From neutrons to node and space

Like always, the last three months at UK SIN has been quite hectic. In January, I visited the ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source in Harwell, Oxfordshire, a world-leading centre for research in the physical and life sciences, owned by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. I was also there to witness the signing up of a letter of intent between ISIS and the Indian Nano Mission for collaboration in the areas of nano science, technology and advanced materials using neutron and muon sources. Prof. CNR Rao, who is a renowned scientist in material sciences and head of the Nano Mission Council and Prof. Robert McGreevy, Director of ISIS, signed the letter. The High Commissioner of India to the UK, Mr. Ranjan Mathai witnessed the signing. The proposed collaboration should aid UK and Indian material scientists to understand materials at the nanoscale and in solving new problems using the world leading neutron and muon source at ISIS.

Since I was in Harwell Research Complex, I also visited the Diamond Light source which is UK’s national Synchrotron facility and uses electrons to study materials. It is used by a large number of scientists from various disciplines including structural biology, energy, engineering and nanoscience. Very few countries in the world have set up such Synchrotron facilities.

February was the much awaited launch of the Web Observatory to study the web. A Web Observatory provides a global, distributed analytics platform that not only provides access to datasets of various sizes but also helps in analysing the web. India’s first Web Observatory (WO) was launched at the International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIIT-B) by Prof. S Sadagopan, Director IIIT-B and Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. IIIT-B is the only such node of the grid in India. The Web Observatory has been set up in partnership with the Web Science Trust, the University of Southampton and other global Web Science laboratories.

A workshop on Web Science was also held coinciding the launch which was attended by UK and Indian scientists and Indian companies. It was organised by IIIT-B and the UK Science and Innovation Network and was a follow-up of the social media research workshop that we organised before. The workshop report can be downloaded here.

Finally in March, I along with my colleague Supramade Rajiv organised an exciting Riffstream workshop on space which my colleague Murtaza has blogged here. Have a look at it if you are interested in the space sector. I am now writing project bids for activities for 2015-16 and I look forward to another exciting year ahead.