Researchers from the University of Warwick’s Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH) are using data to help discover why some pregnancies fail.

The initiative is part of the National Tommy’s Centre for Early Miscarriage Care and Research (NEMC) which is the first in the UK - and the largest in Europe. The University of Warwick has been chosen as a partner, together with the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London. The NEMC is funded by Tommy's, the baby and pregnancy charity

The team at IDH is led by Professor Theo Arvanitis, Chair in e-Health Innovation and Head of Research. He said: “Around 250,000 miscarriages occur every year, and roughly a third of women suffer more than one of these traumatic events. We'll also be creating a national database, initially by taking information from all three centres.

The West Midlands Health Informatics Network’s second annual conference will be held on 26 January 2016 at The Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH) at WMG, University of Warwick. The conference will provide attendees with the opportunity to find out about innovation and research, share good practice and experiences, and network across health and care settings.

The 2nd annual WMG Doctoral Research and Innovation Conference, entitled ‘Innovation through Collaboration’, is an excellent opportunity to showcase research from both academia and industry across themes in design, materials, manufacturing, systems and business transformation.

Organised by doctoral students, the conference will be held in the International Digital Laboratory on 30th June - 1st July, with an evening social event on the 30th.

Papers and poster presentations will take place across a wide variety of topics and awards will be presented in each theme.

Abstracts should be submitted online by 31st March.

Two researchers from WMG's Digital Lifecycle Management research group have won the Best Paper Award at the 2014 International Joint Conference on Mechanical, Design Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing held in Toulouse, France (June 18-20, 2014).

The team won the award for the paper: Franciosa, P., Das, A., Ceglarek, D., Bolognese, L., Marine, C., Mistry, A., 2014, "Design Synthesis Methodology for Dimensional Management of Assembly Process with Compliant Non-Ideal Parts."

The conference is organized jointly by AIP - PRIMECA (Ateliers Inter-établissements de Productique - Pôles de Ressources Informatiques pour la MECAnique), France; ADM (Associazione Nazionale Disegno di Macchine), Italy; and INGEGRAF (Asociación Española de Ingeniería Gráfica) from Spain. A total of 95 papers were presented during the conference.

Dr. Pasquale Franciosa is a Senior Research Fellow within the Digital Lifecycle Management team, and Abhishek Das is a doctoral student supervised by Professor Darek Ceglarek. The paper is also co-authored along with colleagues from WMG's industrial partners: Charles Marine (STADCO), Luca Bolognese (COMAU) and Anil Mistry (Jaguar Land Rover).

WMG has launched a new initiative, the Business Innovation Group (BIG), which will act as a channel to focus WMG’s business engagement activity and support organisations who are looking to transform for success in the digital economy.

The Business Innovation Group will engage and work with a wide range of business partners, from start-ups and SMEs, through WMG’s SME Team within IIPSI, to large organisations and policymakers. BIG is led by WMG's Business Transformation research group, but will draw on its access to cutting-edge research and expertise across all of WMG’s research areas to support organisational and economic transformation. Specifically, BIG will help organisations to adapt their products, services and operations to respond to the connected digital economy as well as assist organisations to evolve and implement new business and economic models as technology continues to transform society.

WMG at the University of Warwick in the UK has appointed one of Ghana’s leading researchers into future manufacturing technology.

Dr Kwabena Agyapong-Kodua, who was born in Kwahu-Amanfrom in the Eastern Region and lived in Tema, Greater Accra Region, has taken up the role of assistant professor at WMG, an academic department at the University of Warwick and one of the world’s leading research groups at the forefront of innovative technology.

Dr Agyapong-Kodua’s main research focus at WMG will be cost-effective evolvable manufacturing systems – or in other words how a factory production line can adapt to changes in product and process requirements using artificial intelligence.

This week BCS Coventry held a Posters Evening and research students Simon Davies, Avishek Pal and Abhishek Das from WMG and Chao Chen from Computer Science represented the University of Warwick.

As with previous years, selected students from both universities presented their leading edge research.

Congratulations to Abhishek Das from the Digital Lifecycle Management team, who won the prize for Warwick for his poster on 'Software Architecture and Multidisciplinary Optimisation for Embedding New Production Processes'.

Slide show from event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78195623@N03/sets/72157632922273041/show/

WMG is very pleased to welcome a number of new academic appointments this month, who will take a leading role in some of our exciting research areas.

Professor Sridhar Seetharaman has joined WMG to take up the Research Chair in Low Carbon Materials Technologies, sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Tata Steel. Professor Seetharaman joins us from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he was the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Co-Director of Center For Iron and Steel Research. Professor Seetharaman will be leading a new programme in the manufacture and application of advanced steels in low carbon technologies and setting up a new team, within WMG's existing Materials and Manufacturing theme, to work with Tata Steel to address the current international priorities of the low carbon agenda.

Professor Tony McNally has joined WMG to lead our developing research in the area of Nanocomposites. Professor McNally joins from Queen's University Belfast, where he was Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Polymer Processing Research Centre. The Nanocomposites team, based in WMG's International Institute for Product and Service Innovation, will span WMG's work in Digital Technologies, Materials and Manufacturing.

Dr Claire Dancer has also joined WMG this week to develop WMG's work in Nanocomposites. Dr Dancer joins from the University of Oxford, where she worked as a researcher in the Department of Materials, specifically looking at Manufacturing Methods for Metamaterials.

We also welcome Dr Kwabena Agyaping-Kodua who is joining WMG from the University of Nottingham where he has been Senior Research Fellow in Digital Manufacturing and Systems Engineering at the Precision Manufacturing Centre. As part of WMG's Digital Lifecycle Management team, Dr Agyapong-Kodua will be continuing to develop research activities in the digital manufacturing and systems engineering field, particularly within the remit of high value manufacturing.

Professor Darek Ceglarek, Dr. Sudi Lahiri, and recently graduated WMG doctoral student, Nagesh Shukla have been awarded a patent, jointly with GE-Healthcare, from the United States Patent Office. The patent (System and Method for Healthcare Service Data Analysis) is for developing an iterative method for analysing healthcare delivery data. Hospitals and health care organisations can apply their approaches to analyse complex, unstructured data for quality and productivity improvements.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), one of the world’s largest multi-discipline professional societies for engineers and technicians, is all set to host the IET Wheatstone Lecture 2012. The topic is “Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone” and will be delivered by Christopher J. James, Professor of Healthcare Technology and Director of the Institute of Digital Healthcare, University of Warwick, UK. The purpose of this event is to demonstrate the technologies that are relevant to the measurement, sensors, instrumentation and NDT Network and also encourage young people to take up engineering by demonstrating the exciting projects that engineers work on.

As part of the lecture, Professor James will introduce how Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments. Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person-to-person communication via the nervous system has been shown in the past, this is the first time we are starting to see true brain-to-brain interfacing being demonstrated. The full implications of this are yet to be understood but there are some scenarios where brain-to-brain communication could be of huge benefit such as intelligence and gaming.