Inaugural Lecture Series 2007/08 - University of Liverpool

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20 Enterprise Week Hundreds of people took part in Enterprise Week, organised by the University’s Management School. Its aim was to promote, inspire, improve and expand the range of support to individuals who want to develop business ideas, and challenge those who influence people, the media and policymakers to recognise the significance of enterprise. A number of events, workshops and seminars took place throughout the week. All were well attended, especially by those students who were considering developing their own businesses after graduation. One of the events which took place was the official launch of VentureNavigator. More than 200 people attended the celebrations, with 80 of these registering as members of the www.venturenavigator.co.uk website. The initiative has been created to make valuable resources in higher education institutions available to the UK’s business community in order to encourage innovation and successful business creation. An Entrepreneurship Club was also launched. Around 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students attended the launch One of the many ways in which computers are changing our lives is that more and more decisions are being made by machines, without direct human involvement. Already, computers can fly aircraft automatically, operate power plants, and make stock-market trades on their own. However, many human decisions involve multiple participants or stakeholders, with diverse objectives and interests, and decisions between them require trade-offs to be made. These applications have proven very challenging to automate. The Department of Computer Science has just completed two major European Commission (EC)-funded research projects in collaboration with partners in Europe and the USA, which extend the ability of computers to make decisions to some of these domains. The first of these projects, Ontogrid, involved the which was addressed by Professor Jimmy Hill, Chair of Entrepreneurship, Kaysi-Ann Spence, MBA Entrepreneurship, and Ian Duckett from the University Careers Service. The Club is a student-run body and is a forum for the discussion and presentation of business ideas in an informal and relaxed atmosphere via business breakfasts, guest-speaker events and business plan competitions. Arabella McIntyre-Brown was principal speaker at another event. Around 50 students heard her recount the stories of 20 successful local entrepreneurs, Computers agreeing to disagree . . . development of frameworks and tools to support ad-hoc negotiations between organisations sharing computing resources, such as those on GRID systems, which involve different organisations to pool their computer processing resources. The other EC project completed by the Department was ASPIC (Argumentation Service Platform with Integrated Components). This project aimed to develop frameworks and software to support arguments between intelligent machines. Different computers may have access to different data, or have different objectives, or have access to different processing capabilities or scientific equipment. Accordingly, just as humans do, intelligent machines can disagree with one another. The Liverpool team focused on the development of mechanisms for arguments over action, including the representation of values, in VentureNavigator was launched during Enterprise Week captured in her new book Score – The Secrets Of 20 Successful Entrepreneurs. Other guest speakers included representatives from the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Steve Stuart Partnership. Finally, a breakfast ‘round table’ event offered participants the opportunity to network with like minded entrepreneurs and pick the brains of three local entrepreneurs including Nick Jenkinson, founder of Merseyside Environmental Services, Dave Wright of www.interestingimports.co.uk and Chris Bradshaw of Urban Revolution. medical and legal domains. One application developed as part of the project was a system for organ transplant decisions, undertaken in collaboration with medical authorities in Spain. This system enables the automated creation and exchange of arguments between computers representing various hospitals. By automating the dialogues and the decisionprocess, the system is intended to expedite the matching of donors and recipients, and also to increase the number of organs actually finding their way to recipients. For further information on Ontogrid visit http://www.ontogrid.net/ or for more information on ASPIC visit http://www.argumentation.org/
Work experience Anew Work Experience Policy is being circulated to staff, offering guidance for departments providing placement opportunities for local students. The University has a long-established work experience programme which helps to build vital links with schools in the region. The aim of the programme is to encourage students to consider the University either to study or as a potential employer. It also contributes to the University’s Widening Participation agenda by raising the aspirations of young people in the local community. Arshad Kamal (pictured), a student from Shorefields School in Liverpool, was among the first group of students to take part in the programme this academic year. Arshad spent two weeks working in the Aerospace department under the supervision of Dr Mark White, Flight Simulation Laboratory Manager. He chose the department specifically because he wants to study Aerospace at university and during his placement he had the opportunity to get involved in research with a test pilot. Sally Middleton, the University’s Work Experience Coordinator, is keen for more departments to offer student placements. She said: “We really appreciate all the hard work that departments put in to organising and running the placements. We get a lot of good feedback from both students and departments - it’s great to know what a positive effect work experience can have.” If your department is interested in offering a work experience placement, or you would like more information, please contact Sally on 0151 795 4146 or email Sally.Middleton@liv.ac.uk. Children’s rights in Europe Members of the Centre for the Study of the Child, the Family and the Law in the Liverpool Law School have been awarded £250,000 by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency to fund a research project into children’s rights across the European Union (EU). Their research will focus on a number of key areas, including immigration, family welfare, poverty and participation. The principal aim is to develop a series of indicators that all institutions can be monitored against, to ensure that children are being treated fairly across the EU. The development of a ‘global strategy’ is crucial, as the rights of children are not even mentioned in the EU treaties and there is consequently some inconsistency among the member states. This year long project, which will begin in spring 2008, will explore the subject in depth, drawing on the expertise of charities, academics and practitioners across Europe and collaborating with researchers in the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna. Law grant The newly-established European Law and Policy Research Group, based in the Liverpool Law School, has secured its first ESRC grant – Building Capacity in Empirical Socio-Legal Research. The 26-month project, starting officially this month, is the first ever grant from the ESRC’s Researcher Development Initiative to be awarded in Law. The project, headed by Professor Louise Ackers and Professor Fiona Beveridge, draws together socio-legal researchers and academics from six universities, including Manchester, Sheffield, and Loughborough, to deliver a series of workshops aimed at encouraging and sustaining capacity in empirical socio-legal research. A recent Nuffield Foundation inquiry into the state of empirical research in law concluded: “The lack of skills, together with the time and cost involved in empirical legal research, as compared with doctrinal or purely theoretical and philosophical work, deters those with an interest in empirical questions from engaging in empirical legal research.” The project responds to these barriers through developing and delivering a training scheme to a cohort of researchers – including PhD students, early-career researchers and mid-career academics from across the social sciences, and provides follow-up mentoring as these participants apply the training in their own research. For more details visit: www.liv.ac.uk/law/elprg/index.htm 21
Page 1 and 2: THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL MAGAZIN
Page 3 and 4: John joins the team The University
Page 5 and 6: Assembly of LHCb VELO modules Nail-
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Page 9 and 10: Top industry chiefs visit Managemen
Page 11 and 12: IMPACTS 08 FIRST PERSON Beatriz Gar
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Page 15 and 16: PUBLIC LECTURES ANNOUNCED The Unive
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Inaugural Lecture Series 2007/08 - University of Liverpool

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