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News

The Future of Advertising – no ads at all.

times square night 2013

source: www.cabume.co.uk

Think about it – what was the last advert you saw that you really remember or which made you take action? The likelihood is that nothing comes immediately to mind. This is ironic as we are now surrounded by more and more ads, whether on the internet, TV or billboards. And they should be increasingly better targeted given that advertisers can see our browsing history, previous searches and even what we Like on Facebook.

Why don’t we remember ads? I think there are three reasons. Firstly, we’re getting better at blanking them out ourselves. Our brains are struggling to cope with the huge amount of information around us, and are therefore becoming more ruthless and ignoring things that aren’t relevant.

Secondly, as well as giving us greater opportunities to see ads, technology is also helping us to skip them. Most of us fast forward through the ads on recorded programmes, and given that more TV is no longer watched live (or on a TV), we can save time by avoiding commercial breaks. Even if you begin watching a recording of a programme on ITV 15 minutes after it starts, you’ll catch up by the end, without missing anything but the ads. Websites are also waking up to the idea that you can offer a premium, ad free product to increase revenues. YouTube is looking at subscription model that means you don’t have to see any ads on the site, for example.

Finally, most ads aren’t actually that interesting anymore. Big budget TV ads still exist, but the vast majority are much more basic and programmatic – you do a search for a toaster, and small, mostly text-based ads then follow your round the internet for a week, appearing on every page you visit for example. The creativity is more in the algorithm that understands your intent, finds a corresponding ad and then keeps tracking you from site to site. It would be physically impossible for the advertiser to create hundreds of creative ads telling you about how their toaster will change your life – there simply isn’t the time or space to do it.

I’m sure there are wonderful long form TV ads out there, but apart from the Christmas campaigns (which have become part of the festive experience) I’m not watching them, and I don’t know who else is either. There don’t appear to be ads that tell your friends about, like the Tango, Guinness or Levis campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. Too many TV or billboard ads are generic or ‘good enough’ in the eyes of the client, rather than pushing the boundaries. Targeting is replacing creativity as the key factor in success, so what does this mean for the advertising industry?

It could mean the end of ads as we know it. Brands are looking for different ways to engage with customers, so are putting their money into sponsorship of programmes, sports and events, content marketing and campaigns on social media. However swapping the TV ads you’ve always done for a Facebook or YouTube-based programme requires a leap of faith from marketing directors and ad planners alike. At the moment many have added the internet to their campaigns, for example sharing their ads on their own site, Facebook and YouTube and using cut down versions for internet advertising.

However I think that there’s going to be a moment when the advertising industry becomes ‘digital first’ and the swashbuckling creatives and Don Drapers will be replaced by data scientists and content marketers who can use technology to understand and reach audiences, as opposed to untargeted TV ads that may win prizes for creativity but don’t deliver ROI. In many ways this will be a shame, but shows that whatever industry you are in, digital can and will disrupt everything you do.

News

Listen to your heart: why your brain may give away how well you know yourself

source: www.cam.ac.uk

“Listen to your heart,” sang Swedish pop group Roxette in the late Eighties. But not everyone is able to tune into their heartbeat, according to an international team of researchers – and half of us under- or over-estimate our ability.

‘Follow your heart’ has become something of a cliché, but we know that, consciously or unconsciously, there is a relationship between our heartrate and our decisions and emotions

Tristan Bekinschtein

In research published today in the journalCerebral Cortex, a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, studied not only whether volunteers could be trained to follow their heartbeat, but whether it was possible to identify from brain activity how good they were at estimating their performance.

Dr Tristan Bekinschtein, a Wellcome Trust Fellow and lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, says: “‘Follow your heart’ has become something of a cliché, but we know that, consciously or unconsciously, there is a relationship between our heart rate and our decisions and emotions. There may well be benefits to becoming more attuned to our heartbeat, but there’s very little in scientific literature about whether this is even technically possible.”

A recent study from Dr Bekinschtein and colleagues showed that people with ‘depersonalisation-derealisation disorder’ – in which patients repeatedly feel that they are observing themselves from outside their body or have a sense that things around them are not real – perform particularly badly at listening to their heart. Another study from the team, looking at a man with two hearts – his natural, diseased heart and a replacement artificial heart – found that he was better able to tune into the artificial heart than the diseased one.

Other studies have highlighted a possible connection between heart rate and task performance. For example, in one study, volunteers given the drug propranolol to increase their heart rate performed worse at emotional tasks than the control group. Changing heart rate is part of our automatic and unconscious ‘fight or flight’ response – being aware of the heart’s rhythm could give people more control over their behaviour, believe the researchers.

Thirty-three volunteers took part in an experiment during which scientists measured their brain activity using an electroencephalograph (EEG). First off, the volunteers were asked to tap in synchrony as they listened to a regular and then irregular heartbeat. Next, they were asked to tap out their own heartbeat in synchrony. Then, they were asked to tap out their own heartbeat whilst listening to it through a stethoscope. Finally, the stethoscopes were removed and they were once again asked to tap out their heartbeat.

During the task, when the volunteers were tapping out their heartbeat unaided, they were asked to rate their performance on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘inaccurate’ and 10 ‘extremely accurate’. Once the task was completed, they were asked how much they thought they had improved from 1 (‘did not improve’) to 10 (‘improved a lot’).

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that brain activity differed between people who improved at tapping out their heartbeat and those who did not,” says Andrés Canales-Johnson from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. “But interestingly, brain activity also differed between people who knew whether or not they had improved and those people who under- or over-estimated their own performance.”

Just over four in ten (42%) of the participants showed significant improvement in their ability to accurately tap along unaided with their heartbeat. This is most likely due to the fact that listening to their heartbeat through a stethoscope had allowed them to fine tune their attention to the otherwise faint signal of their heartbeat. In those whose performance had improved, the researchers saw a stronger brain signal known as the ‘heartbeat evoked potential’ (HEP) across the brain.

The researchers found no significant differences in the HEP when grouping the participants by how well they thought they had performed – their subjective performance. This suggests that the HEP provides a marker of objective performance.

In the final part of the test – after the participants had listened to their heartbeat through the stethoscope and were once again tapping unaided – the researchers found differences in brain activity between participants. Crucially, they found an increase in ‘gamma phase synchrony’ – coordinated ‘chatter’ between different regions in the brain – in only those learners whose subjective judgement of their own performance matched their actual, objective performance. In other words, this activity was seen only in learners who knew they had performed badly or knew they had improved.

“We’ve shown that for just under half of us, training can help us listen to our hearts, but we may not be aware of our progress,” adds Dr Bekinschtein. “Some people find this task easier to do than others do. Also, some people clearly don’t know how good or bad they actually are – but their brain activity gives them away.

“There are techniques such as mindfulness that teach us to be more aware of our bodies, but it will be interesting to see whether people are able to control their emotions better or to make better decisions if they are aware of how their heart is beating.”

The research was supported by the Wellcome Trust and the MRC in the UK, and the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development, the Argentinean National Research Council for Science and Technology, and the Argentinean Agency for National Scientific Promotion.

News

Undo Software and CIC Made-up Following $2M Investment

CIC-Undo-Victor Christou-Greg Law

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

A Cambridge company behind an innovative debugging tool has just raised $2m (£1.3m) in a funding round that brings long term investment company, Cambridge Innovation Capital, together with angel investors for the first time.

Undo Software helps developers make major time and cost-savings by letting them scroll back through their work in real time, a technology it’s been developing since 2007. However, it’s only recently that the company who claims its software could save the industry over £50bn a year by ‘turning back time’ to find the origins of software problems, has picked up a real head of steam having raised a six figure investment sum in 2012,$1.25m 12 months ago and now this latest round.

Co-founder, Greg Law, says the last 12 months has seen significant expansion for the company: “Until last year the company was literally five people in a garden shed. Now we have grown our international sales, with most of our customers in Silicon Valley.”

It also has CIC as a new investor, the first time the Cambridge University inspired investment body has invested alongside the Cambridge Angels syndicate since its launch 18 months ago, a move that senior investment director, Victor Christou, says could help to address the ‘funding gap’ experienced by many early stage, potentially high growth companies.

“Angel support is invaluable for early stage companies as it provides very high-risk capital, resources and access to the contacts that are essential in the formative days of an enterprise. However, many founders reach a point where they need more resources than the angels are able to provide and the company development stalls. At CIC, we aim to play a leading role guiding management and shareholders through this transition into institutional investment.

“Our investment in Undo is a perfect example. It is made alongside Cambridge Angels and has strengthened our relationship with this influential investor group. Hopefully, it will provide a template for future interactions and pave the way for many more promising Cambridge Cluster businesses to raise growth funding rounds.”

Undo Software was founded by programmers Law and Julian Smith (CEO and CTO respectively) out of frustration with the lack of a good debugging tool for Linux, the most widely used computer operating system for enterprise. Almost 50 per cent of a developer’s time is spent fixing bugs and this is particularly problematic if the issues occur after the software is released and operational on a customer site.

Undo’s core technology is a ‘black box’ that allows an application to record itself as it runs, and then save a copy of that recording. If the program crashes the recording can be sent back to the software developer and then replayed to see how and when the problem occurred without the need to recreate it.

The strength of Undo was recognised by Cambridge Angel investor, Dr Robert Brady, founder of stock market listed, commodities trading software firm, Brady PLC and then attracted other major technology and entrepreneurial figures including Robert Swann, the co-founder of Alphamosaic which sold to Broadcom for $123m, Skype co-founder, Jaan Tallinn, and Sir Peter Michael, founder of Classic FM.

Uncategorised

Link between proteins points to possibilities for future Alzheimer’s treatments

Researchers have identified how proteins that play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease are linked in a pathway that controls its progression, and that drugs targeting this pathway may be a potential new way of treating the disease.

source: www.cam.ac.uk

This is something we can only do by looking at real human neurons

Rick Livesey

Researchers have found that the proteins that control the progression of Alzheimer’s are linked in a pathway, and that drugs targeting this pathway may be a way of treating the disease, which affects 40 million people worldwide. The findings are published today (23 April) in the journal Cell Reports.

The scientists, from the University of Cambridge, found that as a protein called amyloid precursor protein (APP) is broken down into toxic protein fragments called amyloid-beta, it affects changes in the way that another key protein, tau, behaves. Though links between these proteins have been described in earlier work, this research has identified a new association between them, and found that manipulating the rate at which APP is broken down is directly connected to levels of tau.

While it is not known exactly what causes Alzheimer’s, it is known that amyloid-beta and tau build up in the brain, forming ‘plaques’ and ‘tangles’ which disrupt the connections between neurons, eventually killing them. There are no treatments to stop or reverse the progression of the disease, although researchers are starting to understand the mechanisms which cause it to progress.

Most people who develop Alzheimer’s will first start showing symptoms in later life, typically in their sixties or seventies. However, between one and five percent of individuals with Alzheimer’s have a genetic version of the disease which is passed down through families, with onset typically occurring in their thirties or forties.

The Cambridge researchers used skin cells from individuals with the genetic form of Alzheimer’s and reprogrammed them to become induced pluripotent stem cells, which can become almost any type of cells in the body. The stem cells were then directed to become neurons with all the characteristics of Alzheimer’s.

Working with these clusters of human neurons – in essence, ‘mini brains’ – the researchers used three classes of drugs to manipulate the rate at which APP is ‘chewed up’ by inhibiting the secretase enzymes which are responsible for breaking it into amyloid-beta fragments. By using drugs to increase or decrease the rate at which APP is broken down, they observed that levels of tau can be altered as well.

Earlier research looking into the link between amyloid-beta and tau had found that once the APP gets broken down, a chunk of amyloid-beta gets outside the cell, which triggers increased production of tau. “What we’re seeing is that there’s a second pathway, and that the amyloid-beta doesn’t have to be outside the cell to change levels of tau – in essence, the cell does it to itself,” said Dr Rick Livesey of the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, who led the research.

While the researchers identified this pathway in neurons with the far rarer familial form of Alzheimer’s, they found that the same pathway exists in healthy neurons as well, pointing to the possibility that targeting the same pathway in late-onset Alzheimer’s may be a way of treating the disease.

Dr Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “We are pleased to see that our investment in this innovative research using stem cell technology is boosting our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms. Alzheimer’s Research UK is committed to funding pioneering research and through our Stem Cell Research Centre at the University of Cambridge we hope to unpick the molecular changes that cause dementia, and crucially, to test new drugs that halt disease progression. With 850,000 people living with dementia in this country, investment in research to find new treatments is critical.”

The research also points to the growing importance of human stem cells in medical research. “The question is why hasn’t this pathway been identified, given that Alzheimer’s is so well-studied?” said Livesey. “The answer is that mice don’t develop Alzheimer’s disease, and they don’t respond to these drugs the way human neurons do. It’s something we can only do by looking at real human neurons.”

The research was funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Wellcome Trust.

Uncategorised

Is your Press Relations website Cambridge TV ready

Cambridge TV has every intention of promoting a very positive image of Cambridge, its universities, companies and people. You will want your company portrayed on Cambridge TV news and documentary programmes in the best possible way. In the absence of any video material, Cambridge TV will use material off of your Press Relations web area and “stock photos” of your key personnel. building, products etc. You can massively improve your image on Cambridge TV (and other video outlets) by offering a range of “Video Setting shots” in your Press Relations area. For example:- Panning shots of your head-quarters or Cambridge buildings featuring your company name or Logo Dynamic portrait videos of you key staff and staff who might be “in the news”. From a simple leaving or entering a building shot, through a working at desk , to video with the person active in their work. Product videos of packaging and product in operation A Dynamic video logo or “sting” A Logo that moves has much better impact than a static one! And finally don’t forget the rights waiver, giving Cambridge TV the rights to show the material in broadcast, recorded and on the Internet. For more does and don’ts contact Cambridge TV at info@cambridgepresents.co.uk

News

Connected Cambridge Website Migration

Connected Cambridge Website Migration

The localhost website  has recently undergone a refresh. It is now based on the open-source WordPress architecture which is able to draw on a wide range of plug-ins and content matching the needs of its rapidly growing userbase

Peter Hewkin for Connected Cambridge say “This upgrade will make the site more friendly for users on smart phones and also provide integration with popular social media, events management and calendar software.” Behind the scenes it will also help to make the site future proof as internet and social media continue to evolve.

While the headline page titles remain the same, the ‘look’ becomes fresher with user driven search, event location maps and new options for members inputting individual jobs (with logos) , news and event articles.

If you spot a bug(!) please contact us on connectedcambridge@connectedclusters.com

Connected Oxford will be undergoing a similar makeover in the coming week.

News

Landmark Event for James Clerk Maxwell Building

Landmark Event for James Clerk Maxwell Building

Source: www.cam.ac.uk

Topping out event for pioneering new building which will provide a home for blue skies thinking and interaction with industry.

The Maxwell Centre will enable a pioneering way for industry and academia to work together in partnership.
Professor Andy Parker
Pioneering “blue skies” research is a step closer to having a home after a topping out ceremony was held at a centrepiece building on the West Cambridge site.

The new facilities will see research scientists from industry occupying laboratory and desk space alongside Cambridge research groups, with the aim of creating a two-way flow of ideas and exposing the best early career researchers to scientific problem-solving that relates directly to industrial need.

Once completed the Maxwell Centre will offer laboratory and meeting spaces for more than 230 people.

Professor Andy Parker, Head of Department at the Cavendish Laboratory, said: “We aim for world-leading excellence in teaching and research in Cambridge. This requires the best facilities and the Maxwell Centre will enable a pioneering way for industry and academia to work together in partnership.”

The Maxwell Centre will build on the research activity currently supported by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, where the focus has been on original, risk-taking science since its inception in March 2011, emphasising fundamental physics research relevant to areas such as renewable energy.

Pioneering research from the Winton programme, including the new physics of materials that could harness superconductivity to revolutionise battery life, will be able to flourish at the centre.

Many other aspects of fundamental physics will be fostered, including advanced scientific computing, the theory of condensed matter, advanced materials and the physics of biology and medicine.

Professor Parker added that the building work was on schedule and on cost despite adverse weather conditions during its construction and said: “I can see the building rising from my office window. I have been very impressed by the hard work and professionalism of the team, both on-site and at the project meetings which I have attended. I would also like to thank the Cavendish team who have been helping to deliver the project.”

The Centre is named to commemorate physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who was appointed the first Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge in 1871 and who discovered electromagnetism and founded statistical mechanics.

Traditionally topping out ceremonies mark the point at which the final beam (or its equivalent) has been placed atop a building. Elements of construction remain to be carried out at the Centre, which is located between the Physics of Medicine building and the William Gates building on the West Cambridge site. It is due to open its doors in late 2015.Among those present at the ceremony were Professor Lynn Gladden, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, and Francis Shiner, Managing Director of SDC Builders Ltd, the construction contractor carrying out the work on behalf of the University.

 

News

Tata Power Successfully Implements Cyan Smart Metering Solution

Tata Power Successfully Implements Cyan Smart Metering Solution

Source: RNS

Cyan (AIM:CYAN.L), the integrated system and software design company delivering mesh based flexiblewireless solutions for utility metering and lighting control, announces that it has successfully deployed what the directors believe to be is the first 865MHz Advanced Metering Infrastructure (“AMI”) commercial volume project in India.

In July 2014, Cyan announced an order from Larsen & Toubro (“L&T”) to provide a complete CyLec(R) AMI solution to Tata Power Mumbai (“Tata Power”), consisting of 865MHz radio frequency (“RF”) modules, Data Concentrator Units, Head End Server software licenses, onsite software installation services and an annual software maintenance contract. The initial contract with Tata Power was for the deployment of 5,000 consumer meters in a district in Mumbai and around 4,000 meters are now live with the remainder expected to be completed before the end of Q2 2015. The Cyan RF modules were installed inside the L&T smart meters that have been deployed by Tata Power. The smart meters, integrated with Tata Power’s control centre, are now providing data to generate customer bills, real-time information on outages and other factors related to the quality of power.

Cyan’s AMI platform supports fully automated, accurate billing for Tata Power. On the last billing cycle, Tata Power achieved 100% success rate in communicating meter readings from the CyLec-enabled meters to their consumer billing system. In addition the AMI platform enables Tata Power to manage grid emergencies with increased efficiency, improving the reliability of the customer’s power supply and optimising peak power demand management.

Tata Power Mumbai is a Tata group company and part of India’s largest integrated power company with a significant international presence and over 500,000 retail customers in Mumbai.

John Cronin, Executive Chairman of Cyan, commented, “I am pleased to update our customers, partners and shareholders that the first volume rollout of Cyan smart metering technology has been a success. The fact that Tata Power was able to achieve a 100% success rate in communicating meter reading data to their billing systems is testament to the reliability of the Cyan sub-GHz radio mesh solution resulting from over 200 man-years of development by our team in Cambridge.

“The success of this project confirms Cyan’s leadership position in providing smart metering solutions to address the pressing power issues faced by both utilities and end consumers in India. I would like to thank Tata Power, L&T and Neosilica for their valued support during the implementation project. We look forward to working on further deployments at Tata Power in due course as well as additional projects with L&T at other utilities. As Tata Power is viewed as a leader in the generation and transmission of electricity, the success of this project will act as an important reference for other utilities evaluating smart metering technologies across India as well as for our customers in other regions around the world.”

News

Genetic Screening Could Improve Breast Cancer Prevention

 

Genetic Screening Could Improve Breast Cancer Prevention

Source: www.ac.ul

A test for a wide range of genetic risk factors could improve doctors’ ability to work out which women are at increased risk of developing breast cancer, a major study of more than 65,000 women has shown.

 

Breast cancer genes are rarely out of the news, but we’ve now reached a crucial stage at which all this research can be combined to help target screening and advice to those women who need them the most.

Doug Easton

Improving the accuracy of risk analysis using genetic screening could guide breast cancer prevention in several ways – for instance by offering high-risk women increased monitoring, personalised advice and preventative therapies.

The research, a collaboration of hundreds of research institutions led by the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Cancer Research, London, showed that a test for differences in 77 separate letters of DNA code could indicate a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

The study, the most definitive of its type conducted so far, was funded by a range of organisations including Cancer Research UK and Breakthrough Breast Cancer, and is published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers came up with a ‘score’ for each woman based on the letters they had in each of the 77 positions of their DNA code, using one of the world’s biggest databases of genetic information – called the Collaborative Oncological Gene-Environment Study (COGS).

They found a significant link between the score – called a ‘polygenic risk score’ – and a woman’s breast cancer risk. For example, a woman in the top 20 per cent for polygenic risk score was 1.8 times more likely to develop breast cancer than the average woman.

A woman in the top one per cent for the polygenic risk score was more than three times more likely to develop breast cancer than average – corresponding to a risk for these women of around one in three.
The researchers also delved into a range of other elements of each woman’s cancer – such as its type, and the age it was diagnosed. The genetic score was particularly good at predicting risk in women who developed oestrogen receptor positive disease, the type of disease most responsive to hormonal treatments such as tamoxifen.

Analysing this panel of 77 genetic markers – all of which had previously been linked with slight increases in breast cancer risk on their own – was much more accurate in defining risk than previous tests that used fewer markers.

Importantly, the study also suggests that using this genetic testing alongside current measures would make current risk screening methods more accurate. For example, the researchers showed that the risk score could predict breast cancer risk both in women with and without a family history of the disease.

Lifetime risk of breast cancer for women with a history of breast cancer in their close family was 24.4 per cent if they were in the highest-scoring fifth – compared with 8.6 per cent if they were in the lowest fifth.
But for women without a history of breast cancer in their close family, the risks were 16.6 and 5.2 per cent respectively.

Study co-leader Professor Montserrat Garcia-Closas, Professor of Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “Our study is the most definitive so far to show the clear benefits of using genetic testing for a large number of genetic risk factors in identifying women at elevated risk of developing breast cancer. This type of testing could fit alongside other standard risk measures, such as family history and body mass index, to improve our ability to target the best preventive treatments and advice to those women most likely to benefit from them.”

The researchers say it is important to work out how this type of test could be used widely in a healthcare, rather than in a research setting. Currently available tests can analyse a handful of high-risk genes, but outside of looking for changes to these genes in women with a history of breast cancer in their close family, genetic testing is not widely offered to women.

Study co-leader Professor Douglas Easton, Director of the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Breast cancer genes are rarely out of the news, but we’ve now reached a crucial stage at which all this research can be combined to help target screening and advice to those women who need them the most.

“There’s still work to be done to determine how tests like this could complement other risk factors, such as age, lifestyle and family history, but it’s a major step in the right direction that will hopefully see genetic risk prediction become part of routine breast screening in the years to come.”

Nell Barrie, Senior Science Communications Manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “This study shows how the genetic map of breast cancer that scientists have been building up over the years might be used to identify women most at risk, so we can take steps to reduce their chances of developing the disease or catch it at the earliest possible stage.”

Dr Matthew Lam, Senior Research Officer at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “In recent years we’ve learnt so much about genetic risk factors of breast cancer – in fact Breakthrough researchers had a hand in discovering over 60 of the genetic markers associated with the disease. What’s great to see now is that these findings are starting to be translated into practical methods to predict risk on an individual basis.”

Adapted from a press release from the Institute of Cancer Research.

News

Mike Lynch promised £100m counter sue to HP’s $5.1bn claim

Mike Lynch promised £100m counter sue to HP’s $5.1bn claim

Source: Cabume.co.uk

Mike Lynch has vowed to use British courts to defend his reputation and those of the management behind Cambridge’s largest ever software company, Autonomy, against the ‘smear campaign’ it says Hewlett Packard has been running against them for over two years after the Silicon Valley giant finally came good on its threat to sue.

HP has threatened Autonomy’s management, in particular its former CEO and founder, Dr Mike Lynch, and CFO, Sushovan Hussain, ever since it wrote off $8.8 billion in the value of the Cambridge software company just one year after its acquisition, claiming $5.1bn of it was due to accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and misrepresentations, allegations roundly rejected by Lynch and his management team.

In January this year, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office decided to close its investigation into the acquisition citing a lack of sufficient evidence, though it did say it had handed jurisdiction over some of the allegations to authorities in the US.

Now HP says it has finally made a claim against Lynch and Hussain for the $5.1bn (£3.4bn) figure, providing a single statement: “HP can confirm that, on March 30, a Claim Form was filed against Michael Lynch and Sushovan Hussain alleging they engaged in fraudulent activities while executives at Autonomy. The lawsuit seeks damages from them of approximately $5.1 billion. HP will not comment further until the proceedings have been served on the defendants.”

Lynch immediately countered with his own claim: “The former management of Autonomy announces today they will file claims against HP for loss and damage caused by false and negligent statements made against them by HP on 20 November 2012 and in HP’s subsequent smear campaign. Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch’s claim, which is likely to be in excess of £100 million, will be filed in the UK.”

That for now is only a threat, but with a $5.1bn hanging, it appears that over two years of name calling will finally be settled in the courts.

News

Horizon plays key role as UK biologics manufacturing receives £6.2m boost

Horizon plays key role as UK biologics manufacturing receives £6.2m boost

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

Horizon Discovery is to receive up to £652,000 to expand its bioproduction work as part of a £6.2 million funding programme under the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative.

The Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) programme consists of an approximate total £11.3m of costs with approximately £6.2m in grant funding being delivered by the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Innovate UK and Birmingham City Council, to support the future needs of biologics manufacturing in the UK.

This initiative will support the future needs of biologics manufacturing and will help develop next-generation production systems so that the most efficacious and cost-effective therapies are made available to patients.

The Cambridge company is part of a consortium led by the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) on behalf of UCB Celltech and Lonza Biologics and will use to build a high throughput platform to accelerate the development of novel and improved Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines.

Specifically, Horizon will introduce specific genetic changes into these CHO cell lines, allowing better decisions to be made on potential performance improvements for biologic drug manufacturing.

Dr Paul Morrill, Horizon Discovery’s president for Products, said the award recognised the importance of strengthening the biomanufacturing supply chain so the next generation of biological medicines could be delivered.

He said: “Enhancing cell line function through gene editing is a critical path activity towards this outcome. This initiative, alongside the recent Industrial Biotechnology Catalyst funding, further reinforces Horizon’s reputation as a driver of innovation for biomanufacturing.”

News

Johnson and Johnson buys Cambridge Start-up with revolutionary anti-coagulant

Johnson and Johnson buys Cambridge Start-up with revolutionary anti-coagulant

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

Johnson & Johnson has acquired a fledgling drug discovery startup built on an antibody with startling anticoagulant properties that could radically reduce the rates of strokes and heart attacks was discovered by chance at a Cambridge hospital.

XO1 Limited launched less than two years ago with the plan to develop a single therapy based on the new anti-thrombin antibody ichorcumab, discovered after the blood of a woman with a head injury in a Cambridge A&E department was found to exhibit unique anticoagulant behaviour, the blood thinned, but the bleeding halted naturally.

Ichorcumab has been developed to mimic the activity of this human antibody which appears to produce an anticoagulated state without predisposition to bleeding. Such a therapy has the potential to greatly reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, which are caused by clots to blood vessels, as all anticoagulants developed to date also increase the risk of bleeding, which can prove fatal – a safe anticoagulant without the bleeding would be transformative and a potentially huge blockbuster drug.

It is this technology that J&J subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, is acquiring for an undisclosed sum less than two years after XO1 launched, backed by $11 million from Index Ventures with further support from Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation division at the university, which held a stake of around 15 per cent in the company.

Peter DiBattiste, head of Global Development, Cardiovascular, at Janssen Research & Development, said Ichorcumab would complement its existing cardiovascular portfolio. “Given Janssen’s leadership in the fields of anticoagulation and biologics, we are well positioned to explore the potential of this next generation anticoagulant,” said DiBattiste.

XO1 was set up as a privately held asset-centric virtual company, which meant its work was almost entirely sub-contracted, allowing it to keep its workforce and overheads to a minimum.

News

CfBI Medical Adherence Consortium Inaugural Meeting Held at BUPA House

CfBI Medical Adherence Consortium Inaugural Meeting Held at BUPA House

Did you know that…

  • Up to 50% of patients do not take their prescribed medication?
  • Up to 10% of all hospital admissions are due to medication-related problems including those caused by drugs not being taken, or being taken incorrectly?
  • That the cost of patients not following their prescribed treatment regime correctly is estimated to cost health care systems around the world over $300bn annually?

The term used to describe the correct taking of a prescribed course of medical treatment is ‘medical adherence’. Poor medical adherence is a big problem – described by the WHO as ‘a worldwide problem of striking magnitude’.

The Centre for Business Innovation Medical Adherence Consortium is a group of organisations all of whom have an interest in the problem of poor medical adherence and a shared belief that technology might be a part of the solution. This group met for the first time at BUPA House in London towards the end of February. Organisations as diverse as BUPA, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbVie, Tunstall, Janssen, Proteus Digital Health, NICE and others discussed the key areas that need to be addressed if progress is to be made in this difficult area.

The group identified areas where common obstacles to improving poor adherence are thought to lie including:

  • Economic / financial considerations: ensuring that good adherence makes economic sense for all actors.
  • Standardisation: agreement around terminology, identification of gaps in information and other standards and planning to address these.
  • Regulation: identification of key obstacles to improved adherence associated with regulation and determine the best way of engaging with the regulator to jointly determine if and how these might be addressed.
  • “Case studies”: identification and dissemination of success stories to encourage wider engagement with the subject of adherence.
  • Measurement / data: understanding problems around measurement of adherence, identifying and disseminating baseline measurements, agreeing standard approaches to measurement.
  • Sustainability: ensuring that any adherence approaches are not only affordable but are sustainable for the long term.

Future meetings will develop these themes and look to make concrete progress in each of them – helping to address some of the problems preventing progress in the difficult area of medical adherence.

For details contact: jeremy.holland@cfbi.com

News

What it takes for a foreign business to break into China

What it takes for a foreign business to break into China

Source: BBC World Business – Business Daily Broadcast
03/03/2015

Ting Zhang, CEO of China Business Solutions was invited to be on an exclusive panel of experts at the BBC Broadcasting House to discuss the ever changing landscape of ‘Doing Business in China’.

As the world’s second largest economy and soon to overtake the United States, China remains the country that businesses, both small and large, would like crack. Over recent years high profile trade missions and even Royal visits have been designed to pave the way for British companies. With a rapidly growing middle class, where consumption is now overtaking investment as the main driver of economic growth, China remains a contradiction – a golden opportunity and successful endeavours for businesses on the one hand and disasters on the other, where foreign companies have got it terribly wrong in China. So as China’s economic growth slows and continues to move from a manufacturing based economy to a consumer driven economy, how then do British business walk the right path of success.

In this recorded live broadcast, many useful issues were addressed from the slow down of the Chinese economy, to regulations, IP, corruption and the value of a contract. Ting Zhang addressed many of these issues in particular a key point that ‘of knowing the right way to build a relationship in China, because in China, doing business in based on trust’.

Market entry advice was discussed and although ecommerce is an exciting route to enter the Chinese market, careful planning and advice is important to avoid the pitfalls. Understanding the channels of entry with ecommerce and social media platforms ideally should entail having some in-house experience, with insight knowledge and practise of using China’s ecommerce. It is complex and requires a well planned social media strategy.

Ting indicated that China Business Solutions when working with many British SME’s, the first task is to explore with the company if there is a market for them. She said “one cannot assume that anything will sell in China, so finding the right market and right partner is essential”. More recently in the creative industry, with online gaming, identifying and finding the right partner has been key to the success of a British gaming company.

As China continues to move from a manufacturing to services to a more consumer power economy, there are many prospects for British business. Understanding the culture, avoiding mis-communication and getting good advice is essential. Although GDP is lower than before at 7%, this brings with it stability and quality offerings with heritage and good customer service will do well.

News

Domino Printing says Japan’s Brother Industries makes 1 bln stg offer for co

Domino Printing says Japan’s Brother Industries makes 1 bln stg offer for co

Source : Reuters

Domino Printing Sciences PLC
DOPR.L
944.02p
+223.00+30.93%
08:22:50 BST

(Reuters) – Domino Printing Sciences Plc :

* Recommended offer for Domino Printing Sciences Plc

* Reached pact on cash offer in which Brother will acquire entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of Domino

* Shareholders will be entitled to receive a total of 915 pence in cash for each Domino share held

* Offer values entire issued ordinary share capital of Domino at approximately £1,031 million

* Co shareholders will also receive proposed final dividend for year ended 31 October 2014 of 14.76p per share

* A premium of approximately 42.6 per cent to volume weighted average price per Domino share of 641.7 pence during six month period to 10 March

* As part of offer, a loan note alternative will be available to domino shareholders

* Loan note alternative will enable eligible co shareholders to elect to get loan notes in lieu of part or all of cash consideration Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Bengaluru Newsroom; +44 207 542 1810)

News

Low-impact hub generates electrical current from pure plant power

Low-impact hub generates electrical current from pure plant power

Source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Green wall technology and semi-transparent solar panels have been combined to generate electrical current from a renewable source of energy both day and night.

 

This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies

Margherita Cesca, MCMM Architettura

A prototype “green bus shelter” that could eventually generate enough electricity to light itself, has been built by a collaboration of University of Cambridge researchers and eco-companies.

The ongoing living experiment, hosted by the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and open to the visiting public, is incorporated in a distinct wooden hub, designed by architects MCMM to resemble a structure like a bus shelter. Eight vertical green wall units – created by green wall specialists, Scotscape – are housed along with four semi-transparent solar panels and two flexible solar panels provided by Polysolar.

The hub has specially adapted vertical green walls that harvest electrons naturally produced as a by-product of photosynthesis and metabolic activity, and convert them into electrical current. It is the brainchild of Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Paolo Bombelli of the Department of Biochemistry. Their previous experiments resulted in a device able to power a radio using the current generated by moss.

The thin-film solar panels turn light into electricity by using mainly the blue and green radiation of the solar spectrum. Plants grow behind the solar glass, ‘sharing the light’ by utilising the red spectrum radiation needed for photosynthesis, while avoiding the scorching effect of UV light. The plants generate electrical currents as a consequence of photosynthesis and metabolic activity during the day and night.

“Ideally you can have the solar panels generating during the day, and the biological system at night. To address the world’s energy needs, we need a portfolio of many

different technologies, and it’s even better if these technologies can operate in synergy,” said Bombell

 

i.

The structure of the hub allows different combinations of the photovoltaic and biological systems to be tested. On the north east aspect of the hub, plants receive light directly, without being exposed to too much direct sun. On the south west orientation, a green wall panel is housed behind a semi-transparent solar panel so that the effect on the plants and their ability to generate current can be monitored. Next to that, in the same orientation, a single solar panel stands alone, and two further panels are also mounted on the roof.

“The combination of horticulture with renewable energy production constitutes a powerful solution to food and resource shortages on an increasingly populated planet,” explained Joanna Slota-Newson from Polysolar. “We build our semi-transparent solar panels into greenhouses, producing electrical energy from the sun which can in turn be used to power irrigation pumps or artificial lighting, while offering a controlled environment to improve agricultural yields. In this collaboration with Cambridge University, the public can experience the plants’ healthy growth behind Polysolar panels.”

The green wall panels in the hub are made from a synthetic material containing pockets, each holding a litre of soil and several plants. The pockets are fitted with a lining of carbon fibre on the back, which acts as an anode to receive electrons from the metabolism of plants and bacteria in the soil, and a carbon/catalyst plate on the front which acts as a cathode.

When a plant photosynthesises, energy from the sun is used to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds that the plant needs to grow. Some of the compounds – such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids – are leached into the soil where they are broken down by bacteria, which in turn release by-products, including electrons, as part of the process.

Electrons have a negative charge so, when they are generated, protons (with a positive charge) are also created. When the anode and cathode are connected to each other by a wire acting as an external circuit, the negative charges migrate between those two electrodes. Simultaneously, the positive charges migrate from the anodic region to the cathode through a wet system, in this case the soil. The cathode contains a catalyst that enables the electrons, protons and atmospheric oxygen to recombine to form water, thus completing the circuit and permitting an electrical current to be generated in the external circuit.

The P2P hub therfore generates electrical current from the combination of biological and physical elements. Each element of the hub is monitored separately, and members of the public can track the findings in real time, at a dedicated website and on a computer embedded in the hub itself.

Margherita Cesca, Senior Architect and Director of MCMM Architettura, the hub’s designer, is pleased that it has garnered so much interest. “This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies. The challenging design incorporates and showcases green wall and solar panels as well as glass, creating an interesting element which sits beautifully within Cambridge University Botanic Garden,” she said.

Bombelli added: “The long-term aim of the P2P solar hub research is to develop a range of self-powered sustainable buildings for multi-purpose use all over the world, from bus stops to refugee shelters.”

P2P is an outreach activity developed under the umbrella of the BPV (BioPhotoVoltaic) project working in collaboration with green technology companies including MCMM, Polysolar and Scotscape. The BPV project includes scientists from the Departments of Biochemistry, Plant Sciences, Physics and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, together with the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and the University of Cape Town.

The innovative prototype solar hub will be unveiled at the Botanic Garden during an event at the Cambridge Science Festival, Trap the light fantastic: plant to power, on Tuesday 10 March.

– See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/low-impact-hub-generates-electrical-current-from-pure-plant-power#sthash.weiGXb1M.dpuf

News

Join our free Chinese/UK Internship Programme!

Join our free Chinese/UK Internship Programme!

 

2015 promises to be a flagship year for the UK in China and for China in the UK, with the first ever UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange. On the bilateral trade side, there already exist great potential for further acceleration of commercial links between UK and China, and we have good reason to be even more optimistic as China continues to open up.
The IMF’s forecasts suggest China’s import market will be worth over £3tn by 2020. There will be numerous opportunities as China commits further to research & innovation, renewable energy usage & environmental protection, and light rail infrastructure. The financial services, healthcare, e-commence, logistics and telecom sector will continue to open up to foreign participation, and the ongoing shift into a consumer economy, to name just a few.

Nevertheless language and culture differences can be problematic and cause headaches for British firms doing business with Chinese companies and in China. Indeed research shows language and culture are among the biggest barriers to companies’ building their links with China, and especially true for SMEs.

Now help is available to reduce the risks and overcome the pitfalls that will make a real difference to your investment in China.

Benefits of Chinese-speaking interns

You are invited to participate in our Bilingual Intern Programme, which offers you dedicated assistance to your China endeavours, at virtually no cost to you. The programme is an integral part of the students’ master course, and so, exempt from the national minimum wage. There is no mandatory financial commitment required from the employer’s side. In addition, placement fee will be taken care of by the university, the higher education institution.

These bilingual students (Chinese as well as home & EU) are studying at Master’s level at one of Britain’s leading universities.  They can work for you at different levels. They can offer reassuring advice on the cultural pitfalls that can unseat the uninformed business person. On a different level, they will be able to contribute to developing your China market strategy or improving your operational efficiency in dealing with China.

The interns can work for your company for a period of six to twelve weeks (or longer if mutually agreed) according to your needs and requirements. We will make sure everything goes smoothly for you, from initial interview to final placement.

Track Record of Our Intern Programme

This is the seventh year we have run this programme and is going from strength to strength. Last year record numbers of positions were generated from both the private and public sectors. The profiles of employers that have signed up our programme has varied from SMEs to large multinational corporations, with industries ranging from banking to insurance, from software development to industrial design, from electronics to engineering, from medical instruments to logistics & distribution and in clean energy. Interns from last year worked in positions such as China business development, China market research, digital marketing, sales & marketing, finance and accounting, Paralegal support, and more. Past years’ internship portfolios reveal a remarkable breadth of experience and the feedback from the companies that have participated clearly demonstrates the benefits such internships can bring both to employers and students.

But don’t just take our word for it – here are some of the comments from previous employers of interns under this programme as to the value and benefit from offering a work placement. “The intern we took on was absolutely outstanding and “exceeded all our expectation “. “The intern proved to be an asset to the company “as outlined by another company. One company describe their intern as “punctual, hardworking and inquisitive, showing considerable diligence and interest in the company’s business development into China”. Finally, one employer nicely summed it up by just saying, the intern was “an excellent addition to our team“.

Act now to secure one of these top interns!

The interns will be available to start from the middle of June 2015. However the number of students is limited. So if you are interested, act now by contacting us on 01223 421966, or emailing intern@chinabusinesssolutions.com.

News

How much equity would different universities take from your spinout?

How much equity would different universities take from your spinout?

OBR has recently published a paper in Nature Biotechnology, examining spinout practices from nearly 100 of the world’s top universities.

The goals of the paper were two-fold:
(1) To give bioentrepreneurs practical advice on how to navigate their university technology transfer offices (TTOs); and
(2) To shine a light on this otherwise opaque process.

What we found was shocking variability in equity stakes that different universities take. For instance, some universities take 5% whilst others take over 67%. Not only are some taking 10-15 times more equity than their peers (leaving very little for the entrepreneurs and investors), but many universities are also failing to make this information public. This is despite the fact that much of their research is being funded by taxpayers’ money.

Read our Nature Biotechnology paper here

It has been a monumental effort by OBR over the past year to get this data, and I’d like to express my sincere thanks to the many OBR contributors who made this happen. We hope this article can start a conversation and bring clarity to this important issue.

News

New Technology Centre Announced For Cambridge Science Park

New Technology Centre Announced For Cambridge Science Park

Source: cam.ac.uk

 

Sir John Bradfield Centre will be in the heart of the science park thanks to £4.8 million investment.

We hope to promote a culture in which we not only help to develop technologies and companies, but also the entrepreneurs who will build the industries of the future.

Sir Gregory Winter, Master of Trinity College 

The Prime Minister David Cameron announced a £4.8 million partnership yesterday at the Cambridge Science Park to build a new technology centre.

The joint investment between Trinity College and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is part of plans to build the Sir John Bradfield Centre in the heart of the science park.

Trinity College, the College of Sir Isaac Newton among many other distinguished scientists, has long been at the centre of scientific innovation in Cambridge University.

The College was an early promoter of technology transfer to industry with the development of the Cambridge Science Park, which is now occupied by more than 90 companies with some 5,000 employees.

The College would like to do more to translate Cambridge research into companies and products; particularly in the very early stage companies.

 

It is known that science incubators can help in these early stages, in particular by providing teams and start-up companies with flexible and affordable space, education, mentoring and finance. It is expected that these companies will thrive in the self-sustaining entrepreneurial culture of the new centre and the Science Park.

Sir Gregory Winter, Master of Trinity College said: “Trinity College is pleased to help on all these fronts by providing a highly flexible building at the heart of the Science Park, and working with other partners to help with education, mentoring and seed financing.

“We hope to promote a culture in which we not only help to develop technologies and companies, but also the entrepreneurs who will build the industries of the future.

“We are particularly pleased to associate this building with Sir John Bradfield, former Senior Bursar of the College, who was instrumental in the creation of the Cambridge Science Park.”

More information:
  • Sir John Bradfield 1925 – 2014: One name alone is synonymous with the foundation of Cambridge Science Park: Sir John Bradfield, Senior Bursar of Trinity College from 1956 to 1992. Right from the start, Sir John saw that establishing and developing the links between the University and hi-tech tenants was critical to the success of Cambridge Science Park. His evident fascination in science and technology was deep rooted. Sir John won a scholarship to study natural sciences at Trinity College in 1942 and he became a research fellow in zoology in 1947. On October 13th 2014, Sir John passed away at Trinity College, on his way to a Cambridge Science Park Forum.
  • The proposed Technology Centre will be a new building on a 1.25 acre site providing a net internal floor area of 36,000 sq ft over three floors. Two thirds of the building will be innovation and lab space. In addition, about 6,000 sq ft will provide space for a café, retail unit, conference and meeting rooms and communal networking area.

– See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/news/new-technology-centre-announced-for-cambridge-science-park#sthash.RMDaPp8l.dpuf

News

Michelangelo bronzes discovered

Michelangelo bronzes discovered

Source: www.cam.ac.uk

It was thought that no bronzes by Michelangelo had survived – now experts believe they have found not one, but two – with a tiny detail in a 500-year-old drawing providing vital evidence.

The bronzes are exceptionally powerful and compelling works of art that deserve close-up study

Victoria Avery

They are naked, beautiful, muscular and ride triumphantly on two ferocious panthers. And now the secret of who created these magnificent metre-high bronze male nudes could well be solved. A team of international experts led by the University of Cambridge and Fitzwilliam Museum has gathered compelling evidence that argues that these masterpieces, which have spent over a century in relative obscurity, are early works by Michelangelo, made just after he completed the marble David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

If the attribution is correct, they are the only surviving Michelangelo bronzes in the world.

They are a non-matching pair, one figure older and lithe, the other young and athletic. Long admired for the beauty of their anatomy and powerful expressions, their first recorded attribution was to Michelangelo when they appeared in the collection of Adolphe de Rothschild in the 19th century. But, since they are undocumented and unsigned, this attribution was dismissed and over the last 120 years, the bronzes have been attributed to various other talented sculptors.

That changed last autumn when Prof Paul Joannides, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge, connected them to a drawing by one of Michelangelo’s apprentices now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

A Sheet of studies with Virgin embracing Infant Jesus, c.1508, is a student’s faithful copy of various slightly earlier lost sketches by Michelangelo. In one corner is a composition of a muscular youth riding a panther, which is very similar in pose to the bronzes, and drawn in the abrupt, forceful manner that Michelangelo employed in designs for sculpture. This suggests that Michelangelo was working up this very unusual theme for a work in three dimensions.

This revelation triggered further art-historical research with input from a number of international experts. The bronzes were compared with other works by Michelangelo and found to be very similar in style and anatomy to his works of 1500-1510; a date confirmed by the preliminary conclusions of initial scientific analysis. Interdisciplinary research is continuing; the findings and conclusions of which will be presented at an international conference on Monday 6 July, 2015.

It is a common misconception that Michelangelo sculpted almost exclusively in marble and never in bronze. However it is historically verifiable that he was associated with bronze throughout his 75-year-long career.  Michelangelo is documented as having made a two-thirds life-size David for a French grandee, and an over twice life-size statue of Pope Julius II.  Sadly neither survives – the first disappeared during the French Revolution; the second was melted down for artillery less than three years after it was made.

Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of the Applied Arts Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum, commented: “It has been fantastically exciting to have been able to participate in this ground-breaking project, which has involved input from many art-historians in the UK, Europe and the States, and to draw on evidence from conservation scientists and anatomists. The bronzes are exceptionally powerful and compelling works of art that deserve close-up study – we hope the public will come and examine them for themselves, and engage with this ongoing debate.”

The bronzes have gone on display in advance of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary in 2016 and before its next major exhibition Treasured Possessions, the result of a interdisciplinary University research project revealing hidden items in the Museum’s reserves. The bronzes and a selection of the evidence are now on display in the Italian galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from February 3 until 9 August 2015. Admission to the Fitzwilliam is free.

Click on images to enlarge:

Researchers behind the discovery
Prof Paul Joannides – Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge
Dr Victoria Avery – Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum
Dr Robert van Langh – Head of Conservation, Rijksmuseum
Arie Pappot – Junior conservator of metals, Rijksmuseum
Professor Peter Abrahams – Clinical Anatomist, Warwick Medical School, University of WarwickLead consultants
Martin Gayford – Art critic and author of Michelangelo: An Epic Life (2013)
Dr Charles Avery – Independent art historian, Cambridge (UK)
Dr Andrew Butterfield – Author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio and many other publications on Renaissance art

– See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/michelangelo-bronzes-discovered#sthash.y9TS7D0D.dpuf

News

New life breathed into Plastic Logic as Cambridge drops manufacturing for IP

New life breathed into Plastic Logic as Cambridge drops manufacturing for IP

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

FlexEnable Flex OLED

Fifteen years and several hundred millions pounds after it spun out of Cambridge University’s physics department, the company formerly known as Plastic Logic says it now has the technology and strategic plan necessary to make a dent in a range of markets including Internet of Things and wearable technologies using IP from its groundbreaking plastic electronics platform.

It is the advances in the last two years in particular with organic transistors which are now stable, yet flexible enough to wrap around a pencil and powerful enough to drive displays, sensors and programmable logic circuits backed by a high yield, low temperature manufacturing process, that has persuaded Plastic Logic to split into two entities, one to focus on IP in Cambridge, the other on mass production in Germany.

The rebranded Plastic Logic Germany to focus on plastic electronics production from its multi-million pound manufacturing plant in Dresden while Cambridge concentrates on exploiting thevast intellectual property portfolio and plastic electronics knowhow it has developed over the last decade and a half under a new company, FlexEnable.

The main technology advances have come in the last two years and this new launch seems to have breathed new life into a company that was already operating a new IP-focused strategy, but whose name was struggling to shake of its history which included some of the biggest private funding rounds ever seen in a Cambridge startup and a high profile and ultimately doomed attempt to enter the ereader market.

Though in-house ereaders have been off the menu for a few years now, display technology is still integral to FlexEnable’s future, though this time end user product development will come from collaborators. The company that once attempted to build a fully vertically integrated business that went from the materials science right through to the customer’s palms will now become an enabling partner to companies.

Operating through three divisions, FabEnable, ProductEnable and MaterialEnable, the company will either help manufacturers upgrade their own lines to integrate flexible electronics production, work with companies to develop their own products based on flexible electronics or get involved at a much more fundamental scientific level with companies or research groups working to develop new flexible materials.

Though Dresden remains a large scale manufacturer of plastic electronics, FlexEnable will provide prototyping and small scale manufacturing.

The company’s current technology is able to produce 25 micron thick substrates that can be used to create a transistor with a quarter of a millimetre bend radius, a curvature with unique mechanical properties according to former Plastic Logic CEO and now FlexEnable’s CEO, Indro Mukerjee. The fact that the production process doesn’t involve temperatures much over 80ºC not only means improved yields, but that it can be integrated with a wide range of flexible materials.

The organic thin film transistor technology is now capable of driving active matrix organic LEDs, LCD and many other display and sensor materials. Programmable array logic circuits, which can be programmed for different functions by digital printing, have been created in flexible plastic while a range of sensor array technology has been developed for use in medical devices, contactless control of devices and gesture recognition.

FlexEnable has come up with a number of show products to attract potential partners and to demonstrate some of the directions the technology could go. These include a wearable display on the sleeve of a waterproof jacket which could be used to display a map, a wrap around display for smartphones that can become a tablet, or a smart credit card that can have an active matrix display, fingerprint sensors and logic on a single sheet of plastic.

Revenues are already being generated by FlexEnable technology licenses and the company has worked with Samsung owned NovaLed on fully flexible Amoled displays.

All Plastic Logic’s 45 or so Cambridge staff are understood to have transferred to FlexEnable which will continue to be run by Mukerjee and which is still almost entirely owned by Russian state-owned nanotech company, Rusnano.

Funding for the new venture comes from existing investors, but Mukerjee says the company will undertake a funding round soon with the support of Rusnano. Russia will no longer be a venue for plastic electronics manufacturing, as was planned when Rusnano invested $150m with promises of up to $500m in equity funding and loans to follow, but it will house a focused electronics centre to be shared with a consortium of other companies.

News

Cambridge meets Cambridge in £18m Biotech Acquisition

Cambridge meets Cambridge in £18m Biotech Acquisition

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

Firefly branded boxes and vialsAbcam is paying £18.5 million cash to add biomarker detection capabilities to its business as it looks to expand its traditional offering of supplying proteins.

Firefly BioWorks, which has 15 employees based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a novel multiplex assay platform for the detection of biomarkers, based on a microfabrication technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Its first product is for the detection of microRNAs (miRNAs), which Abcam says fits well with the strategy it outlined in September last year to establish new growth platforms and supports its wider ‘mission’ of enabling “scientists to discover more.”

The move into helping identify proteins and not just supplying them carries extra significance as this strategic expansion is happening under the stewardship of Alan Hirzel, the successor to Abcam’s hugely successful founding CEO, Dr Jonathan Milner.

“The acquisition of Firefly represents a compelling strategic fit for Abcam, expanding our Kits and Assays business into the new areas where life science researchers tell us they have the greatest needs,” said Hirzel. “RNA is one of the hottest areas in science for our consumers and we are excited about the scientific and commercial potential in what is a new product area for Abcam.

“We are also delighted to be working with our new colleagues at Firefly to offer researchers access to a novel technology that will enable them to assess the role of miRNA in a broad range of areas including epigenetics and cancer biomarker discovery, as well as generally across biological research.”

News

GCGP ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FUNDS REACH £100M

GCGP ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FUNDS REACH £100M

Source: www.cabume.co.uk

11 board members spell out £100m with individual placards Cambridge and Peterborough’s economic development body has secured an additional £38 million of investment to support economic growth in area, taking the total raised from the UK government’s Growth Deal to over £100 million.

The Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough Local Enterprise Partnership (GCGP Lep) says the funding will help in the generation of 15,500 new jobs and construction of 10,000 new homes across the Lep area.

Specifically, the funding will be invested into the following projects over the next five years:

• Ely Southern Bypass: Funding to support the construction of the much-needed Ely Southern Bypass – 1.7km of road that will connect the A142 to the Stuntney Causeway, relieving congestion in the city and supporting the creation of 4,500 new jobs and 3,000 new homes.

• Growing Places Fund: A £16.6 million boost to the LEP’s successful Growing Places Fund scheme that provides affordable loan funding to overcome key barriers to growth.

• Institute of Advanced Construction and a Highways & Civil Engineering Academy: A significant contribution towards the creation of a new national centre for higher level construction skills near King’s Lynn, and a local Highways & Civil Engineering centre near Huntingdon to provide skilled labour for the many key transport schemes planned over the coming years.

• M11 Junction 8 upgrade: Funding towards development work to upgrade the busy M11 Junction 8 interchange located near Stansted Airport

News

Lucideon Looks To UK’s Scientific Heartlands With New Site in Cambridge

Lucideon Looks To UK’s Scientific Heartlands With New Site in Cambridge

International materials development consultancy Lucideon is continuing on a growth curve with the opening of new offices in Cambridge Science Park.

Operating as Lucideon Cambridge Polymer Limited, the new site will be the hub of development of novel polymer systems for high value applications in industry, particularly in the healthcare sector.

Lucideon develops cutting-edge materials technologies for sectors including medical devices, ceramics and nuclear.  Current work includes the development of field-enhanced processing technology to reduce the energy used to produce ceramics, inorganic controlled release technologies for the healthcare industries, and a new technology, MIDAR, which can be used to encapsulate nuclear industry waste.

The decision to have a base in Europe’s longest-serving and largest centre for commercial research and development forms part of Lucideon’s ambitious expansion plans, which include opening offices in North Carolina, Turkey, Japan and Australia.

Tony Kinsella, Chief Executive at Lucideon, said: “As our strategy for the future is based on innovation and developing cutting-edge technologies it seemed a natural move for us to be part of the thriving and energetic science, engineering and business communities that exist in the greater Cambridge area.”

Lucideon has worked with, and continues to work with, the University of Cambridge on numerous research projects, including EU-funded R&D.  The company has also sponsored post doctorate places at the university for some years.

The Cambridge office will be headed up by Dr Xiang Zhang – a Royal Society Industrial Fellow – with scientists and engineers from Lucideon working there on secondment initially.

In line with the company’s plans to hire 100 new staff over the next three years, new roles will be added at the office. Lucideon also hopes to strengthen links with the high-tech sector companies within the area.

Mr Kinsella added: “We already have close links with the scientific excellence of the University of Cambridge through the work of our Head of Medical Materials, Dr Xiang Zhang – and we can only see this strengthening with the opening of the new office.”

News

Computers using digital footprints are better judges of personality than friends and family

Computers using digital footprints are better judges of personality than friends and family

Source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Researchers have found that, based on enough Facebook Likes, computers can judge your personality traits better than your friends, family and even your partner. Using a new algorithm, researchers have calculated the average number of Likes artificial intelligence (AI) needs to draw personality inferences about you as accurately as your partner or parents.

 

People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgments with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions

Wu Youyou

A new study, published today in the journal PNAS, compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while computer models used a specific digital signal: Facebook Likes.

The results show that by mining Facebook Likes, the computer model was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Given enough Likes to analyse, only a person’s spouse rivalled the computer for accuracy of broad psychological traits.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University describe the finding as an “emphatic demonstration” of the capacity of computers to discover an individual’s psychological traits through pure data analysis, showing machines can know us better than we’d previously thought: an “important milestone” on the path towards more social human-computer interactions.

“In the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally-intelligent and socially skilled machines,” said lead author Wu Youyou, from Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.

“In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem to be within our reach.”

The researchers say these results might raise concerns over privacy as such technology develops; the research team support policies giving users full control of their digital footprint.

In the study, a computer could more accurately predict the subject’s personality than a work colleague by analysing just ten Likes; more than a friend or a cohabitant (roommate) with 70, a family member (parent, sibling) with 150, and a spouse with 300 Likes.

Given that an average Facebook user has about 227 Likes (and this number is growing steadily), the researchers say that this kind of AI has the potential to know us better than our closest companions.

The latest results build on previous work from the University of Cambridge, published in March 2013, which showed that a variety of psychological and demographic characteristics could be predicted with startling accuracy through Facebook Likes.

In the new study, researchers used a sample of 86,220 volunteers on Facebook who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire through the ‘myPersonality‘ app, as well as providing access to their Likes.

These results provided self-reported personality scores for what are known in psychological practice as the ‘big five’ traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—the OCEAN model. Through this, researchers could establish which Likes equated with higher levels of particular traits e.g. liking ‘Salvador Dali’ or ‘meditation’ showed a high degree of openness.

Users of the ‘myPersonality’ app were then given the option of inviting friends and family to judge the psychological traits of the user through a shorter version of the personality test. These were the human judges in the study—those listed on Facebook as friends or family expressing their judgement of a subject’s personality using a 10-item questionnaire

Researchers were able to get a sample of 17,622 participants judged by one friend or family member, and a sample of 14,410 judged by two.

To gauge the accuracy of these measurements, the online personality judgements were corroborated with a meta-analysis of previous psychological studies over decades which looked at how people’s colleagues, family and so on judge their personality. Researchers found their online values similar to the averages from years of person-to-person research.

In this way, the researchers were able to come up with accuracy comparisons between computer algorithms and the personality judgements made by humans. Given enough Likes, the computers came closer to a person’s self-reported personality than their brothers, mothers or partners.

Dr Michal Kosinski, co-author and researcher at Stanford, says machines have a couple of key advantages that make these results possible: the ability to retain and access vast quantities of information, and the ability to analyse it with algorithmsthe techniques of ‘Big Data’.

“Big Data and machine-learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of thinking,” he said. Nevertheless, the authors concede that detection of some traits might be best left to human abilities, those without digital footprints or dependant on subtle cognition.

The authors of the study write that automated, accurate, and cheap personality assessments could improve societal and personal decision-making in many ways—from recruitment to romance.

“The ability to judge personality is an essential component of social living—from day-to-day decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire, or elect as president,” said Cambridge co-author Dr David Stillwell. “The results of such data analysis can be very useful in aiding people when making decisions.”

Youyou explains: “Recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality; products and services could adjust their behaviour to best match their users’ characters and changing moods.

“People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgments with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. Such data-driven decisions may well improve people’s lives,” she said.

The researchers say that this kind of data mining and its inferences has hallmarks of techniques currently used by some digital service providers, and that—for many people—a future in which machines read our habits as an open book on a massive scale may seem dystopian to those concerned with privacy.

It’s a concern shared by the researchers. “We hope that consumers, technology developers, and policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints,” said Kosinski.

Take the Facebook personality test yourself here: http://applymagicsauce.com/

– See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/computers-using-digital-footprints-are-better-judges-of-personality-than-friends-and-family#sthash.bK7Gi05d.dpuf