Spring 1972 Keynes Quadrant

Life in Keynes 50th Anniversary Photography Competition

Keynes College celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year.  As part of these celebrations, the Master of Keynes College, Chloé Gallien, is pleased to launch the ‘Life in Keynes’ photography competition.

This competition is open to all University students and staff past and present and participants are encouraged to submit photos that capture the essence of life in Keynes.

Keynes College today

You don’t have to be a member of the College to enter, as we know that many of you have enjoyed the facilities offered by the College and we are looking forward to seeing what the College means to as wide a range of people as possible.

A panel of judges will choose the best entries and these will be exhibited in Keynes College during June. There will also be a prize for the top three entries: vouchers to the value of £80 (1st prize), £50 (2nd), £35 (3rd prize).

Photos should be submitted by the end of the day on Sunday 19 May to the competition Flickr page.

Please see the following links for competition terms and conditions and instructions on how to enter.

 

EIRA microfinance

All about EIRA Microfinance 2019

Current students and graduates from the last three years can now apply for up to £3000 to take their start-up business ideas forward.

Through the EIRA project, this microfinance opportunity supports innovative start-ups in their earliest stages, helping to get ideas developed and tested. Applicants must produce a short video pitch (up to 3 minutes) and submit a written application too, the deadline for applications will be midnight on Sunday 30 June. Shortlisted applicants will then be invited to pitch to a review panel in the summer.

What is EIRA Microfinance?

EIRA are providing £3000 seed funding to students who have businesses or starting-up businesses. Th funding is provided by EIRA to help accelerate your business, their aim is to help start-ups to progress.

How do I enter?

You will need to fill out the application form attached. where you will answer key questions about your business.

You will need to submit a three minute video pitch, which introduces us to your business. The video should be submitted privately so ensure if you do it on YouTube that you make it as a private video as to prevent public view.

Criteria

The scheme is available to current students or graduates within the last 3 years of all EIRA partner institutions.

The student must have started a business that has a business bank account. EIRA Microfinance Grants can only be paid into a business bank account.

Applicants will have to demonstrate their right to work in the UK

Applications relating to the EIRA themes of Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology and Digital Creative, or where there is potential for the business to grow in the East of England, will be prioritised for funding.

#InnovateIT

InnovateIT – What’s your idea?

SAGA, a company that has become the leading provider of products and services for people over the age of 65, recently engaged with the University’s Hub for Innovation & enterprise through its #InnovateIT competition via its #DigitalReboot programme, supported by Santander Universities.

A launch event was held on 13 February where Saga colleagues gave an overview of the business and the challenge at hand.  Hub Business Advisor, Paul Swaddle OBE of Pocket APP, gave an insight into how tech is currently developing and how it’s being adopted by industry at present.

They offered a £600 prize to the student individual or team who could come up with the most innovative way of using the tech of tomorrow.Students were then given 23 days to think, mind map and research their selected tech.

On 27 March, judges Emily Gardener, Leanne Brown and Simon Godfrey of SAGA, Paul Swaddle of Pocket APP and Kevin Bardwell of Santander Universities,  gathered in the Canterbury Innovation Centre, ready to make the final judgement.The three finalists teams included Hazim Abdusada & Huma Razzaq, Rebecca Humphries and Teniola Etti, who were equipped with a ten-minute pitch waited for their chance to convince the judges.

All the finalists were calm and confident and did exceedingly well at presenting their ideas. What was clear, after the pitches, was that the judges had a hard decision to make. The winner of the £600 of Amazon Vouchers was Teniola Etti, whose idea had convinced the judges that his tech was credible, possible and the most impactful submission. The runner-ups were Huma and Hazim and Rebecca.

Our thanks to the work of the finalists, SAGA, Santander Universities and the University of Kent.

 

Photo of Bernardino Branca

PhD student publishes major biography of Edgar Wind

Bernardino Branca, a PhD student in the History and Philosophy of Art in the School of Arts, has published a major new intellectual biography of the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind entitled Edgar Wind, filosofo delle immagini. La biografia intelletuale di un discepolo di Aby Warburg (Milan and Udine: Mimesis Edizioni, 2019).

Edgar Wind (1900-1971) was a German art historian who specialised on the survival of the ancient art of the Renaissance, and was and close collaborator of art historian Aby Warburg. In 1933, after the rise of Nazism in Germany, moved to London and became involved in the Warburg Institute and finally became Oxford University’s first Professor of Art History.

Based on extensive archival research, the volume is the first book-length study of Wind’s extraordinary life and significant contribution to scholarship, and makes an important contribution to our historical understanding of the Warburg tradition of art history.

Bernardino’s own PhD project is on ‘Edgar Wind, The Warburg Circle and the Renaissance’, under the supervision of Dr Ben Thomas and Dr Grant Pooke.

For further details, please see the publisher’s page (in Italian) here.

Team photo of SARD 2019

SARD chooses the Kent and Medway Medical School as its Charity of the Year

We are delighted to announce that SARD, a medical technology company based at the Innovation Centre, has chosen to support our fundraising for the Kent and Medway Medical School by choosing us as their Charity of the Year.  They have pledged to raise £5,000 through a programme of charity events such as bake sales, quizzes, challenge events and much more and we are very much looking forward to working with them.

SARD is a family run business which supplies workforce management software to the healthcare sector.  They are passionate about applying the best technologies to improve the way the healthcare workforce is managed and make life easier for those within it.

About their support for KMMS, they said:

“As a company founded alongside and working with doctors every day, we want to do everything we can to help strengthen the UK’s medical workforce. Kent and Medway Medical School will provide a new point of entry for future doctors and its focus on widening participation means that a career in medicine may become a possibility for many who would not have previously considered it. With one of our offices based at the University of Kent’s Innovation Centre, we are thrilled to have this development right on our doorstep and are excited about what this means for our children and children’s children, whether they be the doctors of the future, or those being cared for by them. We urge everybody to support this cause as every single person will need medical care at points in their life. The Kent and Medway Medical School will train future doctors who may end up saving the lives of you or your loved ones.”

They are kickstarting their fundraising efforts with a bake sale on Thursday 18th April from 10am in the Innovation Centre café area.

Photo of Amber Winston

Alumna Amber Winston on the Coffee Art Project

Kent alumna Amber Winston, who completed a BA (Hons) in Visual and Performed Arts at Kent in 2015 and an MA in History and Philosophy of Art in 2016, is currently Project and Marketing Executive for The Coffee Art Project, an art competition inviting artists to interpret the theme of coffee. As part her role, she selected Dr Grant Pooke, Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History, to be on the competition’s panel of judges.

The Coffee Art Project was featured at the London Coffee Festival, where 46 artist submissions were selected and displayed in a gallery. The Project is a non-profit initiative aimed at encouraging artists by providing them with an open platform to showcase their works.

Artists at all levels can enter one piece of artwork that connects to ‘coffee’ and/or ‘coffee shop’ experience. There is no restriction on media used; providing that they have a link to coffee. The project supports Project Waterfall, a charity committed to bringing clean water to communities which grow coffee. Project Waterfall has raised more than over £1 million and delivered clean water to over 37,000 people across 7 countries in partnership with WaterAid, Charity: Water and Water for People.

How did Amber come to be involved in The Coffee Project? ‘After graduation, I went on to a sales job for 20 months as a Business Development Executive, and took on another few roles throughout the business to gain some corporate experience’, she explains. ‘After this I took a big leap, took a big cut in pay, got myself a job in London as a marketing intern for a start-up company to experience in a more creative and autonomous role. After this ended I applied for a social media role at the Allegra Foundation, then – after seeing my work experience and past roles, plus my degrees – they asked me to take on the Coffee Art Project’.

Why did Amber choose Grant? ‘I had to select judges who would be able to fairly judge artwork based off four categories; Creativity, Impact, Connection to Coffee, and Spirit of Humanity. The reason I asked Grant to be on the panel was because he taught me since I started at Kent – I admire his vast depth of knowledge and how he made me try harder at each piece of written work on his subjects even though I struggled with dyslexia. I remembered he taught a class on globalisation (which is part of coffee culture) and thought that he would judge each piece with the same amount of composure he has for all his previous students’ work’.

To see all Coffee Art Project entries, please click here.

Plastic cup on a beach

All female team tackle plastic pollution at Athena Hack

A group of Masters students from the School of Computing attended Athena Hack, an all-women hackathon, in London from 13-14 April 2019.

The hackathon was organised by ShowCode as an initiative to champion female technologists and focus their skills to help solve one of the biggest environmental issues around. Prizes were awarded for the best performing university team and the best performing company team with a top prize of £5000 cash.

The challenge was to use their skills to create an idea that would help solve the plastic crisis that is currently plaguing the world in support of Plastic Oceans UK. The team, called ‘bumblebees’, was made up of five Masters students; Asha Barathoki, Sybil Mayard, Mai Pham, Zhaneta Georgieva and Clarissa Ang.

The team developed an app, called ‘Plastix’, based on the augmented reality, machine learning and image recognition features which have become popular among smart phone users. It aims to use real-time object identification, personal record and data aggregation to address the lack of awareness and lack of data, as well as making it convenient for the user.

Plastix has three basic functions:

  • -identifying an object in real time and whether it is recyclable
  • reporting and booking rubbish hotspots
  • allowing the user to receive rewards for recycling / cleaning the hotspot.

Asha Barathoki said ‘We had an amazing experience at the hackathon where we got to network and develop our skills via workshops. Unfortunately we didn’t win but the whole process was very inspiring for female students like us in the tech industry.’

Businessman working on laptop in office

Take part in our Careers in Research Online Survey

Calling all early career research staff at Kent!  You told us that “Research staff fall through the cracks”.  Help us stop this from happening in the future.  Have your say in the Careers in Research Online Survey (CROS) from 1 May 2019.

CROS runs nationally every two years for early career research staff. CROS is your chance to tell Kent about your views and experiences. Key benefits of CROS are:

  • The information you provide will be used to inform policy and practice around employment, management and researcher development: this should benefit not only you, but also have long-lasting impact for future researchers.
  • A clearer picture of Kent’s progress towards implementing the principles of the Concordat to support Researchers; and on how we are meeting our Athena Swan goals, to continue to improve our gender equality support for early career research staff.
  • A good response rate and national benchmarking will provide leverage for future changes at Kent.

CROS is anonymous. It is managed by Vitae and hosted on Online Surveys, a secure web environment.

Is the survey targeted at you? Vitae’s definition of early career research staff is:

“Researchers are […] individuals whose primary responsibility is to conduct research and who are employed for this purpose. It is recognised that this broad category of staffing covers a wide range of staff with different disciplinary backgrounds, levels of training, experience and responsibility, types of contract (fixed or open-ended, full- or part-time), and different career expectations and intentions.  However, […] there are likely to be early career staff who may be sustaining their research activity through a series of teaching or other professional contracts.” (2015)

If you have any queries about the survey, contact Dr Jo Collins (Postgraduate Development Advisor), j.p.collins@kent.ac.uk.

CROS closes on 31 May.2019.

Hammers

Choosing a trusted tool that’s right for the job

There are apps and software out there that can help you manage your time, take notes, read efficiently and more, but choosing one can be a minefield!

These tools, which you can search or browse, are tried and tested by University staff.

We’ve selected the free or Kent-provided tools that we think will save students and staff time and increase your productivity.

Some of them are on student PCs, some are online tools you can use anywhere, and others you can add to your device.

They can help you with:

  • Accessibility
  • Text to speech and screen reading
  • Voice recognition
  • Reading
  • Time management and focus
  • Writing
  • Collaborative working
  • Images, video and audio
  • Planning, mindmapping, notes and meetings

 

‘Share what you use too!’

Use a great app that we should share? Recommend it at www.kent.ac.uk/tools or visit regularly to see what’s been added.