Reaping the rewards: ISMM student wins agri-tech entrepreneurship competitionArmand de Durfort (ISMM) has won Agri-Tech East’s GROW student competition with his automatic harvester, Softharvest. Arsalan Ghani (CIM) was also a finalist with his food-sharing platform, Share Your Foods.

Agri-Tech East set up GROW to encourage entrepreneurship in the agri-food industry. Armand and Arsalan saw off stiff competition from across the UK.

Softharvest: gentle automatic harvester allows just-in-time picking of lettuces

Softharvest provides automated harvest of lettuces using visual recognition to control the robotic picker and prevent damage to the delicate plants.

Harvesting represents 60% of the cost of production for a lettuce crop and is generally done by hand. The challenge for a robot is accurate identification of the lettuce and then to pick it without bruising the leaves. Automating this process with Softharvest would pay for itself in three years and offer harvesting of three main crop lettuces: iceberg, Romaine and green leaf.

The venture started as a research project at the bio-inspired robotics laboratory of the University of Cambridge in collaboration with G’s Growers, which harvests 3 million heads of iceberg a week.

Softharvest would allow lettuces to be picked to order with a fast turnaround,

allowing producers to meet tight deadlines.

Share Your Foods: food sharing platform connects the supply with demand

Arsalan was a finalist in the student competition with Share Your Foods, a food-sharing platform which will allow producers, retailers and mass caterers with an excess of produce to reach potential consumers directly. This would address the issue of avoidable food waste, which is currently valued at £12.5 billion in the UK.

Spreading the word: Tim gives TEDxOxBridge talk on 3D printingWatch Tim Minshall explaining to a non-technical audience why 3D printing is really important at bit.ly/29a4tNl.

He explains that 3D printing has the potential to transform the way in which production and consumption are connected. He describes how this is already happening using examples from medical prosthetics, aerospace, disaster relief and education.

Entrepreneurship in CambridgeTim Minshall has written an article for the June issue of Cambridge Business magazine (bit.ly/292bTUU) describing how entrepreneurship has flourished in many forms at the University. He explains how Cambridge has become one of the most entrepreneurial universities in the world, thanks to lots of different initiatives all designed to inspire students, staff and researchers, give them new skills and support for developing their ideas. Also out now is The Cambridge Phenomenon: Global Impact which explores the Cambridge entrepreneurial ecosystem. (Tim is on the Advisory Board). IfM is featured as one of the research institutes ‘that contribute so much to the national and international reputation of Cambridge and its technology cluster: www.cambridgephenomenon.com

IfM News June 2016No 222

Armand de Durfort wins the GROW student competition. Arsalan Ghani, GROW finalist.

Tim talks at TEDxOxbridge

Event

‘You can’t learn if you don’t fail’What it takes to be a successful leader and transform companies – and brands – into global players.

Speaker: Jean-Claude Biver, President of the Watches Division at LVMH Group, CEO Tag Heuer, Chairman of the Board at Hublot

15.00–16.20 Friday 17 June 2016 Lecture Theatre 3, Cambridge Judge Business School. Register at: www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/entrepreneurship

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Award-winning papersCristina Rodriguez (Inkjet Research Group) has been awarded the 2016 Charles E Ives Award by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology for her paper entitled ‘Aerodynamic effects in industrial inkjet printing’ (C. Rodriguez-Rivero, JR Castrejon-Pita and IM Hutchings, J. Imaging Sci. and Tech. 59 (2015) 040401).

Philip Woodall, Vaggelis Giannikas, Wenrong Lu and Duncan McFarlane won best paper award at ICIQ 2016, Spain, for Data State Tracking: labelling good quality data to improve warehouse operations.

EFNMS Excellence Award for PhD Thesis in MaintenanceCongratulations to Maria Holgado (CIS) whose PhD thesis has been granted the PhD Thesis Award by the European Federation of National Maintenance Societies (EFNMS). The EFNMS (http://www.efnms.org/) is an umbrella organisation for non-profit National Maintenance Societies in Europe and leads the European network for knowledge and experience in maintenance and physical asset management. Maria received this award during the opening ceremony of the Euromaintenance Congress 2016 in Athens, Greece.

The EFNMS Award winners are selected from candidates previously nominated at country level and selected by each participating country’s National Maintenance Society. AIMAN, the Italian Maintenance Association selected Maria’s thesis as the Italian candidate for the EFNMS award and additionally granted Maria’s thesis a mention of ‘Thesis of Excellence’ for its content quality and its contribution to the development of the maintenance culture.

Technology for the bottom billionSudhir Rama Murthy of the Centre for Industrial Sustainability presented at the ‘Technology for the Bottom Billion’ Workshop on June 10, 2016. The workshop was organised by the Centre for Global Equality. The event discussed innovative technological responses that address the challenges of the bottom billion. Sudhir’s presentation on Island Manufacturing illustrated the constructive role that manufacturing can play to address these challenges, described through case examples from his research.

Further details of the Workshop are available at: http://centreforglobalequality.org/event/technology-bottom-billion-workshop/

New book on asset managementRaj Srinivasan and Ajith Parlikad’s (DIAL) book, Decision-Making in Asset Management, has been published by ICE. It is a comprehensive guide to improving the effectiveness of infrastructure asset management by determining the level of expenditure on infrastructure assets in order to maximise life-cycle value.

Using clear and concise examples, this book provides detailed guidance for making whole-life asset management decisions based on value rather than cost.

It aims to help asset management decision-makers better understand the value generated by assets and the risks associated with this in order to make more informed decisions, and to also have a deeper understanding of the impact of their decision.

Phil Woodall is presented with best paper award.

Aerodynamic interactions between two streams of ink droplets, travelling downwards through a distance of 5 mm on to a moving substrate.

Maria Holgado receiving her award.

23rd Annual Research Methodology Workshop PhD students from across the UK and Europe convened for the 23rd Annual Research Methodology Workshop at the IfM on 9-10 June.

Experienced researchers from the IfM and external institutions led sessions that explored various methodology related topics, such as research design foundations, the case study method, qualitative data handling, research ethics, journal publications, working with industry as well as interactive sessions. PhD students at the Annual Research Methodology Workshop

PublicationsTo ensure your publication is listed in future, please make sure they are added to: www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk

CIM Kumar, M., Graham, G., Hennelly, P., & Srai, J. S. (2016). How will Smart City Production Systems Transform Supply Chain Design: a Product-level investigation. International Journal of Production Research

CTM Mortara, L., & Parisot, N. G. (2016). Through entrepreneurs’ eyes: the Fab-spaces constellation. International Journal of Production Research

Mortara, L., & Parisot, N. G. (2016). How do Fab-spaces enable entrepreneurship? Case studies of ‘Makers’ – entrepreneurs. International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management.

Ford, S.J. and Despeisse, M. (2016) Additive manufacturing and sustainability: an exploratory study of the advantages and challenges, Journal of Cleaner Production.

CSA Urmetzer, F., Neely, A. and Martinez, V. (2016), “The Ecosystem Value Framework: Supporting Managers to Understand Value Exchange between Core Businesses in Service Ecosystems”, Euroma 2016 Norway Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway.

FIAM Jérôme Charmet, Thomas C. T. Michaels, Ronan Daly, Abhinav Prasad, Pradyumna Thiruvenkathanathan, Robin S. Langley, Tuomas P. J. Knowles, and Ashwin A. Seshia “Quantifying measurement fluctuations from stochastic surface processes on sensors with heterogeneous sensitivity”, Physical Review Applied, 2016, 5, 064016.,

New peopleHsin-Ling has joined the NanoManufacturing Group as a Research Associate in June 2016. She has a BSc and MSc in Engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and received her DSc from Johannes-Gutenberg-University-Mainz in Germany. After her doctoral studies she moved to the Photonics and Sensors Group in the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) in Cambridge prior to her start in IfM. Her research interests involve liquid crystals, microfluidics, scaled-up production and start to grow in superamphiphobic surfaces. She is very excited about her new project on roll-to-roll processing for nano-materials.

Outi Kettunen, has joined CIS as a visitor for 4 weeks. Outi works as a research scientist at VTT Business Ecosystems, Value Chains and Foresight research area. She has 16 years of experience in research projects in the area of Industrial Engineering and Management. Her expertise areas are supply chain management, value networks and logistics efficiency, with growing emphasis on circular economy, including sustainable SCM. She has a long experience of working in close cooperation with Finnish and international industrial and trade companies. She holds M.Sc. (Tech.) degree from Lappeenranta University of Technology. At the moment she is starting her PhD studies in the area of circular economy.

James Veale studies Manufacturing Engineering at Churchill and is starting MET IIB in September. He worked in PolyPack for his Major Project, working to create the technology and business plan for turning waste plastic into a packaging solution. He is currently participating in a University Research Opportunity Placement (UROP) for Tablet Assisted Teaching in Engineering, focusing on assessing the latest technologies as well as researching and implementing new interactive teaching tools within MET. He is also involved in the creation of Churchill’s Engineering Society. To date he has worked in Building Services Engineering at ARUP and in R&D at HTZ Ltd (which focuses on automated liquid handling).

Lauren Horton has just finished her second year of Natural Sciences at Gonville and Caius College. She is now working on the University Research Opportunity Placement (UROP) for Tablet Assisted Teaching in Engineering in IfM. For this project she will be analysing the uses of tablets in different universities and seeing how learning with tablets can be improved within the department and throughout the university. She will also be examining how tablet learning in general may be used outside of universities.