• Question: Your research is very interesting:), What is the technology you are researching?

    Asked by anon-258471 to Olivia, Freya, Evelyn on 9 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Freya Addison

      Freya Addison answered on 9 Jul 2020:

      Thank you! I have two areas of research. I have been working on creating a python package to determine if an airborne platform is within our radar beam using geodesy (the shape of the Earth). The technology I am working with is ground-based weather research radars (Chilbolton Observatory & University of Leeds) and airborne platforms such as weather balloons, the UK’s atmospheric research aircraft (FAAM), and helikites. This is to make sure if we are measuring say a cloud from the ground and the air, that we are measuring the same cloud when comparing the observations.
      Currently, I am using software to work out what insects look like from a radar perspective. We start off with Micro-CT scans of insects, then I use a program called slicer, to pick out the insect from the scan, I then put this into an animation software called Blender, where we trace the insect, to get a virtual shell of the insect shape (think vacuum forming), then we use this in our radar simulation software (WIPL-D), to see the scattering pattern of each insect. We are trying to determine the limits of the radar virtually and then compare to real-life observations to see how far we can go in measuring insect biodiversity in the atmosphere.

    • Photo: Olivia Lala

      Olivia Lala answered on 10 Jul 2020:

      Hi Philip,

      Thanks! At the moment I am working on a project which focuses on data analysis. I have been helping clinicians better utilise the patient data they have available to them by building a dashboard that will sit on top of current medical records software. This will allow them to track patients in their diagnosis pathway, better plan for clinic capacity, meet government initiatives to do with waiting time targets and allow them to implement changes to the way data is used to run their service more efficiently.

    • Photo: Evelyn Greeves

      Evelyn Greeves answered on 15 Jul 2020:

      Hi Phillip! I don’t personally do any research into technology myself. However, other people in my department do lots of different kinds of research. In my head, I split our work into 5 different areas:

      • Data management – lots of scientists visit our laboratory to do experiments using big pieces of equipment (bigger than a football pitch!), which produce HUUUUGE amounts of data, such numbers and pictures. My colleagues help those scientists by designing and building systems to store their data, and get it back when they need it. This involves building both hardware (physical things e.g. computers) and software (the programs your computer runs e.g. Microsoft Word). Our software is very specialist because it’s unusual to have as much data as we do!

      • Software – as well as data management software, we also write software to do other special jobs. A lot of these jobs are linked to analysing the data I just mentioned. However, some of the software is written to help scientists produce their data too!

      • Modelling – sometimes it’s really difficult for scientists to do a certain experiment, because it’s too expensive or even sometimes too dangerous to carry out in real life. We help scientists solve this problem by helping them build ‘models’ and ‘simulations’, which basically just means using the rules of maths and physics to imagine how an experiment would play out. Often this is visualised using animation or graphs.

      • Compute – this is a bit of a funny word, but usually computer scientists use it to mean “the bits of machines and computers which do the actual work”. In our context, we use it to mean our supercomputers and platforms which we build and let other scientists use. For example, we have a cloud computing platform. Cloud computing lets you “borrow” very high-tech computers without having to own them yourself – you access them through your laptop. Companies like Netflix use cloud computing to let you stream films and TV shows without having to download them. We’ve built this platform so scientists can use our super fast computers to analyse their huge amounts of data, which would be very slow on a normal laptop!

      • Machine learning – you might have heard of machine learning or ‘artificial intelligence’. It’s a pretty cool field of computing which basically tries to teach computers how to learn, so that rather than telling them what to do they can learn how to do it themselves! We use machine learning to solve problems which are a bit too complicated or long-winded for humans to do by themselves. For example, we’re helping our friends in the space department to analyse photos of the Earth, taken by satellites, using machine learning.

      This was a very long answer, but I hope it explains a bit more about the kind of work we do! The great thing about technology and computing is that they’re needed for almost every part of science these days, so there’s opportunity to be involved in lots of different kinds of science 😀

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