Month: August 2019

Crystal Maze Experience- EEE PhDs

The first Crystal Maze event connecting PhD students from the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, took place on Friday 5th of April. The goal of this unforgettable experience was to mix students from different groups and foster new collaborations within the EEE department.

The evening started with a drinks hangout at union bar where the attendants got to know about each other before the team building event. The Crystal Maze Experience was a truly interactive, frenetic and funny team challenge. Expertly guided by the Maze Master, the two teams of students journeyed through four different adventure zones: Aztec, Industrial, Futuristic and Medieval. Along the way, the teams faced lots of challenging tasks and games. Every challenge successfully completed won each team a crystal. Every Crystal earned, gave more time in the very final challenge: The Crystal Dome. Here, the teams had to work together to catch as many tokens as possible.

The event was a great success, with a big turnout of 16 students. Everyone had a great time and enjoyed building teamwork and social skills. EEE PhDs were very happy to meet new people from the department in such a fun way.

Connect to Succeed

As we get closer and closer to graduation, we look forward to taking a step into the real world and work either for corporations or starting our own venture in order to reach our potential. Judging by the society we live in, connections have a great impact on our future. Events managed and produced by the GSU give such opportunities to students, allowing them to expand their horizons. One such event was the GSU connect 2019 initiative.

The event offered students the opportunity to enjoy the cross disciplinary collaboration with other students, allowing for students to benefit from different skills and expertise. The event saw 60 students from diverse backgrounds, participating in the competition. Though GSU Connect has traditionally been a networking event, this year the committee had added a twist. Students had the opportunity to present a pitch to a panel of judges as well as the audience and the winning team to win £1,000 pounds in cash. The event ran for 2 days, one exclusively to allow students to connect with peers in a professional environment and the second to allow the teams to pitch their ideas to their selective audience and judges. The panel of judges included Mr. Anouar Adham Founder of Elite Crowdfunding Ltd., Elite Assets International and Elite IRP/ Assets and Wealth Management Expert, Ms. Anca Enica Co-founder of Legacy Venture, Mr. Matthieu Burnand Manager of Solar Energy startup, MBA at INSEAD, Mr. Robert Benson an Active investor in startup businesses, Founder of Arete Consulting and Mr. William Makant. In this year’s competition, two teams had the opportunity to take home £500 each by presenting an idea that could wow the panel and the audience. This year, the winning team had a unique idea, to develop a sustainable autonomous vertical farming system based on the aeroponics technology by using a technique in AI called Reinforcement Learning. This would allow scalability for vertical farming system, as the AI can learn and adapt in any given environment given enough training. The idea won both the award from the esteemed judges as well as the audience, proving to the world just how bright the minds of the future are.

Though next year’s event will focus solely on building connections and networking, we look forward to receiving both your feedback and any suggestions on improvement. The GSU thanks it’s participants for making this event as successful as it could have been and we look forward to seeing you all again at our future events. Keep an eye out on our social media channels to get updates and information on our exciting upcoming events.

We would like to thanks the Graduate School and the Research Community Fund for their financial support and for enabling this event to take place.

Cross-CDT PhDs @ Reunion

On Friday, 10th of May the third event of the Cross-CDT series took place. The students from five different CDTs gathered at the Union bar to catch up with people from their own cohort as well as with people from other CDTs and cohort years that they got to know at the other events. In total more than 20 students from different CDTs joined for this event in the course of the evening and had a great time together.

It was a great opportunity for friends who have not seen eachother in a long time to socialise and grab a drink together. At the beginning of our PhD program, all of PhD students were working together in an open office area. However, since now everybody is spread out in a different building and even different campuses (White City and South Kensington), it is very rewarding to meet up from time to time and to have a chat about how the PhD projects are going, to what cool conference some people already went or which internships they have done and to exchange also thoughts and advice that we have accumulated over the time. The Union bar was the perfect choice for such and event, since it is close to all of our offices and easy to convince people to join for a after work drink on a Friday.

Overall it was a great event that was appreciated by all the people involved. Everybody is looking forward to the next event. A thanks goes to the Graduate School of Imperial College London which financially supported this cohort building activity.

 

 

 

 

 

Inaugural Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering Seminar (AMES)

Athanasios E. Giannenas, Alexander Schwertheim & Omar Mahfoze
Postgraduate Students & Departmental representatives, Department of Aeronautics

The Inaugural Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering Seminar took place on 29th of March 2019 comprising a joint academic seminar between the Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering departments, followed by a networking opportunity over food/snacks. Three presenters (PhD students and Postdocs of both departments) introduced their latest research to their fellow colleagues. The seminar offered a unique opportunity for the presenters to share their work in a somewhat informal setting. This allowed them to discuss not only their achievements, but also their failures and struggles—something generally not shared at formal conferences.

The rationale behind this event was to create a bridge between the two departments. While these two departments overlap in several research areas, they seldom interact both academically and socially. We wanted to change this, and in turn create a broader, more active community of young researchers, by improving relations, and inspiring both presenters and audience.

A wide variety of research areas were covered by the three speakers who provided the following titles for their talks:

  • Michela Gramola (PhD Student, Department of Aeronautics): ‘Adaptive shock control bumps for next generation transonic wings’
  • Giovanni Giustini (Postdoc, Department of Mechanical Engineering): ‘Computational Fluid Dynamics for nuclear thermal hydraulics: application to microscopic modelling of boiling’
  • Dimitrios Bekas (Postdoc, Department of Aeronautics): ‘Structural Health Monitoring of composite structures using additively manufactured sensors’

The event drew fantastic attention and attendance with approximately 65 attendees from both departments. The seminar was an outstanding opportunity for the active PhD and Postdoc students of both departments to gain an insight into the world-leading research that is currently conducted in our departments. Despite the rather short duration of the presentations (15 minutes), they provided a high-level introduction on the presenters’ field of research. The networking session over food and drinks proved to be a success which brought together students from both departments not only to discuss their research but also network and socialize.

Overall, the seminar proved to be a tremendous success as we received very positive feedback and many requests to repeat the event in the future. Furthermore, we received many requests from students who are eager to present their research in future events. Both departments recognised the benefits and popularity of the event and we are currently trying to establish funding to repeat the seminars every month where members of academic staff will also be invited. We also learned a lot from organising and hosting this event and we very much look forward to arranging more (and hopefully equally successful) events.

We would like to very warmly thank Dr Paul Bruce (Senior Tutor for PGR in the department of Aeronautics) for his help and support. We thank the PhD reps from the Mechanical Engineering Department for their help and cooperation. We would also like to thank the Graduate School for kindly awarding us the Research Community Fund and making this event possible.