish and enhance our reputation in these academic areas, something that continues to this day.

“Here at the University Turing’s legacy lives on as future generations of mathematicians and physicists study in a building that bears his name. This latest recognition is richly deserved and a fitting tribute to one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century.”

Alan Turing was chosen following the Bank’s character selection process including advice from scientific experts. In 2018, the Banknote Character Advisory Committee chose to celebrate the field of science on the £50 note and this was followed by a six week public nomination period. The Bank received a total of 227,299 nominations, covering 989 eligible characters.

The Committee considered all the nominations before deciding on a shortlist of 12 options, which were put to the Governor for him to make the final decision. This latest accolade follows Turing being voted the 20^th century’s greatest person in a public vote on BBC Two’s series, ICONS earlier this year.

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, commented: “Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today. As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far ranging and path breaking. Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.”

The new £50 note will celebrate Alan Turing and his pioneering work with computers. As shown in the concept image, the design on the reverse of the note will feature:

• A photo of Turing taken in 1951 by Elliott & Fry which is part of the Photographs Collection at the National Portrait Gallery.
• A table and mathematical formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. This paper is widely recognised as being foundational for computer science. It sought to establish whether there could be a definitive method by which any theorem could be assessed as provable or not using a universal machine. It introduced the concept of a Turing machine as a thought experiment of how computers could operate.
• The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine which was developed at the National Physical Laboratory as the trial model of Turing’s pioneering ACE design. The ACE was one of the first electronic stored-program digital computers.
• Technical drawings for the British Bombe, the machine specified by Turing and one of the primary tools used to break Enigma-enciphered messages during WWII.
• A quote from Alan Turing, given in an interview to The Times newspaper on 11 June 1949: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”
• Turing’s signature from the visitor’s book at Bletchley Park in 1947, where he worked during WWII.
• Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code. The concept of a machine fed by binary tape featured in the Turing’s 1936 paper.

The full note design including all the security features will be unveiled closer to it entering circulation.

Geared towards adult learners in the North West of England, Coding Boot Camp is a non-degree programme that teaches the front-end and back-end skills necessary for a career in coding and web development.

The 24-week, part-time programme begins on 22 October 2019, with two three-hour evening classes during the week (6:30 to 9:30pm) and a four-hour class on Saturdays (10am to 2pm). The curriculum is strategically designed to teach people across varying proficiency levels, from absolute beginners to those with existing coding experience. Enrollment is now open at bootcamp.manchester.ac.uk.

Professor Robert Stevens, Head of the School of Computer Science, said: “We are delighted to be offering a pioneering new style of learning here at our University, which has an unrivalled heritage in the field of Computer Science. The accessible nature of the programme brings opportunities for technical development to a new audience of adult learners across the North West region; whether they’re parents with flexible study needs, or people looking for a career change into an exciting industry.

Our new Coding Boot Camp delivered in partnership with Trilogy Education is taught by industry professionals, with a course curriculum guided by our own academics in computer science; providing participants with high quality academic support and career coaching to help them make the transition into a technology career.”

The Coding Boot Camp covers the basics of coding, algorithms, and data structure, in addition to intensive training in HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, React, and more. No previous training or experience is required, although an understanding of coding basics is recommended. Participants gain skills to develop dynamic end-to-end web applications.

In addition to classroom instruction, participants spend a minimum of 20 hours a week on outside projects and homework. By the end of the course, participants will have built a professional project portfolio to showcase their abilities and hone their competitive edge in the employment market. In addition, participants receive a range of career-support services, portfolio reviews, recruitment assistance, and extensive tutor support.

At the end of the course, participants receive a certificate of completion in Full Stack Web Development from The University of Manchester.

To learn more about The University of Manchester Coding Boot Camp, visit bootcamp.manchester.ac.uk. You can apply online or by calling +44 (0) 161 240 6800.

The funding, from the seven UK Research Councils that are part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will enable the Institute - a team of software experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester Oxford and Southampton - to continue its work in helping researchers increase the impact of their research through the use of software. 

Of the full amount, £1.6 million will go to Manchester. Dr Caroline Jay, Senior Lecturer in Empirically Sound Software Engineering in the School of Computer Science, will be the Institute's inaugural Research Director. 

Dr Jay commented: "The Institute has been supporting researchers in writing better software since 2010. In its next phase, we will focus on building the evidence bank for practice and policy, to ensure that the software underpinning research in the UK - and internationally - is engineered in the most robust, reliable and reusable way."

Objectives for the new phase include the growth of communities to better share expertise across the wider research community, and the offering of insight into the use of software in research. The Institute also aims to continue enabling widespread adoption of research software practices and to provide training to build a researcher community and increase recognition of software in research.

Rozita Karami and Pelagia Ntoskori (Computer Science) joined Cesare Ardito (Mathematics) in The University of Manchester's qualifying team: Cyberhive. A total of 17 teams from 16 universities competed over two days in London's BT Tower to present the best treatment for a developing scenario.

The fictional scenario involved orchestrating a fix before a cyber attack could exploit a security vulnerability in the software that the UK oil and gas industry relies on for distribution.

Although the Manchester team didn't make it into the semi-finals, it excelled in teamwork - not only in preparation but in its presentation to judges drawn from the military, national and international government, banking and consultancy.

Competitors were rewarded by two days of networking opportunities with names at the forefront of international cybersecurity operations, including Lord George Robertson, former Secretary General of NATO.

The Manchester team's mentor Dr Daniel Dresner, Lecturer in the School of Computer Science, said he was very proud of the students' performance and looks forward to taking a new cohort to next year's competition.

Scientists working at The University of Manchester have shone new light on the Enigma machine used by the German military in World War Two and cracked by Alan Turing and his team of code breakers at Bletchley Park.

Using X-ray Computed Tomography (CT), features inside the Enigma’s metal casing were revealed, including the wiring and structure of the rotors that encrypted messages sent using the machine.

The CT technology, part of the Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials, works by collecting a series of X-ray radiographs which are then reconstructed into a virtual 3D replica.

Professor Philip Withers, Chief Scientist at the Henry Royce Institute and Regius Professor of Materials at The University of Manchester, said: "Normally Royce facilities are probing new materials to solve engineering problems in industry but when we were approached we were keen to help. Gaining a first look inside the Enigma machine required us to take over 1500 separate x-ray radiographs. It is exciting and appropriate to be able to unlock some of the secrets of such an iconic machine here at Manchester."

The 1941 German army Enigma machine was loaned to the University by Bletchley Park and its owner, cryptography enthusiast, David Cripps. It is the latest Enigma machine to be verified and one of only 274 registered. Made in Berlin in 1941, the machine is believed to have been supplied to the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior in Vienna.

Enigma machine owner David Cripps said: "One thing we’ve been able to do is actually look inside the rotors and see the individual wires and pins which connect the 26 letters on each of the three rotors, enabling a message to be encrypted. This is the first time anyone has been able to look inside the Enigma with this level of detail, using a technique that does not damage the machine."

Appropriately, the scanning work took place in the Alan Turing Building at The University of Manchester, which is dedicated to his legacy. Alan Turing was appointed at the University’s School of Mathematics in 1948 after his work on the Enigma. While at Manchester his work included programming of software for one of the earliest true computers – the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 – and a seminal 1950 paper on computing and artificial intelligence.

Professor Gavin Brown, from the School of Computer Science, said: "It is fantastic to unveil this new perspective on the Enigma in the Alan Turing Building, named after the man who played such a large role in cracking its code in World War Two.

"Manchester was an environment where Turing flourished. His legacy can be seen right across the University with researchers developing super computers that can model the human brain, exploring number theory and cryptography, as well as training robots to understand language. Right here, people are working on the principles that he laid down and the dreams that he had."

The University of Manchester has published a range of images and two videos of the Enigma X-ray CT reconstruction, with more results to follow. The results were presented at a special lecture at the University, to inspire students and to help launch the 2019 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition – a web-based competition open to UK school children in year 11 that will start in January 2019. The competition attracts over 4000 students each year who compete in real-time code-breaking challenges, helping to inspire young people to take up Maths and Computer Science courses.

The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer designed and built to work in the same way a human brain does has been fitted with its landmark one-millionth processor core and is being switched on for the first time.

The newly formed million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million transistors.

To reach this point it has taken £15million in funding, 20 years in conception and over 10 years in construction, with the initial build starting way back in 2006. The project was initially funded by the EPSRC and is now supported by the European Human Brain Project. It is being switched on for the first time on Friday, 2 November.

The SpiNNaker machine, which was designed and built in The University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science, can model more biological neurons in real time than any other machine on the planet.

Biological neurons are basic brain cells present in the nervous system that communicate primarily by emitting ‘spikes’ of pure electro-chemical energy. Neuromorphic computing uses large scale computer systems containing electronic circuits to mimic these spikes in a machine.

SpiNNaker is unique because, unlike traditional computers, it doesn’t communicate by sending large amounts of information from point A to B via a standard network. Instead it mimics the massively parallel communication architecture of the brain, sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously to thousands of different destinations.

Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering, who conceived the initial idea for such a computer, said: “SpiNNaker completely re-thinks the way conventional computers work. We’ve essentially created a machine that works more like a brain than a traditional computer, which is extremely exciting.

“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.”

The computer’s creators eventually aim to model up to a billion biological neurons in real time and are now a step closer. To give an idea of scale, a mouse brain consists of around 100 million neurons and the human brain is 1000 times bigger than that.

One billion neurons is 1% of the scale of the human brain, which consists of just under 100 billion brain cells, or neurons, which are all highly interconnected via approximately 1 quadrillion (that’s 1 with 15 zeros) synapses.

So, what is a million-core processor computer that mimics the way a brain works used for? One of its fundamental uses is to help neuroscientists better understand how our own brain works. It does this by running extremely large scale real-time simulations which simply aren’t possible on other machines.

For example, SpiNNaker has been used to simulate high-level real-time processing in a range of isolated brain networks. This includes an 80,000 neuron model of a segment of the cortex, the outer layer of the brain that receives and processes information from the senses.

It also has simulated a region of the brain called the Basal Ganglia - an area affected in Parkinson’s disease, meaning it has massive potential for neurological breakthroughs in science such as pharmaceutical testing.

The power of SpiNNaker has even recently been harnessed to control a robot, the SpOmnibot. This robot uses the SpiNNaker system to interpret real-time visual information and navigate towards certain objects while ignoring others.

Prof Furber added: “neuroscientists can now use SpiNNaker to help unlock some of the secrets of how the human brain works by running unprecedentedly large scale simulations. It also works as real-time neural simulator that allows roboticists to design large scale neural networks into mobile robots so they can walk, talk and move with flexibility and low power.” 

The Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research (HIMR) will be opening a new office in Manchester, in partnership with the University’s School of Mathematics.

HIMR is a major national centre which works in collaboration with universities and Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) to support mathematics research. It employs more than 30 Heilbronn Fellows, who divide their time between academic research and work for GCHQ.

The Institute also runs a highly successful programme of events to promote and further the cause and understanding of advanced mathematical research. These include conferences, focused research groups and workshops. It is named after Professor Hans Heilbronn FRS, who was a major contributor to UK mathematics.

The HIMR Manchester office will open in 2019. It will complement HIMR’s existing facilities in Bristol and London, allowing the Institute to work closely with academics at The University of Manchester and across the North. The University’s School of Mathematics will host a number of Heilbronn Fellows, who will work both at the University and at the Institute.

The University of Manchester President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, said: “Advanced mathematics is the key to many of the challenges facing the nation in the digital age. I am delighted that this partnership will further strengthen the leading role played by the University’s School of Mathematics in meeting those challenges.”

The University of Manchester will be part of a new £6 million cybersecurity scheme launching today (Monday 3 September)

The initiative, which will be known as the GM Cyber Foundry, is in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), Lancaster University and the University of Salford. The scheme will protect Greater Manchester’s small and medium-sized companies against malicious computer attacks.

Cyberattacks pose a £860m risk to the region’s businesses each year according to estimates by the Lloyds City Risk Register. To combat these threats some of the region’s leading universities are combining expertise and research in cybersecurity to create new products and services for SMEs.

The Foundry will match the research strengths of each university to the business needs of the local community; projects therefore can be developed in a targeted and streamlined way through business development intervention. It will also enable cybersecurity research capability, which is in great demand in the region, to be managed efficiently.

Dr Daniel Dresner, Academic Coordinator for Cyber Security in School of Computer Science at The University of Manchester says: “We'll jointly run targeted business engagement sessions, to supply specialised cybersecurity support and guidance, and also identify projects that can harness research and innovation expertise from the four partner universities. The goal is to see the development novel cybersecurity products and services.”

Manchester’s vibrant digital and creative sector generates more than £3bn in economic output each year the city is growing as a centre for digital excellence, as seen with the opening of a Government Communications Agency site (GCHQ) in the city next year.

Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, says: “Through the work of the Cyber Foundry, our world-leading universities are giving start-ups and SMEs the freedom they need to create and innovate, but within digital environments that are safe and secure from cyber criminals.

“With over £25m being invested in fibre broadband connectivity, a planned £5m Cyber Innovation Centre, and the new GCHQ site, Greater Manchester is both a major hub for digital development and research, and a trusted place to do business.

“Greater Manchester is a rapidly expanding software and technology hotbed, and we’re perfectly positioned to become one of the top-five digital city-regions in Europe.”

The GM Cyber Foundry has been approved by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which allocated £3m of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funding to the scheme.

Dr Dresner added: “I'm thrilled to be working with SMEs again on pragmatic, applied cybersecurity research to make working in GMCA's business ecosystem that bit safer.

“Direct innovation with them is the next logical step after my part in a Technology Strategy Board supported project that created the only information security benchmark designed with SMEs in mind.”