On the 24-25 Aug 2016, in conjunction with MIDA (Malaysian Investment Development Authority), the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) held the inaugural “Funding Research on a Changing Landscape” conference.

We were very fortunate to have an excellent line up of speakers, led by Prof Tan Sri Zakri, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister, who gave an excellent tlak and set the tone for the next two days. The press conference that followed his talk resulted in a lot of media coverge, some of which is shown in the images below.

The following two days saw an excellent program, which can be seen by downloading the program.

The team that organised this conference did a fantastic job and they should all be thanked and congratulated. There are too many people to list here (and I fear that I will miss somebody) but the Graduate School, The Research Support Office and Business Engagement and Innovations Services all deserve a special mention.

I understand that the conference was well recieved (I certainly enjoyed it) and that discussions are already underway about a similar event next year.

Below are a small selection of the pictures that were taken, and we have also uploaded a short video to You Tube.

The post Conference: Funding Research on a Changing Landscape (24-25 Aug Aug 2016) appeared first on Malaysia Research and Knowledge Transfer.

It was our honour to recently sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Green Plant Organic Fertilizer Sdn Bhd and The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC).

This research project is valued at about RM 500,000

Collaboration with industry is valued and we are very pleased to have this collaborative project with Green Plant Organic Fertilizer Sdn Bhd.

A few pictures from the signing are shown below.

Professor Graham Kendall and Dr David Lim sign the MOA between the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and Green Plant Organic Fertilizer Sdn Bhd

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On 6 September, 2016, there was a signing ceremony between Centre of Sustainable Palm Oil Research (CESPOR), UNMC and Green Plant Organic Fertiliser Sdn Bhd to secure RM580,120 worth of research funding for a project “The Efficacy of Living Organic Fertilizer (LOF) and Fortified Living Organic Fertilizer (FLOF) amended with mix cultures of Trichoderma spp. to Control Basal Stem Rot Diseases in Oil Palm”. The PI of the Project is Dr Christina Vimala Supramaniam of the School of Bioscience, FoS and co-PI, Prof Denny Ng, FOE

The project will commence in September 2016 and will be carried out for 3 years in 2 phases. The first phase is for the development of a Trichoderma culture for the biocontrol of Ganoderma spp. and the second phase is the application of the formula in 2 oil palm estate locations in Malaysia. The results will be used in the formulation of a commercial product by Green Plant Organic Fertiliser Sdn Bhd. UNMC’s role is to provide expertise on the microbial formulation and industry’s role is to carry our pilot scale and large scale cultivation of the microbes to be used with their existing commercial products, LOF and FLOF.

Prior to this, in June 2015, Dr Supramaniam received RM10,000 as seed money for proof of concept and the project was conducted between June and September 2015. Prior to joining UNMC in 2006, Dr Supramaniam was working in a large bio-fertiliser facility for a few years doing similar formulations with other sets of microbes and applying them in oil palm estates. She has since published a patent for formulations and gained the experience to go ahead with this project.

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The UNMC Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition was held on the 8th Sep in the Great Hall.

I always look forward to this event and I was fortunate enough to be invited as one of the judges again this year. From memory, this is the fourth or fifth year that I have been invited to do this.

The Three Minute Thesis (or 3MT) competition asks post-graduates to present their research in three minutes. If they exceed the three minutes, even by a second, they are disqualified.

The other rules are also just as strict and include things such as:

• They are allowed one slide that must be available from the start of the presentation. It cannot have any transitions or animations
• There can be no other form of audio-visual assistance such as music, videos etc.
• The candidate cannot use any props
• The medium of communication is via the spoken word. No singing, poetry, rapping etc. is allowed

The winner of this competition goes forward to compete against the winners of the UK and China campuses. The winner of that contest represents the University of Nottingham at the main U21 competition.

This year saw a record number of 20 entries from UNMC. The speakers were all of very high quality. We often comment on things such as not making contact, starting off very nervous etc., but these were not apparent this year. Thus judges wrote very few negative comments down when scoring each presentation.

This led to a very tough session when the judges reached their final decisions. Rather than taking about half an hour (as it has in previous years), this time it took over an hour of, sometimes, quite heated debate.

But we arrived at an eventual decision, with the order being as follows:

Winner

• Lillian Joyce Among Olule (Title: Capturing Signals then Charging Batteries)

Runner Up

• Mohammed Ayoub Juman (Title: Future Plantation Helpers)

There was also a vote by the audience members (The People’s Choice Award). This also went to Lillian.

On behalf of the judges, we would like to thank all the contestants. It really was an exceptional year and congratulations to Lillian for her two first places. We wish you every success in the tri-campus competition.

Below, we present a selection of photographs from the day.

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by D.C.Y. Foo

Professor Ir Dr Dominic C. Y. Foo, Director for the Centre of Excellence for Green Technologies (CEGT) was invited for a book launch event held during the Process System Engineering conference (PSE China) at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China (27-29 July 2016).  The new book being launched is the Chinese translated version of the English textbook entitled “Process Integration for Resource Conservation”, published by Professor Foo in 2012 with CRC Press/Taylor and Francis (see here and here for more details).  The Chinese version of the book was translated by a team from Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingda, China.  The team consists of Dr Xiaoping Jia, postgraduate student Zhiwei Li, and Dr Fang Wang, all from the School of Environment and Safety Engineering.  The textbook consists of the state-of-the-art process integration techniques, such as pinch analysis and mathematical optimisation.  In recent years, industrial resource conservation such as recovery of water, industrial gases and solvent wastes have gained good attention among both academia and industrial practitioners, mainly due to the scarcity of resources, rising cost of material and waste treatment, as well as the awareness of sustainable development goal.  Hence, this textbook serves as good teaching material for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students, in chemical, environmental and energy engineering courses.  The book launch event has attracted many academics who expressed their interest with the book.

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We have just received this email from the British High Commission, which might (should) be of interest to researchers at UNMC.

Please note that Expressions of Interest have to be registered by 15 Jul.

“Greetings from British High Commission

The Satellite Applications (SA) Catapult is looking for industrial or academic partners for a number of space based projects aimed at tackling real world problems such as disaster resilience, marine pollution, environmental protection.  These projects are being funded by the UK Space Agency through its International Partnership Programme (IPP), a £150 million multi-year programme which will use UK space expertise and capability to provide a sustainable, economic or societal benefit to underdeveloped nations and developing economies.  Full details are available here.

In particular, the UK Space Agency has launched 4 tactical calls specific to Malaysia focusing on Advanced Flood Warning, Marine Pollution and Illegal Logging.  SA Catapult has set a deadline for expression of interest to be logged by 15 July on their official webpage before the final submission deadline on 27 September 2016.

Please feel free to share this information with your network of contacts who may be interested in partnering with SA Catapult on any of these calls.“

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From 29th June to 2nd July Conservation Asia 2016, was held in Singapore. This is a joint meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Asia (Ahimsa Campos Arceiz is currently President of this society) and the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation Asia-Pacific.

The meeting was attended by 600 people, from around 40 countries, all supported by an outstanding scientific program.

We were particularly pleased to see the strong presence of UNMC at the meeting.

A total of 21 UNMC members participated in the conference, including five of our undergraduates from Environmental Sciences, one MSc student, all of Ahimsa’s research group and four faculty staff.

It is especially pleasing to see that two of our undergraduate students presented. This alone is a remarkable achivement.

We are still awaiting final numbers, but we believe that UNMC was the second best represented academic institution at the meeting, after the National University of Singapore..

We feel that this indicates that UNMC excel and play a significant leadership role for Biodiversity Conservation in Asia.

We are really proud of all our staff and students, and the work they do in this area.

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A recent paper (A systematic approach to design task-specific ionic liquids and their optimal operating conditions) by Nishanth G. Chemmangattuvalappil has recently been featured on Chemistry World. The piece starts:

“Scientists have developed a computer-aided method that designs carbon capturing ionic liquids and at the same time finds their optimal operating conditions.

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide decreases its global warming potential. Ionic liquids, salts that are liquid at room temperature, can trap large amounts of carbon dioxide. However, there are thousands of ionic liquids – their properties are dictated by their comprising anions and cations, and their ability to dissolve CO₂ depends on temperature and pressure.

Researchers use computer-aided molecular design (CAMD) to …”

The rest of the article is available here.

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You might be interested in this note from EURAXESS, which provides funds for ASEAN researchers to visit European labs and for European Scientists to visits ASEAN labs.

This email provides an overview of the opportunities.

Topics:

• MSCA Individual Fellowship Open to ASEAN Researchers. Deadline 14 September 2016

• MSCA Individual Fellowships – bring your research partner from Europe to ASEAN at no cost to your employer

• How to Prepare a Successful MSCA Individual Fellowship Proposal

With best regards,

EURAXESS  ASEAN

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Whilst looking through Conversation articles I came across an article entitled “When scoring an own-goal is the only way to win” by Liam Lenten.

By coincidence, I had just read another article about an analysis of sporting rules from the perspecive of Operations Research, written by a good friend of mine – Mike Wright from Lancaster.

The two articles had some similaraties and, after reading Mike Wright’s article I was already planning to write a follow up. Reading Liam’s Conversation article I posted some comments and he was kind enough to respond.

One thing led to another and we agreed to write a paper together.

I am pleased to report that this article (“When Sports Rules Go Awry“) has just been accepted in the European Journal of Operational Research.

The abstract of the paper reads:

“Mike Wright (Wright, M. OR analysis of sporting rules – A survey. European Journal of Operational Research, 232(1):1–8, 2014) recently presented a survey of sporting rules from an Operational Research (OR) perspective. He surveyed 21 sports, which consider the rules of sports and tournaments and whether changes have led to unintended consequences. The paper concludes: “Overall, it would seem that this is just a taster and there may be plenty more such studies to come”. In this paper we present one such study.

This is an interdisciplinary paper, which cuts across economics, sport and operational research (OR). We recognize that the paper could have been published in any of these disciplines but for the sake of continuity with the paper that motivated this study, we wanted to publish this paper in an OR journal. We look at specific examples where the rules of sports have led to unforeseen and/or unwanted consequences. We hope that the paper will be especially useful to sports administrators, helping them to review what has not previously worked and also encouraging them to engage with the scientific community when considering making changes.

We believe that this is the first time that such a comprehensive review of sporting rules, which have led to unexpected consequences, has been published in the scientific literature.”

When Sports Rules Go Awry is really a review of where sporting rules have been introduced by sports administrators, but which have led to unintended consequences. For example, when it is sensible to score an own goal. The paper has several tanking  (the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage) examples.

We hope that the paper will be of interest to anybody who likes sports, as well as sports administrators.

It is pleasing to note that TheConversation was instrumental in making this paper happen. If it were not for them, I would have been unaware of Liam’s work. The paper may have still be written (either by Liam or me) but it would not have been as good as the paper that has now been accepted.

If you are interested, you can see my Conversation articles here and Liams articles are here.

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