Professor Emeritus David Jackson FInstP, FOSA, is meeting former and present academic staff members, research associates and PhD students many of whom are now leading research programmes in industry and at prestigious universities around the world.

The exciting two-day event takes place in Canterbury on the University of Kent campus on 21 and 22 May 2015 and includes talks about the history and current development of optical sensing (including the early days of optical fibre sensing, and other topics explored at Kent, such as coherence imaging methods and optical signal processing) and the legacy of the Kent Applied Optics Group.

The event is intended to be a celebration of Prof Jackson’s rich and lengthy career, which has included many world firsts. From 1965, David led research in Applied Optics at the University of Kent for four decades, making Kent an internationally recognised centre of excellence for fibre optic sensing, laser Doppler anemometry, laser light scattering and optical instrumentation.

The Centre for Professional Practice will be hosting an Open Lecture by Dr Mike Nicholls on the topic of Work based learning : paradigm, practice and paradox.

“Work based learning” has been described as “a mode of learning and field of study allied to the Social Sciences” (Portwood, 2000), while Boud and Solomon (2001) maintain that “work is the curriculum”, and that it is the workplace and not an academic discipline which frames work based learning.

The presentation will chart the professional journey of a traditionally trained natural scientist seeking to harmonise these polarised views of work based learning in generic Professional Studies university programmes.

Please email cppmedway@kent.ac.uk to reserve a seat by Friday 22nd May 2015.
Date: Friday 29th May 2015
Time: Refreshments available from 15.00
Time: Lecture starts at 15.30 until approx. 17.00
Location: Seminar Room 1, Compass Centre South, Medway Campus

To mark the continued success of Kent Extra, we would like to invite staff to our end of year event. This is an opportunity to celebrate the work of Kent Extra students and to show our appreciation to everyone who has been involved in providing courses and making Kent Extra happen.

Please come along to meet the Kent Extra team, find out more about the scheme and see some examples of students’ work.

The event will take place in the Woolf Upper Foyer between 13.00 to 15.00 on Friday 29 May 2015.

If you would like to come or have any questions, please email: kentextra@kent.ac.uk

Dr Matteo Migliavacca has been awarded funding for a two-year project on stream and transactional processing from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The project will be looking at the integration of the stream processing model (which processes streams of data in real time) with the the recent developments of in-memory transaction processing systems (which process data which was previously stored).

The funding of £120,000 starts in January 2016, the project will involve Dr Migliavacca as principal investigator and a Research Associate (for which recruitment will begin soon). The School will also fund a PhD scholarship to work on themes related to the project.

Matteo said: ‘Big Data and Fast Data are receiving explosive R&D efforts from industry and academia, which is leading to an organic growth of incompatible parallel data processing systems. It is now time to stand back and rethink how we approach the problem. In this project we aim to close the gap between stream and transaction processing, which is key in reducing operational costs and development complexity of large data-intensive applications. I am very excited for this project which has the potential to revolutionise how we think, develop and manage Big Data applications.’