Computational Physics student Flaviu Cipcigan reached the final of the Science, Engineering & Technology (SET) Student of the Year Awards with his work on Quantum Computing. Here he tells us what was involved.
It all started with my Computational Physics Junior Honours Project, where I had the opportunity to learn about Quantum Computing and its applications. My interest in Quantum Computing continued after the project, leading to an EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council) vacation scholarship and a Senior Honours Project, both under the supervision of Dr Elham Kashefi and Prof. Tony Kennedy. In these projects, I looked at the theoretical and experimental aspects of the subject (the latter in collaboration with Dr Philip Walther and Ms Stefanie Barz, University of Vienna), gaining a broad understanding of its present state and the direction it is heading in.
Based on the latter two projects, Dr Kashefi nominated me for the SET Awards. The first round consisted of a short report detailing what was involved in the projects and their importance. This took me to the final round of the Awards, where three students from each category were invited to give a presentation at the Institute of Physics in London. The award ceremony was organised in the evening of the interview and was my personal highlight of the SET Awards, as I had the opportunity to talk to a wide range of great academics and industry leaders.
I was very honoured to represent the schools of Physics and Informatics at such a unique event and to highlight the importance of collaborations between disciplines. Quantum Computing is a great medium for this, since its challenges can only be solved with input from both disciplines, both of which are close to my heart.
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Student entrepreneur wins a place at Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar and the Nobel festivities.
Science and business are often seen as two separate spheres, but as Physics student Eimear O' Carroll explains, when you combine the analytical and problem solving skills of a scientist with a commercial opportunity it can be a recipe for success.
Restored Hearing Ltd produces an innovative sound therapy for sufferers of temporary tinnitus that is effective in just one minute. Using the physics of sound and how the ear responds to different types of sound, we have developed a non-invasive remedy for the ringing in your ears commonly experienced after concerts or listening to your iPod for too long.
Originating as a project for the BT Young Scientist and Technology exhibition, the Restored Hearing team comprises Rhona Togher and myself, who were two students on the project, and Anthony Carolan, the project mentor at the time. We won Runner Up Overall and the Health Research Board Award for Medical Innovation in 2009. When investigating funding for further research it was suggested that we market the therapy. We incorporated the company in May 2009, a month before our final high school exams, and Restored Hearing was born.
I have found running a business to be an extremely exciting and rewarding endeavour, if a bit stressful at times when university and working life clash.
Having fallen into entrepreneurship by accident I have found running a business to be an extremely exciting and rewarding endeavour, if a bit stressful at times when university and working life clash. I started working with Launch.ed, the University of Edinburgh student enterprise support service, last year and it has been an integral part of the development of Restored Hearing and my skills as an entrepreneur. My involvement with Launch.ed has led to developing winning business pitches, expanding my network and going to South Korea for the MIT Global Start-Up Workshop on its inaugural scholarship programme.
Rhona and I recently represented Ireland in the Intel/JAYE Sci-preneurship competition in Brussels. Ten international teams were given 24 hours to develop a business idea from scratch that was socially beneficial while being commercially viable. Second place was awarded to Rhona’s team for their noise reduction technology while I was awarded a place at the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar. In December I will be travelling to Stockholm to present Restored Hearing and attend the Nobel lectures and the Nobel Prize ceremony.
We sell the Somtus TM therapy online and have spent the past two years developing the website, gaining national and international publicity for the company (including articles by the Institute of Physics and ABC News) and using physics to solve auditory problems.
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A new type of soft gel developed by School researchers may have important implications for the future use of liquid crystals.
Conventional wisdom says that particles and liquid crystals do not mix. In the latter state of matter, anisotropic molecules (which have direction-dependent properties) align to form various 'mesophases'. The simplest mesophase is the nematic, in which rod shape molecules all point in the same direction. The inclusion of particles disrupts such ordering, and gives rise to energetically costly 'defects' known as disclinations. In the past, therefore, it has proved all but impossible to coax anything more than a handful of particles to disperse in liquid crystalline mesophases.
Now, researchers from the School's Institute of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems have managed to persuade the nematic phase of a well-known liquid crystal to mix with a high concentration of particles. The resulting material is a solid gel. 'Solidifying' liquid crystals this way may have important implications for their application. Liquid crystals are already widely used in display devices, and are increasingly seen as possible biomedical sensors. But liquid crystals flow like liquids, and so hitherto, there is always the need for an external container. The invention of liquid crystalline gels removes this constraint.
Extensive computer simulations allowed the ICMCS researchers to show that the new liquid crystal gel they had made in the test tube derived its rigidity from the disclinations entangling each other and trapping a percolated particle network (see figure, where particles are orange spheres, and disclinates are blue lines). Interestingly, this arrested state of matter has similarities with 'vortex glasses' in Type II superconductors, and may open up new avenues for understanding 'glassy arrest', which remains one of the deepest problems in condensed matter science.
The SUPA Graduate School has instigated Distinguished Visitors and Events Support Programmes. Their purposes are threefold:
- to enhance the training of physics graduate students within SUPA
- to enhance the dissemination of research to and from SUPA
- to enhance SUPA research strength.
SUPA is calling for applications for these two programmes. Applications should be submitted to admin [at] supa.ac.uk by Friday 11th November 2011. All applications will be reviewed and decided upon by the Graduate School Management Committee.
Please also read the guidelines to applying. Applications which do not conform to these guidelines will not be accepted.
Distinguished Visitors Programme
The scheme will fund short visits to Scotland by renowned scientists from elsewhere in the world.
Prospective visitors should be based at one (or more) of the SUPA Graduate School institutions during their stay, and will be expected to provide specific benefits for the training of graduate students and/or research. These benefits might include some or all of the following: taking part in or helping to direct research via generation of new ideas, sharing of expertise by giving short lecture courses, guest lectures and colloquia. Visits to SUPA institutions other than the host institution(s) are strongly encouraged.
Event Support Programme
The scheme can contribute to appropriate Postgraduate Schools, Workshops, and Technical Meetings held in Scotland and organised by members of the SUPA Graduate School.
The proposed event will be expected to provide specific benefits for the training of graduate students. Meetings or workshops with a primary aim of graduate student training will be targeted for support. Likewise, technical meetings that provide graduate student level introductions, or that are making other special provisions to encourage graduate student attendance and participation will be considered.
The Euclid mission, which aims to understand the origin of the accelerating expansion of the Universe, has been selected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cosmic Vision Programme.
The Euclid satellite will observe 1.5 billion galaxies in an effort to track the effects of dark energy, dark matter and gravity on the expansion and growth of cosmic structures in the Universe over the last 10 billion years. At the heart of Euclid is a massive optical digital camera - one of the largest such cameras put into space. Every 15 minutes it will produce an image that is the equivalent of nearly 300 HDTV screens, and in six years it will have surveyed 75 per cent of the sky. ESA plans to launch the Euclid satellite in 2019.
"Euclid is a wonderful step for European and UK science," Professor Andrew Taylor
Euclid and the Institute for Astronomy
The School's Institute for Astronomy (IFA) is heavily involved in several aspects of the mission, with the UK Euclid Science Data Centre to be based at the Royal Observatory (ROE), and run by the IFA’s Wide Field Astronomy Unit.
Professor Andrew Taylor, Professor of Astrophysics at the University's Institute for Astronomy, leads the UK Ground Segment for Euclid, responsible for coordinating the UK’s Euclid data analysis. He also leads the measurement of the Weak Gravitational Lensing signal – one of Euclid's two main science probes which will map the dark matter and probe dark energy – which will also be carried out in Edinburgh. "Euclid is a wonderful step for European and UK Science," said Professor Taylor. "Dark energy and dark matter are two of the biggest problems in Cosmology and Physics today, and Euclid will bring us much closer to explaining them. Edinburgh has a big part to play in this."
Thomas Kitching, a Royal Society Research Fellow at the IFA, is one of four European leads of the Euclid Science Group (a team of over 800 scientists) and co-leads the Weak Lensing science group. He said: "Euclid will image the sky with the same quality and depth as the hugely successful Hubble Space Telescope but over an area of sky thousands of times larger, producing so many images that it would take a million USB sticks to store the information."
"By imaging the majority of galaxies in our observable Universe, Euclid will unveil the mysteries of dark energy and gravity, revolutionising physics for decades to come." Thomas Kitching, IFA
About Euclid
Euclid is designed to understand the origin of Universe's accelerating expansion that physicists and astronomers refer to as "Dark Energy". Current observations show that dark energy comprises more than 70% of the matter-energy of the present-day Universe and is therefore driving its evolution.
To achieve this, it is proposed to build a satellite equipped with a 1.2 m telescope and three imaging and spectroscopic instruments working in the visible and near-infrared wavelength domains. These instruments will observe several hundreds of million galaxies over a large fraction of sky and will track the observational signatures of dark energy, dark matter and gravity on the geometry of the Universe and the cosmic history of structure formation. By measuring the apparent shapes and the distribution of galaxies in the Universe, astronomers will then derive what is dark energy and whether the general theory of relativity is still a valid gravitation theory on scales beyond billions of light years.
Euclid is planned for launch in 2019, with ESA funding the spacecraft, launch and operations. The UK and other national partners (Austria, Denmark, Italy, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Switzerland) will fund the scientific instruments and the ground segment activities.
Nine UK institutions are involved in Euclid’s instrument development or data/processing/analysis activities: University College London; University of Durham; the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh; UK ATC; University of Oxford; University of Portsmouth; University of Hertfordshire; the Open University and the University of Cambridge.
In addition, many scientists across the UK are involved in the scientific definition of Euclid and will have access to the data. Across Europe, the Euclid consortium contains over 800 scientists from 110 institutions.
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The SOUND exhibition combines soundscapes and artwork to examine how we are affected by industrial and urban noise. It has toured in the UK, India and Belarus and is currently installed in the Briggait Centre in Glasgow, where it was visited by over 1,000 people in the opening weekend.
The exhibition features a new semi-anechoic installation with surround sound and a binaural soundscape to reproduce the experience of hearing 'live' sounds. There is also a new video about sound made in the School of Physics and Astronomy.
'SOUND in a Man-Made Environment' is funded through the School of Physics and Astronomy by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The Glasgow exhibition runs until October 10th.
More details about the exhibition and a list of the venues where it has been shown can be found on the SOUND website - see below.
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Four academics in the School of Physics & Astronomy are among the first members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's new Young Academy of Scotland.
Rosalind Allen, Cait MacPhee, Job Thijssen (all from the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems) and Catherine Heymans (Institute for Astronomy) will join 64 other academics, entrepreneurs, artists and professionals in the first venture of its kind in the UK.
The Young Academy brings together some of the most able people in Scotland, with the intention of stimulating creative ideas and collaborative working. It will also provide a forum for its members to engage with talented individuals beyond their own discipline or profession.
"I'm delighted to have been chosen as one of the first members of the Young Academy. Its ambitious goals will address many of the challenges facing society today and I'm very much looking forward to contributing to its work." Catherine Heymans.
"The Academy will support young academics in Scotland as well as reaching out beyond academia. It's great that the School is so well represented and I'm excited to be involved." Rosalind Allen.
"The Young Academy of Scotland will provide a unique platform for tackling complex issues which require an interdisciplinary effort, for example the energy challenge and climate change. I am very much looking forward to the new collaborations that it will encourage and to becoming more active in science policy and public engagement." Job Thijssen
The RSE Young Academy invited applications from outstanding young academics and professionals whose ages range from late 20s to early 40s. A wide variety of expertise is represented by its members, from biologists, geoscientists and engineers to lawyers, social scientists and entrepreneurs.
The Academy's members come from all parts of Scotland, and every year a new round of applications will be encouraged, bringing in a new cohort of members. Membership lasts for 3 years and can be continued for a further 3 years. In the first cohort, 68 people have been selected from 336 applicants. Of these over 40 % are female. About 80% are drawn from academic institutions, with around 20% from the professions and business.
The Young Academy of Scotland will be launched at a ceremony in Edinburgh in November.
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Computer chips developed for gaming have the potential to create more realistic synthesised music.
Graphical Processor Units (GPUs) can be used to create more realistic synthesised music than has previously been possible. This is what Chris Maynard, a computer scientist at EPCC, claims will move along sound synthesis techniques, which have remained stagnant for decades.
Read the full article in ISGTW.
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) is a national facility for the users and developers of research software. It is led by EPCC in collaboration with the universities of Manchester and Southampton.
The SSI is on the lookout for researchers who use software in their work and who have a good understanding of current developments in their discipline. The Institute will pay researchers from any field up to £3000 a year to attend conferences and report on the latest developments.
Closing date: 8 August 2011
The Software Sustainability Institute is funded by the research councils to help researchers use and develop software for their research. To better understand the fields that most need our help, the institute are setting up a network of Agents. Working as an Agent, you will receive travelling expenses in return for a short report about the conference you attended, the people you met and your views on the topics that look most promising in the future.
Benefits
• Up to £3000 a year to attend the conferences and events that you want to attend
• Your advocacy will ensure that your field benefits from the best support for software development
• Add world-leading researchers to your professional network
• Free attendance at training events for new tools and technologies
• If you develop, improve your knowledge of effective techniques for developing sustainable software
• A great addition to your CV
Eligibility
You don’t have to be a professor or a Principal Investigator. We are looking for UK-based researchers with a good knowledge of their field, who are keen to travel and to meet new people, and have experience of national and international collaborations. We are looking for applicants from all disciplines and especially from the fields that have been flagged as strategically important to UK research: the ageing population, environment and climate change, the digital economy, energy and food security.
After a three-month trial period, Agents will be recruited for an initial term of one year, which is renewable each year. We expect to recruit around ten Agents every year.
By becoming an SSI Agent, you will attend more of the conferences that you want to attend, meet influential researchers from across all disciplines and ensure that your field receives the best support for software development.
Find out more
If you’re interested, or you’d like to nominate someone, please visit www.software.ac.uk/agents. If you would like more information, email Agents [at] software.ac.uk.
EPCC and SSI
EPCC provides specialist software engineering expertise to drive the continued
improvement and impact of research software through a series of projects in partnership with key research groups in the UK. EPCC staff work on impact projects with these groups to improve the maintenance, quality and usability of existing software, as well as developing publicly available tools and disseminating best practice to improve the process of sustainable software development.
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A joint project to investigate new ways of detecting certain cancers has published its research in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, a highly rated interdisciplinary journal in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Two hormones critical in the early stages of pregnancy - hCG and LH - were investigated by a team drawn from the School's Institute for Condensed Matter & Complex Systems, the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York and UK-based company Mologic Ltd.
Commercial pregnancy tests screen for the presence of hCG, but although its role as a tumour marker in a variety of cancers is of great clinical significance, it is not well understood. Before diagnostic tests based on hCG can be developed, it is necessary to first find a way of detecting its various forms while also distinguishing it from other closely related hormones.
The research team found that a particular antibody can discriminate between fragments of hCG and similar hormones that differ only by a single amino acid - this recognition process is analogous to a lock and key, where only one combination of antibody and hormone is possible. The structures of the hormone fragments were determined through a combination of computational simulations and spectroscopic measurements.
The team hopes that this research will lead to pharmaceutical companies developing new technologies for the early detection of certain cancers.
"The scientific conclusions are, we believe, widely applicable to peptide-antibody interactions in general, and also illuminate the strategy that should be followed in exploring such bio-molecular phenomena underpinning high-value commercial diagnostic products." Mologic's Chief Scientific Officer, Paul J Davis.
For further information about this work, see the article 'Antibody recognition of a human chorionic gonadotropin epitope (hCGβ66-80) depends on local structure retained in the free peptide' in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.