Latest research shows a lack of overarching coordination or the involvement of any “kingpin”-style monopolies in the criminal operations illegally transporting people from the Horn of Africa into Northern Europe via Libya.

Instead, transnational smuggling routes were found to be highly segmented: each stage a competitive marketplace of “independent and autonomous” smugglers – as well as militias and kidnappers – that must be negotiated by migrants fighting for a life beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

The first “network analysis” of this booming criminal enterprise suggests that successful smugglers need a reputation among migrants – and that removing any individual smuggler will only result in rivals immediately seizing their “market share”.

Dr Paolo Campana from Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology conducted the research using evidence from the 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors that followed the Lampedusa shipwreck, in which 366 people lost their lives.

The work included data from wiretapped telephone conversations between smugglers at all stages, testimonies collected from migrants, interviews with police task force members, and background information on offenders. 

“The smuggling ring moving migrants from the Horn of Africa to Northern Europe via Libya does not appear to have the thread of any single organisation running through it,” said Campana, whose findings are published today in the European Journal of Criminology. 

“This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate, and a major departure from media reports claiming that shadowy kingpins monopolise certain routes.”

In fact, it was the Anti-Mafia unit with the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office initially tasked with investigating smuggling operations on both sides of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Lampedusa disaster in October 2013.  

Campana points out that they found no evidence of any involvement from the Sicilian Mafia at the time, even through payment of protection money – despite Sicily being a key stage in the smuggling route.      

The two indictments prepared by the Palermo unit – totalling some 800 pages – formed a major part of the dataset Campana combed through to code all possible data points: references to times, names, events, exchanges, locations and so on.  

Overall, 292 actors (not including migrants) were identified as part of the Lampedusa smuggling ring. 95% were male smugglers operating along the main route, from the Horn of Africa to the Nordic nations in northern Europe – where many migrants hoped to find refuge – via Libya and Italy. 

However, the network also extended to Dubai, Israel, Canada, Turkey, Germany and the UK, and included those who kidnap for ransom in the deserts of Libya, and Tripoli militiamen who take bribes to let migrants out of detention centres.

“People specialise,” said Campana. “There was a clear separation between those providing smuggling services, those kidnapping for ransom, and those, like the militias, ‘governing’ spaces and supplying protection.”

He also detected signs of rudimentary hierarchy among smugglers in some stages of the route, which roughly divide into ‘organiser’ and ‘aide’.

“Organisers are individuals who give orders but don’t receive them, while aides are highly dependent on organisers for their activities. Organisers make up some 15% of the smuggling network and the remaining 85% occupy a lower ranking aide position.”

The network models built by Campana show that those who operate in the same stage of the journey are almost seven times more likely to have some link with each other. “Even in a network that traverses the hemispheres, it is the local dimension that is still crucial,” he said. 

Moreover, Campana found that those who share the same network position as either organiser or aide are three times less likely to have any tie. “There is little contact between fellow organisers, reinforcing the impression of smugglers as free-trading independents. Business opportunities tear coordination apart,” he said. 

Indeed, a focused analysis of a sub-network of 28 smugglers revealed that those based in Italy who tapped directly into the Libyan ‘marketplace’ had very little contact with each other. 

Wiretaps and testimonials suggest that migrants have to pay separate vendors for each leg of the journey. Payment was often done in advance though Hawala, an informal money transfer system based on trust.

One wiretap reveals a charge of $3600 for a couple to cross the Mediterranean. Another wiretapped smuggler charges €150 per person for a car trip from Sicily to Rome.    

“Reputation is crucial in a competitive market, and the wiretaps show how much value smugglers place on their reputation,” said Campana.

One smuggler was recorded reproaching another for overcrowding a boat, comparing it to the way a dirty bathroom reflects badly on everyone who shares the house.

In fact, the wiretaps reveal that the loss of life in the Lampedusa disaster led to compensation being paid to families by smugglers scared of losing future business.

“Authorities may wish to deliberately tarnish the reputation of smugglers in order to shut down their business,” said Campana.

“Criminal justice responses require the adoption of coordinated tactics involving all countries along the route to target these localised clusters of offenders simultaneously.

“This is a market driven by exponential demand, and it is that demand which should be targeted. Land-based policies such as refugee resettlement schemes are politically difficult, but might ultimately prove more fruitful in stemming the smuggling tide than naval operations.”

OCD in children and adolescents is a distressing condition, which is often chronic and persists into adulthood. Almost 90% of these young patients have problems at school, home, or socially; with difficulties doing homework and concentrating at school being the two most common problems. Children and adolescents are well set up for learning and, indeed, can quickly pick up new foreign languages, computing skills or motor tasks, such as riding a bike, much quicker than older adults. But if an adolescent is not learning well in school, they are likely to become stressed and anxious.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have previously shown that there are core problems of cognitive inflexibility in adults with OCD. Since flexibility in problem-solving is an important skill for performance in school, they wanted to study whether adolescents with OCD had difficulty in this area. Cognitive flexibility becomes important when trying to find the correct solutions to a problem, particularly when your first attempt at solving that problem does not work. To reach the correct solution, you have to switch to a new approach from the one you have previously been using.

In healthy individuals, there is a balance between goal-directed control and habit control, and this balance is crucial for daily functioning. For example, when learning to drive, we focus on specific goals, such as travelling at the right speed, staying within the traffic lines and following safety rules. We often have strategies to perform these tasks optimally. However, once we are an experienced driver, we frequently find that driving becomes habitual. In new situations, healthy people tend to use goal-directed control; however, under conditions of stress, they frequently select habitual learning.

In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers looked at whether cognitive flexibility for learning tasks and goal-directed control was impaired early in the development of OCD. The study was led by Dr Julia Gottwald and Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry.

Thirty-six adolescents with OCD and 36 healthy young people completed learning and memory tasks. These computerised tests included recognition memory (remembering which of two objects they had seen before) and episodic memory (where in space they remember seeing an object). A subset of 30 participants in each group also carried out a task designed to assess the balance of goal-directed and habitual behavioural control.

The researchers found that adolescent patients with OCD had impairments in all learning and memory tasks. The study also demonstrated for the first time impaired goal-directed control and lack of cognitive plasticity early in the development of OCD.

Dr Julia Gottwald, the study’s first author, comments: “While many studies have focused on adult OCD, we actually know very little about the condition in teenagers. Our study suggests that teens with OCD have problems with memory and the ability to flexibly adjust their actions when the environment changes.”

Professor Barbara Sahakian, senior author, says: “I was surprised and concerned to see such broad problems of learning and memory in these young people so early in the course of OCD. It will be important to follow this study up to examine these cognitive problems further and in particular to determine how they impact on clinical symptoms and school performance.”

Experiencing learning and memory problems at school could affect self-esteem. Furthermore, some symptoms seen in people with OCD, such as compulsive checking, may result from them having reduced confidence in their memory ability. The stress of having difficulty in learning may also start a negative influence and promote inflexible habit learning.

Dr Anna Conway Morris commented: “This study has been very useful in assisting adolescents with OCD with the help they needed at school in terms of structuring the environment to ensure that there was a level playing field. This allowed them to receive the help they needed to realise their potential.

“One person with OCD was able to obtain good A Levels and to be accepted by a good university where she could get the support that she needed in order to do well in that environment.”

Future studies will examine in more detail the nature of these impairments and how they might affect clinical symptoms and school performance.

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Gottwald, J, et al. Impaired cognitive plasticity and goal-directed control in adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychological Medicine; 22 Jan 2018; DOI: 10.1017/S0033291717003464

The Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) was established in 2007, with funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), to allow research-intensive institutions from all over the world to set up research centres in Singapore and establish research partnerships with local universities.

Today, CREATE supports collaborations between four Singaporean universities – the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and the Singapore Management University (SMU) – and seven international partners – ETH Zurich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technical University of Munich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of California, Berkeley, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Cambridge.

To mark its 10th anniversary, CREATE held an international symposium attended by university leaders as well as Singapore's former president, Dr Tony Tan.

Speaking at the event on 1 December, Mr Heng Swee Keat, Singapore’s Minister for Finance and Deputy Chairman of the NRF said:

“We designed CREATE to encourage interaction not just across a range of disciplines and cultures, but also of perspectives – from dreamers to researchers, designers and users – thereby fuelling exchanges between the spheres of research and innovation.”

“By bringing together researchers, policy makers and end users, CREATE enables serendipitous interactions and discovery. It creates a research environment that is richer than the sum of its parts, allowing researchers to innovate and provide solutions to real world problems.”

“Today,” he added, “CREATE is an international research hub, built on strong institutional partnerships, involving almost 1,100 people from over 40 countries. CREATE’s projects are relevant to Singapore and impactful on the global level.”

CARES: a hub for research collaboration

The Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of Cambridge, was set up as one of CREATE’s collaborative initiatives in April 2013. It hosts a number of research collaborations between the University of Cambridge, NTU, NUS and industrial partners in Singapore and elsewhere.

Representing CARES at the event, its Director, Prof. Markus Kraft, explained: “CARES creates and fosters cutting-edge science in the area of energy efficiency in chemical technologies. We want to do first class research, world-leading research. We want to understand the world better. And we want to contribute to some of the pressing problems facing mankind – in particular, global warming."

Prof. Gehan Amaratunga, Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, was involved in CARES from its inception: “CARES is driven by the Cambridge attitude to research: to think about things deeply, and to deliver results that are significant and worthwhile. But that is coupled with the Singapore culture of hard work, and results-driven research. The mixture of those two research cultures under the CARES umbrella generates a unique symbiosis.”

He adds: “It is worth noting that CARES was the first time that the University of Cambridge had established anything under its name outside of Cambridge. The Singaporean government has put resources into research, and is keen for international researchers to come and work in Singapore. From the Cambridge perspective, it gives us an opportunity to globalise our research by engaging in a location that is an Asian hub, directly in between Asia’s two largest population centres – India and China. Singapore is a melting pot where researchers from the entire region are present. The impact of what we do in Singapore will be felt all over Asia.”

Reducing carbon footprint and energy demand

CARES’ first research programme is the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Reduction in Chemical Technology (C4T), a partnership between Cambridge and Singapore set up in 2013 to tackle the problem of assessing and reducing the carbon footprint of the petrochemical plants and electrical network on Singapore’s Jurong Island. Since its inception, it has brought together researchers in fields including Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Information Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Materials Science and Metallurgy.

Lowering the cost of CO₂ capture and developing technologies for waste heat utilisation have been among the main drivers for C4T’s research. It addresses the problem of carbon abatement in chemical technologies though Interdisciplinary Research Programmes that combine state-of-the-art experimental analysis with advanced modelling research.

Speaking at CREATE’s 10th anniversary event in Singapore, Dr Lim Mei Qi, Project Officer for CARES, explained: “C4T proposes ways of reducing the carbon footprint of Singapore while supporting economic growth. To build upon CARES’ early success we will continue to engage with Singapore's stakeholders, including government agencies, policymakers, and academic and industrial research organisations. We hope, by doing so, to positively contribute to Singapore’s ratification of the Paris Agreement on climate change.”

A laboratory built from scratch – via Skype

Dr Jethro Akroyd, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology’s Computational Modelling Group, worked on the design of the CARES laboratory in Singapore.

Today he spends most of his time supervising CARES students based in Cambridge, but he remembers the early challenges of designing lab space remotely: “We communicated with the architects and our external consultant in Singapore via Skype. We often had Skype meetings at 5:30 in the morning – the only time people were available both in Singapore and in Cambridge. Those were long days.”

“One of the biggest difficulties was explaining to people in Singapore what was required in the laboratories in order to deliver flexible research space. And even once we figured out what we wanted, we had to work out how to fit this into the physical constraints of the space that was available at CREATE. Imagine sitting in a small, cold room on a dark Cambridge morning trying to explain complicated ideas to a team on the other side of the world who can only see you via a video link.”

“We built up a very successful working relationship with the consultant and the architects. This culminated in my first visit to Singapore, during the design process, when we had our first face-to-face meeting as a team. That was very special.”

“It’s been great to see designs you worked out on paper in reality, and you can see how the research space was going to be used in order to understand the fundamental combustion and pollutant formation processes that are really at the heart of our role in the research project.”

In June 2017, the CARES C4T Laboratory was awarded the BCA Green Mark for Laboratories Platinum Award, in recognition of its sustainable efforts and commitment to reduce the environmental impact of lab operations.

An industrial park simulator

CARES C4T’s flagship project is the J-Park Simulator (JPS) – a tool for the design, analysis and operation optimisation of eco-industrial parks developed by C4T researchers. It aims to allow sector agencies, industry and infrastructure providers to model the impact of different “what-if” scenarios in real time. The simulator is able to analyse different scenarios affecting chemical processes, electricity grid and building management to provide the visual information needed to support optimisation, decision-making and scenario analysis.

“In order to reach an optimum symbiotic relationship among industries and networks, all resources need to be taken into consideration simultaneously – this is the idea behind J-Park Simulator," explained Dr Lim.

Split-site PhD

Another successful initiative has been the Cambridge-CARES studentship programme, which allows Cambridge PhD students to spend two years based in Singapore with the C4T team.

Jacob Martin is a third-year PhD student at CARES currently doing research into how to stop soot from forming in engines.

“Something that I like about CARES is being able to work with a lot of different people from different universities. Because we are physically located within the CREATE tower, it is easier to interact with other universities and do a lot of research with other interest groups. And because we have access to NUS’ equipment, we can expand what we are doing in Cambridge. The availability of resources has been a real selling point for the programme.”

He cites the Visiting Scientists scheme as helping to establish international research connections. This invitation-only programme attracts eminent professors from around the globe, such as Emeritus Professor Karl Johan Åström from the Department of Automatic Control, LTH, Lund University, to stay and work with C4T researchers in Singapore for a few weeks.

Jacob hopes that his research will lead to new technologies to reduce pollution from diesel engines, which has an impact on climate as well as on human health.

“It always helps to have more connections in research. Being at CARES will definitely be helpful to establish collaborations not only in Asia but also with universities in America. There are many benefits to collaboration. You can achieve a lot more. The more minds you put to a problem, the faster you can solve it.”

He adds: “Having people with different cultural backgrounds allows for new and interesting solutions to problems. Cambridge has a particular way of dealing with problems – focus, focus, focus, and really nail the fundamentals. Sometimes that means you lose a bit of perspective. Something that’s been really good about collaborating with people in Singapore is that it’s less about the minutiae and more about the big picture. Singapore is facing a lot of big problems to do with climate change, energy, water. It’s small enough that you can make big changes, and use it as a model for other cities all over the world.”

Teaming up

CREATE makes this collaboration possible by supporting projects through the Intra-CREATE programme. A recent example is the three-year project involving researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), which was recently awarded SGD$5m (£2.8m) by Singapore’s National Research Foundation.

The project, which will start in January 2018, seeks to develop ways of transforming carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted as part of the industrial process into compounds that are useful in the chemical industry supply chain. It will be co-led by Prof. Alexei Lapkin (University of Cambridge/CARES) and Prof. Joel Ager (UC-Berkeley and Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS Ltd)).

Looking ahead

After a successful start, CARES is now taking stock of the knowledge created over the past four years and planning for its next phase.

Prof Markus Kraft (CARES' Director) commented: “We have identified opportunities to save over eight million tonnes of CO₂ per year for Singapore – this is about 20% of their annual emissions. The idea of C4T Phase 2 is to take this forward. At the core of the proposal for C4T Phase Two is to look at ideas generated in Phase One, take them much closer to the market and let them be adopted by industry.”

“One of the ideas we developed in Phase One was to blend biodiesel with diesel fuel for road transport. We’ve shown this can save about one million tonnes per year of CO₂ for Singapore. What we’re now looking at in Phase Two is whether we can do anything similar for marine shipping traffic. This has the potential to save something like another one million tonnes of CO₂ in Singapore, but it also has the potential to be adopted worldwide. This could have a much broader global impact, far beyond just the shipping in Singapore Strait.”

For further information on CARES and the C4T research programme please contact Ms Louise Renwick, CARES Communications and External Affairs Executive, caresco@hermes.cam.ac.uk,; Tel: +6566015447 

Climate change is one of the most important issues facing people today and year on year the melting of glacial ice patches in Scandinavia, the Alps and North America reveals and then destroys vital archaeological records of past human activity.

Enter the glacial archaeologists – specialists who rescue now-threatened artefacts and study the relationship between variability in climate and the intensity of human use of alpine landscapes.

Focusing on Jotunheimen and the surrounding mountain areas of Oppland, which include Norway’s highest mountains (to 2649m), an international team of researchers have conducted a systematic survey at the edges of the contracting ice, recovering artefacts of wood, textile, hide and other organic materials that are otherwise rarely preserved.

To date, more than 2000 artefacts have been recovered. Some of the finds date as far back as 4000 BC and include arrows, Iron Age and Bronze Age clothing items and remains of skis and packhorses.

By statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates on these incredibly unusual finds, patterns began to emerge showing that they do not spread out evenly over time. Some periods have many finds while others have none. What could have caused this chronological patterning – human activity and/or past climate change?

These questions are the focus of a new study published today in Royal Society Open Science.

“One such pattern which really surprised us was the possible increase in activity in the period known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age (c. 536 – 660 AD)," says Dr James H. Barrett, an environmental archaeologist at Cambridge's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and senior study author. 

"This was a time of cooling; harvests may have failed and populations may have dropped. Remarkably, though, the finds from the ice may have continued through this period, perhaps suggesting that the importance of mountain hunting (mainly for reindeer) increased to supplement failing agricultural harvests in times of low temperatures. Alternatively, any decline in high-elevation activity during the Late Antique Little Ice Age was so brief that we cannot observe it from the available evidence.

“We then see particularly high numbers of finds dating to the 8th – 10th centuries AD, probably reflecting increased population, mobility (including the use of mountain passes) and trade – just before and during the Viking Age, when outward expansion was also characteristic of Scandinavia.

"One driver of this increase may have been the expanding ecological frontier of the towns that were emerging around Europe at this time," says Barrett. "Town-dwellers needed mountain products such as antlers for artefact manufacture and probably also furs. Other drivers were the changing needs and aspirations of the mountain hunters themselves."

There is then a decrease in the number of finds dating to the medieval period (from the 11th century onwards). Lars Pilø, co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program at Oppland County Council and lead author on the study further explains, “There is a sharp decline in finds dating from the 11th century onwards. At this time, bow-and-arrow hunting for reindeer was replaced with mass-harvesting techniques including funnel-shaped and pitfall trapping systems. This type of intensive hunting probably reduced the number of wild reindeer.”

Professor in medieval archaeology Brit Solli, of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, who led the study of the recovered artefacts, comments: “Once the plague arrived in the mid-14th century, trade and markets in the north also suffered. With fewer markets and fewer reindeer the activity in the high mountains decreased substantially. This downturn could also have been influenced by declining climatic conditions during the Little Ice Age.”

The ongoing research of the Glacier Archaeology Program in Oppland can be followed on the Secrets of the Ice blogpost: http://secretsoftheice.com/

A team of plant scientists examined the processes through which plants are able to pass on information about the external environment from the roots to the new shoots. The results showed that increased soil nutrients leads to a response in stem cells in the shoots in less than 24 hours.

Experiments showed that this rapid response occurred both in vitro at the microscopic level and ex vitro with entire plants beginning to increase the rate of stem cell growth and flower development in response to the application of nitrogen in the form of nitrate.

The scientists say that the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could contribute to improving crop yields by refining timing of fertiliser application and selective plant breeding.

First author of the paper, Dr Benoit Landrein said that it was already well established that the availability of nitrate can affect various aspects of plant development. While it was known that plant hormones called cytokinins were involved in this root-to-shoot communication, the exact role of cytokinins in mediating the response of the meristem (the structure that produces all of the aerial organs of plant) to mineral nutrients had not been described before.

“Through this study, we provide an integrative model of the response of the meristem to a key environmental signal by showing that the cytokinins produced in the root in response to nutrients can modify the pool of stem cells in the meristem, which leads to a rapid change in the rate of flower production,” Dr Landrein said.

“Within one day of the root cells detecting additional nitrate, the cytokinin hormone precursors had travelled through the plant and converted to active hormones at the shoot meristem, which started influencing the shoot’s growth. The speed of this process was very surprising – the roots had not only responded to the change in environment themselves, they had rapidly communicated this information from the roots to the stem cells at the very top of the plant. We observed shoot meristem cells were starting to respond within 24 hours of the application of nitrate.”

Dr Landrein is a member of the research groups of Professor Henrik Jönsson, Dr James Locke and Professor Elliot Meyerowitz, which are working to increase our understanding of how cellular level processes in plants are controlled by gene regulatory networks, hormone transport and signalling, cell growth and division. Professor Jönsson said that while this latest research was undertaken in the plant Arabidopsis, the findings can be applied in future to crops.

“This research provides us with improved insight into how mineral nutrients influence plant architecture and could be used to better understand plant response to environmental inputs and to develop cultivars with increased yield. Crops where the same cytokinin action between roots and shoots occurs could significantly benefit from this. For example, genes involved in the regulation of cytokinins have been mapped in rice and maize and this knowledge could be utilised to select for plants with higher seed yields.”

This research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Nitrate modulates stem cell dynamics in Arabidopsis shoot meristems through cytokinins. Benoit Landrein, Pau Formosa-Jordan, Alice Malivert, Christoph Schuster, Charles W. Melnyk, Weibing Yang, Colin Turnbull, Elliot M. Meyerowitz, James C. W. Locke, and Henrik Jönsson. PNAS 2018 ; published ahead of print January 23, 2018, doi:10.1073/pnas.1718670115

This research was undertaken through a collaboration between the Jönsson, Locke and Meyerowitz research groups at the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

Article by Kathy Grube, Communications Manager, Sainsbury Laboratory.

The funding for the four projects, totalling up to £42 million, was announced this week by the Faraday Institution, the UK’s independent national battery research institute. Cambridge will receive up to £11.9 million to research how to extend battery life for electric vehicles.

Led by Professor Clare Grey from the Department of Chemistry, the Cambridge-led project will examine how environmental and internal battery stresses (such as high temperatures, charging and discharging rates) damage electric vehicle (EV) batteries over time. Results will include the optimisation of battery materials and cells to extend battery life (and hence EV range), reduce battery costs, and enhance battery safety.

The project includes nine university and 10 industry partners, including the University of Glasgow, University College London, Newcastle University, Imperial College London, University of Strathclyde, University of Manchester, University of Southampton, University of Liverpool and WMG, at the University of Warwick.

The other three projects to be funded by this week’s announcement are Battery system modelling, led by Imperial College London; Recycling and reuse, led by the University of Birmingham; and Next-generation solid-state batteries, led by the University of Oxford.

If successful, this research has the potential to radically increase the speed with which we are able to make the move to electric vehicles, as well as the speed with which we can decarbonise our energy supply, with obvious benefits to the environment.

“With 200,000 electric vehicles set to be on UK roads by the end of 2018 and worldwide sales growing by 45 percent in 2016, investment in car batteries is a massive opportunity for Britain and one that is estimated to be worth £5 billion by 2025,” said Business Minister Richard Harrington. “Government investment, through the Faraday Institution, in the projects announced today will deliver valuable research that will help us seize the economic opportunities presented by battery technology and our transition to a low-carbon economy.”

The topics for the four projects were chosen in consultation with industry, who will partner closely with each of them. This unique collaboration will help to ensure that the research is producing findings and solutions that meet the needs of industry. In addition, industrial partners will contribute a total of £4.6 million in in-kind support to the following four projects:

“To deliver the much-needed improvement in air quality in our cities and achieve our aspiration for cleaner energy targets we need to shift to electric vehicles quickly,” said Peter B. Littlewood, founding executive chair of the Faraday Institution. “These research programmes will help the UK achieve this. To be impactful on increasing energy density, lowering cost, extending lifetime, and improving battery safety requires a substantial and focused effort in fundamental research. Through steady investment in basic research on specific societal challenges identified by industry and government, the UK will become a world-leading powerhouse in energy storage.”

Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC’s Chief Executive, said: “There is an urgent imperative for us to increase the efficiency of energy storage as we move towards low carbon economies and attempt to switch to clean methods of energy production.

“The Faraday Institution will bring leading academics in the field of battery development together with industry experts to explore novel application-inspired approaches that will address the challenges we face. The UK has an opportunity to accelerate the development of new products and techniques. EPSRC will be working with the Institution and the academic community to help it succeed and keep the UK a prosperous and productive nation.”

Originally published on the Faraday Institution website. 

The ‘die-off’ events occurring in honeybee colonies that are bred and farmed like livestock must not be confused with the conservation crisis of dramatic declines in thousands of wild pollinator species, say Cambridge researchers.

Writing in the journal Science, the conservationists argue there is a “lack of distinction” in public understanding – fuelled by misguided charity campaigns and media reports – between an agricultural problem and an urgent biodiversity issue.

In fact, they say domesticated honeybees actually contribute to wild bee declines through resource competition and spread of disease, with so-called environmental initiatives promoting honeybee-keeping in cities or, worse, protected areas far from agriculture, only likely to exacerbate the loss of wild pollinators.

“The crisis in global pollinator decline has been associated with one species above all, the western honeybee. Yet this is one of the few pollinator species that is continually replenished through breeding and agriculture,” said co-author Dr Jonas Geldmann from Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology.

“Saving the honeybee does not help wildlife. Western honeybees are a commercially managed species that can actually have negative effects on their immediate environment through the massive numbers in which they are introduced.

“Levels of wild pollinators, such as species of solitary bumblebee, moth and hoverfly, continue to decline at an alarming rate. Currently, up to 50% of all European bee species are threatened with extinction,” Geldmann said.  

Honeybees are vital for many crops – as are wild pollinators, with some assessments suggesting wild species provide up to half the needed “pollinator services” for the three-quarters of globally important crops that require pollination.

However, generating honeybee colonies for crop pollination is problematic. Major flowering crops such as fruits and oilseed rape bloom for a period of days or weeks, whereas honeybees are active for nine to twelve months and travel up to 10km from their hives.

This results in massive “spillover” from farmed honeybees into the landscape, potentially out-competing wild pollinators. A recent study by the co-author of today’s Science article, Dr Juan P. González-Varo, showed honeybee levels in woodlands of southern Spain to be eight times higher after orange tree crops finish blooming.

“Keeping honeybees is an extractive activity. It removes pollen and nectar from the environment, which are natural resources needed by many wild species of bee and other pollinators,” said González-Varo, also from Cambridge’s Zoology Department.

“Honeybees are artificially-bred agricultural animals similar to livestock such as pigs and cows. Except this livestock can roam beyond any enclosures to disrupt local ecosystems through competition and disease.”

As with other intensively farmed animals, overcrowding and homogenous diets have depressed bee immune systems and sent pathogen rates soaring in commercial hives. Diseases are transferred to wild species when bees feed from the same flowers, similar to germs passing between humans through a shared coffee cup.

This puts added pressure on endangered wild European bee species such as the great yellow bumblebee, which was once found across the UK but has lost 80% of its range in the last half century, and is now limited to coastal areas of Scotland.

Both wild and cultivated pollinators are afflicted by pesticides such as neonicotinoids, as well as other anthropogenic effects – from loss of hedgerows to climate change – which drive the much-publicised die-offs among farmed bees and the decline in wild pollinator species over the last few decades.

“Honeybee colony die-offs are likely to be a ‘canary in the coalmine’ that is mirrored by many wild pollinator species. The attention on honeybees may help raise awareness, but action must also be directed towards our threatened species,” said Geldmann.

“The past decade has seen an explosion in research on honeybee loss and the dangers posed to crops. Yet little research has been done to understand wild native pollinator declines, including the potential negative role of managed honeybees.”

Geldmann and González-Varo recommend policies to limit the impact of managed honeybees, including hive size limits, the moving of colonies to track the bloom of different crops, and greater controls on managed hives in protected areas.

“Honeybees may be necessary for crop pollination, but beekeeping is an agrarian activity that should not be confused with wildlife conservation,” they write. 

The University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS) has become a regional hub for the Chartered College of Teaching (CCT).

Through the work with the University of Cambridge and other local and National partners, the regional hub is designed to be an energising and intellectually stimulating space to foster relationships and nurture professional dialogue among teachers.

It will help teachers to explore notions of research-informed and research-generating practices which will benefit teachers and their pupils across the region.

It offers an opportunity to support educators to feel inspired to further inspire the children they work with.

Dr James Biddulph, headteacher of the UCPS, said: “We are committed to exemplary teaching and learning for children.  In our approach to learning, we aim to be creative, bold, free thinking and rigorous.  The school endeavours to put into practice what matters to children and is also an innovative professional learning community for teachers.  By becoming a hub for the Chartered College of Teaching we hope to share best practice across East Anglia and the Fens and benefit from the experience of teachers from across the region.”

The University of Cambridge Primary School opened in 2015 and was the first primary University Training School in the UK.

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge said: “We know that excellent teaching transforms the lives of all students, from those in early years to adult learners.  We also know at the University of Cambridge that collaboration allows best practice and world-leading research to be shared and increases the benefit to the public that knowledge can impart.

“I am delighted that the primary school will be the hub to develop, support and give voice to teachers in the region, enabling them to be the best they can, for the benefit of teaching in general and for their pupils in particular.”

The CCT is a new initiative, set up in early 2017 to promote what works in teaching and help teachers from across the country to interact.

Professor Dame Alison Peacock, Chief Executive of CCT, said: “The education landscape is challenging. Everything from curricular and assessment reform and budget constraints and workload concerns, to feelings of disempowerment and disillusion, can hamper what happens in the classroom.  We set up the Chartered College of Teaching to change that.  This is a once-in-a-generation chance for the teaching profession and we are incredibly encouraged that an exemplary organisation like the University of Cambridge Primary School, with its links to research within the university and beyond, takes on the role as a hub for the region.”

A launch event for the hub tonight (January 30) will set the scene for the role of the hub in supporting teachers engaging with research-informed teaching throughout Cambridgeshire and the Fens. 

The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS Institute), led by the University of Cambridge, is made possible by the largest single grant ever made by the Health Foundation, an independent charity. The new institute is founded on the principle that efforts to improve care should always be based on the best quality of evidence. Some of that evidence will be created by NHS patients and staff themselves, using innovative citizen science methods in large-scale research projects.

Director of THIS Institute Professor Mary Dixon-Woods, said: “If you ask people to describe the future of healthcare, they might describe a shiny vision of new treatments and technologies. These kinds of innovations are important. But how healthcare is organised and delivered, including its basic systems and processes, has perhaps just as much impact, and sometimes more, on patient outcomes and experience.”

Dr Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation, said: “The UK population clearly wants a high quality and sustainable NHS into the future. Understanding what works, in which contexts and why, is crucial, as is obtaining that evidence fast so it can be acted on. There couldn’t be a more important time to do this, and that is why the Health Foundation has put its money where its mouth is.”

One way the institute will create the evidence-base is through citizen science. Using methods already used in other areas such as biology and astronomy, THIS Institute is building a digital platform to crowdsource research ideas and collect research data from NHS staff and patients, including their opinions on the right indicators of quality of care and their views on equipment design.

Professor Dixon-Woods, Director, THIS Institute, adds: “Tackling healthcare challenges needs to involve a greater variety of people with diverse experience: the institute is looking for expertise in new places. Some of this expertise will come directly from patients – us, you, me – working alongside healthcare staff and other professionals such as engineers and designers.”

The institute will be based at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, alongside Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and world-leading research institutes. It is made possible by a ten-year grant from the Health Foundation, whose mission is to bring about better health and healthcare for people in the UK.

Press release from The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute.

Working as part of a collaboration between the Graphene Flagship and the European Space Agency, researchers from the Cambridge Graphene Centre tested graphene in microgravity conditions for the first time while aboard a parabolic flight – often referred to as the ‘vomit comet’. The experiments they conducted were designed to test graphene’s potential in cooling systems for satellites.

“One of graphene’s potential uses, recognised early on, is space applications, and this is the first time that graphene has been tested in space-like applications,” said Professor Andrea Ferrari, who is Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, as well as Science and Technology Officer and Chair of the Management Panel for the Graphene Flagship.

Graphene – a form of carbon just a single atom thick – has a unique combination of properties that make it useful for applications from flexible electronics and fast data communication, to enhanced structural materials and water treatments. It is highly electrically and thermally conductive, as well as strong and flexible.

In this experiment, the researchers aimed to improve the performance of cooling systems in use in satellites, making use of graphene’s excellent thermal properties. “We are using graphene in what are called loop-heat pipes. These are pumps that move fluid without the need for any mechanical parts, so there is no wear and tear, which is very important for space applications,” said Ferrari.

“We are aiming at an increased lifetime and an improved autonomy of the satellites and space probes,” said Dr Marco Molina, Chief Technical Officer of the Space line of business at industry partner Leonardo. “By adding graphene, we will have a more reliable loop heat pipe that can operate autonomously in space.”

In a loop-heat pipe, evaporation and condensation of a fluid are used to transport heat from hot electronic systems out into space. The pressure of the evaporation-condensation cycle forces fluid through the closed systems, providing continuous cooling.

The main element of the loop-heat pipe is the metallic wick, where the fluid is evaporated into gas. In these experiments, the metallic wick was coated in graphene, improving the efficiency of the heat pipe in two ways. Firstly, graphene’s excellent thermal properties improve the heat transfer from the hot systems into the wick. Secondly, the porous structure of the graphene coating increases the interaction of the wick with the fluid, and improves the capillary pressure, meaning the liquid can flow through the wick faster.

After promising results in laboratory tests, the graphene-coated wicks were tested in space-like conditions onboard a Zero-G parabolic flight. To create weightlessness, the plane undergoes a series of parabolic manoeuvres, creating up to 23 seconds of weightlessness in each manoeuvre.

“It was truly a wonderful experience to feel weightlessness, but also the hyper-gravity moments in the plane. I was very excited but at the same time a bit nervous. I couldn’t sleep the night before,” said Dr Yarjan Samad, a Research Associate at the Cambridge Graphene Centre.

During the flight, the graphene-coated wicks again demonstrated excellent performance, with more efficient heat and fluid transfer compared to the untreated wicks. Based on these results, the researchers are continuing to develop and optimise the coatings for applications in real space conditions. “The next step will be to start working on a prototype that could go either on a satellite or on the space station,” said Ferrari.

The research was supported by the Graphene Flagship and the European Space Agency, as a collaboration between researchers from Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; the University of Cambridge, UK; the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Italy; and industry partner Leonardo Spa, Italy.

​Today is the start of LGBT+ History Month, which will be marked with a series of public events at the University throughout February.

LGBT+ History Month takes place every February, and promotes equality and diversity by increasing the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, their history, lives and experience; as well as raising awareness and advancing education on matters affecting the LGBT+ community.

This year, the University Library will fly the rainbow flag - the internationally-recognised symbol of the LGBT+ community - from its 157ft tall tower for the first time to mark the month, joining the many Colleges across the city who also fly the flag. The Library will host a pop-up exhibition called Queering the UL towards the end of the month, featuring a selection of LGBT+ related materials brought together for the first time from the more than eight million items which form the library’s 600-year-old collection. Items on display range from the 11th century to the 21st, including evidence of gay life in medieval Cairo, gender fluidity in 18th century Japan and ephemera from the vibrant LGBT scene in 1970s' Latin America.

Liam Sims, Rare Books Specialist, said: “Since its appearance in San Francisco in 1978 the rainbow flag has symbolised both the diversity of the LGBT+ community and the pride felt by its members, and in flying the flag, the University Library sends a clear message that it is a welcoming, open and tolerant place.”

Dr Jessica Gardner, University Librarian, said: “In joining with other institutions across Cambridge also flying the flag we show that our city and university are places where people can be themselves without fear of discrimination.”

Marking the end of LGBT+ History Month, the exhibition will be held on 28th February (3.00-6.30pm). No booking is required. The exhibition will be held in the Milstein Rooms (through the Exhibition Centre). You can use the hashtag #queeringtheul to share your thoughts on what you see.

A number of student-run events are taking place this month, coordinated by the Cambridge University LGBT+ Campaign. A calendar of events is available on their Facebook page.

In addition to University and College events, there are many events taking place around Cambridgeshire to mark LGBT+ History Month. Further details are available on the Encompass website.

Cambridge University Library celebrates LGBT History Month: rainbow flag flies from our iconic tower to show our city and university are places where people can be themselves without fear of discrimination. https://t.co/R6a0sfVWxPpic.twitter.com/haiJ1fiQKG

— Jessica Gardner (@CamUniLibrarian) February 1, 2018

Veterinary Medicine supporting LGBT @cusulgbtpic.twitter.com/GRCcqkXh7C

— Cambridge Vet School (@CamVetSchool) January 31, 2018

We're flying the flag today for the start of #LGBTHM18! There are a lot of events in Cambridge this month, and we're excited to be hosting a panel on 'Queering Britain's national heritage". Details here: https://t.co/oh53ZStJoHpic.twitter.com/NqdZ1KOkQL

— Pembroke College (@pembroke1347) February 1, 2018

Flying the flag pic.twitter.com/nbb1Ek3F8K

— Christ's College (@christs_college) February 1, 2018

Read more about the unusual burial of one of England's earliest converts to Christianity. 

AI systems are now used in everything from the trading of stocks to the setting of house prices; from detecting fraud to translating between languages; from creating our weekly shopping lists to predicting which movies we might enjoy.

This is just the beginning. Soon, AI will be used to advance our understanding of human health through analysis of large datasets, help us discover new drugs and personalise treatments. Self-driving vehicles will transform transportation and allow new paradigms in urban planning. Machines will run our homes more efficiently, make businesses more productive and help predict risks to society.

While some AI systems will outperform human intelligence to augment human decision making, others will carry out repetitive, manual and dangerous tasks to augment human labour. Many of the greatest challenges we face, from understanding and mitigating climate change to quickly identifying and containing disease outbreaks, will be aided by the tools of AI.

What we’ve seen of AI so far is only the leading edge of the evolution to come.

Yet the idea of creating machines that think and learn like humans has been around since the 1950s. Why is AI such a hot topic now? And what does Cambridge have to offer?

Three major advances are enabling huge progress in AI research: the availability of masses of data generated by all of us all the time; the power and processing speeds of today’s supercomputers; and the advances that have been made in mathematics and computer science to create sophisticated algorithms that help machines learn.

Unlike in the past when computers were programmed for specific tasks and domains, modern machine learning systems know nothing about the topic in question, they only know about learning: they use huge amounts of data about the world in order to learn from it and to make predictions about future behaviour. They can make sense of complex datasets that are difficult to use and have missing data.

That these advances will provide tremendous benefits is becoming clear. One strand of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy is to put the UK at the forefront of the AI and data revolution. In 2017, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers described AI as “the biggest commercial opportunity in today’s fast-changing economy”, predicting a 10% increase in the UK’s GDP by 2030 as a result of the applications of AI.

Cambridge University is helping to drive this evolution – and to prepare for it.

Our computer scientists are designing systems that are cybersecure, model human reasoning, interact in affective ways with us, uniquely identify us by our face and give insights into our biological makeup.

Our engineers are building machines that are making decisions under uncertain conditions based on probabilistic estimation of perception and for the best course of action. And they’re building robots that can carry out a series of actions in the physical world – whether it’s for self-driving cars or for picking lettuces.

Our researchers in a multitude of different disciplines are creating innovative applications of AI in areas as diverse as discovering new drugs, overcoming phobias, helping to make police custody decisions and forecasting extreme weather events.

Our philosophers and humanists are asking fundamental questions about the ethics, trust and humanity of AI system design, and the effect that the language of discussion has on the public perception of AI. Together with the work of our engineers and computer scientists, these efforts aim to create AI systems that are trustworthy and transparent in their workings – that do what we want them to do.

All of this is happening in a university research environment and wider ecosystem of start-ups and large companies that facilitates innovative breakthroughs in AI. The aim of this truly interdisciplinary approach to research at Cambridge is to invent transformative AI technology that will benefit society at large.

However, transformative advances may carry negative consequences if we do not plan for them carefully on a societal level.

The fundamental advances that underpin self-driving cars may allow dangerous new weapons on the battlefield. Technologies that automate work may result in livelihoods being eliminated. Algorithms trained on historical data may perpetuate, or even exacerbate, biases and inequalities such as sex- or race-based discrimination. Without careful planning, systems for which large amounts of personal data is essential, such as in healthcare, may undermine privacy.

Engaging with these challenges requires drawing on expertise not just from the sciences, but also from the arts, humanities and social sciences, and requires delving deeply into questions of policy and governance for AI. Cambridge has taken a leading position here too, with the recent establishment of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as being one of the founding partners of The Alan Turing Institute based in London.

In the longer term, it is not outside the bounds of possibility that we might develop systems able to match or surpass human intelligence in the broader sense. There are some who think that this would change humanity’s place in the world irrevocably, while others look forward to the world a superintelligence might be able to co-create with us.

As the University where the great mathematician Alan Turing was an undergraduate and fellow, it seems entirely fitting that Cambridge’s scholars are exploring questions of such significance to prepare us for the evolution to come. Turing once said: “we can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Inset image: read more about our AI research in the University's research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Dr Mateja Jamnik (Department of Computer Science and Technology), Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, CFI), Dr Beth Singler (Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and CFI) and Dr Adrian Weller (Department of Engineering, CFI and The Alan Turing Institute).

Read more about the new research into 'Cool Japanese men.

Trust in universities’ ability to safeguard students and staff from sexual abuse will remain low until reports of sexual misconduct are in triple figures, according to Graham Towl, former chief psychologist for the Ministry of Justice.

The University of Cambridge has now passed that point, with 173 reports received through our anonymous reporting tool between its introduction in May 2017 and 31 January 2018. The start of an awareness campaign against sexual misconduct called Breaking the Silence in October 2017 prompted the second largest spike in reports.

Several other universities have introduced similar anonymous reporting tools, such as the University of Manchester, but Cambridge is the first to publish such a high number of reports.

We expected high numbers, and view it as a metric of success. It appears victims have confidence in our promise that these figures will be used to judge the nature and scale of sexual misconduct affecting students and staff, and to act on it accordingly.

Under-reporting of sexual misconduct is a problem generally, not just in universities. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center in the US, more than 90% of those who were sexually assaulted on campus did not report it. The charity Rape Crisis describes the numbers in terms of a pyramid. The wide base is the total number of incidents, reports of incidents are in the middle and at the tip are the few that result in convictions.

Universities must step up

A number of recent high profile cases of acquittal have raised significant concerns about prosecution practices relating to disclosure of evidence. They also show the fundamental importance of the rule of law: the criminal justice system must be fair and must be seen to be fair.

But the media coverage of these cases may mean victims of sexual misconduct will be less likely to report what has happened to them to the police – and so other agencies will need to respond. Universities have a particular responsibility for their own students who have been affected by sexual misconduct, but this requires them to be able to identify and then provide support to the students who need it.

The challenge is that one or two complaints a year do not give a university much information with which to formulate a response to the wider problem. Through the anonymous reporting tool, we now have a large number of Cambridge voices who have reported the issues they’ve faced. Using this data, we can start to measure the impact of initiatives and campaigns such as Breaking the Silence. But this data is anonymous, and some of it will be historic.

It supports our belief that we have a significant problem involving sexual misconduct – what we now need to ensure is that those who have been affected receive the support and guidance they need.

The early signs of the impact of Breaking the Silence are encouraging. Before the campaign, 52% of those reporting recent incidents thought nothing would be done if they made a complaint. Following the launch, that has dropped to 30%. Clearly, there is work still to do, but the campaign’s message that those who report will be supported and action can be taken is starting to have an impact.

Why anonymity works for some

As part of our evaluation of the campaign, we held a series of focus groups. I was struck by one student’s comment in particular. She said the #MeToo campaign put people under unfair pressure to disclose, adding that, to her, it was wrong that victims of sexual misconduct were being encouraged to “parade their pain” in the national news.

Anonymous reporting can help survivors’ voices be heard without their rawest experiences being made public in any way. It gives them a voice in a way that is free of the fear of consequences, but also free from accusations that complaints are vexatious as neither perpetrator nor victim can be named. For some, this may be sufficient. For others, they may want action to be taken.

When speaking to our staff who support students affected by sexual misconduct, all describe students who do not want formally to report to the authorities; who do not want others to know; who do not want to have to relive their experience. These students feel there is no benefit to them in reporting, and they are fearful of the reactions of their friends or the perpetrator if they do so.

Read more: Understanding the myths that new students hold about sexual violence and domestic abuse is key for prevention

Without anonymous reporting options there are no opportunities for these silenced voices to be heard. And with anonymous reporting, these students may start to have confidence that they can come forward and be heard in person and be given the emotional support, advice and guidance they might need.

Challenging sexual misconduct is not only the right thing to do for the safety and well-being of staff and students. Universities are in a unique position to instil a zero tolerance approach to misconduct in their students which they can take with them into the future.

Graham Virgo, Professor of English Private Law; Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

We are well on the way to a world in which many aspects of our daily lives will depend on AI systems.

Within a decade, machines might diagnose patients with the learned expertise of not just one doctor but thousands. They might make judiciary recommendations based on vast datasets of legal decisions and complex regulations. And they will almost certainly know exactly what’s around the corner in autonomous vehicles.

“Machine capabilities are growing,” says Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI). “Machines will perform the tasks that we don’t want to: the mundane jobs, the dangerous jobs. And they’ll do the tasks we aren’t capable of – those involving too much data for a human to process, or where the machine is simply faster, better, cheaper.”

Dr Mateja Jamnik, AI expert at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, agrees: “Everything is going in the direction of augmenting human performance – helping humans, cooperating with humans, enabling humans to concentrate on the areas where humans are intrinsically better such as strategy, creativity and empathy.” 

Part of the attraction of AI requires that future technologies perform tasks autonomously, without humans needing to monitor activities every step of the way. In other words, machines of the future will need to think for themselves. But, although computers today outperform humans on many tasks, including learning from data and making decisions, they can still trip up on things that are really quite trivial for us.

Take, for instance, working out the formula for the area of a parallelogram. Humans might use a diagram to visualise how cutting off the corners and reassembling it as a rectangle simplifies the problem. Machines, however, may “use calculus or integrate a function. This works, but it’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut,” says Jamnik, who was recently appointed Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on AI.

“When I was a child, I was fascinated by the beauty and elegance of mathematical solutions. I wondered how people came up with such intuitive answers. Today, I work with neuroscientists and experimental psychologists to investigate this human ability to reason and think flexibly, and to make computers do the same.”

Jamnik believes that AI systems that can choose so-called heuristic approaches – employing practical, often visual, approaches to problem solving – in a similar way to humans will be an essential component of human-like computers. They will be needed, for instance, so that machines can explain their workings to humans – an important part of the transparency of decision-making that we will require of AI.

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, she is building systems that have begun to reason like humans through diagrams. Her aim now is to enable them to move flexibly between different “modalities of reasoning”, just as humans have the agility to switch between methods when problem solving. 

 Being able to model one aspect of human intelligence in computers raises the question of what other aspects would be useful. And in fact how ‘human-like’ would we want AI systems to be? This is what interests Professor José Hernandez-Orallo, from the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and Visiting Fellow at the CFI.

“We typically put humans as the ultimate goal of AI because we have an anthropocentric view of intelligence that places humans at the pinnacle of a monolith,” says Hernandez-Orallo. “But human intelligence is just one of many kinds. Certain human skills, such as reasoning, will be important in future systems. But perhaps we want to build systems that ‘fill the gaps that humans cannot reach’, whether it’s AI that thinks in non-human ways or AI that doesn’t think at all.

“I believe that future machines can be more powerful than humans not just because they are faster but because they can have cognitive functionalities that are inherently not human.” This raises a difficulty, says Hernandez-Orallo: “How do we measure the intelligence of the systems that we build? Any definition of intelligence needs to be linked to a way of measuring it, otherwise it’s like trying to define electricity without a way of showing it.”

The intelligence tests we use today – such as psychometric tests or animal cognition tests – are not suitable for measuring intelligence of a new kind, he explains. Perhaps the most famous test for AI is that devised by 1950s Cambridge computer scientist Alan Turing. To pass the Turing Test, a computer must fool a human into believing it is human. “Turing never meant it as a test of the sort of AI that is becoming possible – apart from anything else, it’s all or nothing and cannot be used to rank AI,” says Hernandez-Orallo.

In his recently published book The Measure of all Minds, he argues for the development of “universal tests of intelligence” – those that measure the same skill or capability independently of the subject, whether it’s a robot, a human or an octopus.

His work at the CFI as part of the ‘Kinds of Intelligence’ project, led by Dr Marta Halina, is asking not only what these tests might look like but also how their measurement can be built into the development of AI. Hernandez-Orallo sees a very practical application of such tests: the future job market. “I can imagine a time when universal tests would provide a measure of what’s needed to accomplish a job, whether it’s by a human or a machine.”

Cave is also interested in the impact of AI on future jobs, discussing this in a report on the ethics and governance of AI recently submitted to the House of Lords Select Committee on AI on behalf of researchers at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and the University of California at Berkeley. “AI systems currently remain narrow in their range of abilities by comparison with a human. But the breadth of their capacities is increasing rapidly in ways that will pose new ethical and governance challenges – as well as create new opportunities,” says Cave. “Many of these risks and benefits will be related to the impact these new capacities will have on the economy, and the labour market in particular.”

Hernandez-Orallo adds: “Much has been written about the jobs that will be at risk in the future. This happens every time there is a major shift in the economy. But just as some machines will do tasks that humans currently carry out, other machines will help humans do what they currently cannot – providing enhanced cognitive assistance or replacing lost functions such as memory, hearing or sight.”

Jamnik also sees opportunities in the age of intelligent machines: “As with any revolution, there is change. Yes some jobs will become obsolete. But history tells us that there will be jobs appearing. These will capitalise on inherently human qualities. Others will be jobs that we can’t even conceive of – memory augmentation practitioners, data creators, data bias correctors, and so on. That’s one reason I think this is perhaps the most exciting time in the history of humanity.”

A hundred years on from women winning the vote in this country, gender pay gaps, sexual harassment and everyday sexism are still making headlines.

While gender pay gaps and sexual harassment were certainly overt in earlier centuries, it is difficult to say whether the everyday sexism was more common.

While women were economically active in most sectors of the economy, and in much larger numbers than is usually thought, they could be legally excluded from high-status forms of employment by guilds and professional bodies.

In 17th century London, Samuel Pepys itemised in excruciating detail the sexual exploitation of female employees, friends and acquaintances in his meticulous diary. His actions may have been unwelcome but none were illegal unless they resulted in pregnancy. This kind of diary was fairly unusual. But the language to describe the commerce proliferating in early modern England and the language describing sex overlapped. A woman’s credit was largely sexual, whereas a man’s was financial. The range of options to discredit a woman was wide. In the introduction to the 1855 Philadelphia edition of Pepys’ Diary, it describes “almost every word in the English language designating a female, having, at some time or another, been used as a term of reproach”.

In the early 17th century, women sometimes sued name-callers for defaming their reputation. This largely disappears later, though probably because the legal defence of a woman’s reputation was no longer seen as necessary rather than that the name-calling stopped.

Feminist campaigns for equality since the mid-19th century achieved real improvements – first higher education in the later 19th century, the vote 100 years ago today, then birth control and statutory equal pay in the 1970s.

But even those radical achievements did not create a situation of equality. That is not because of any biological differences between the sexes, as some suggest. Cordelia Fine, in her books Testosterone Rex and Delusions of Gender, clearly outlines the very small biological differences between women and men.

Be aware of your bias

At least part of the answer – and it is not comforting – is that, in general, we have an ‘implicit bias’ in favour of male (and lighter skinned) people. Psychological work on these cognitive errors has been around for 30 years. We know that employers, whether male or female, rank a CV for a job application higher with a man’s name at the top than the same CV with a woman’s name at the top.

Similarly, ‘Anglo’ sounding names are preferred. One writer who ran her own personal experiment found that literary agents, who are predominantly female, were eight times more likely to respond to the same proposal coming from a (fictional) man as from a (real) woman, as Mary Ann Sieghart found out last week on Analysis.

These biases are unconscious, based on associations that are made in the culture around us, regardless of our personal beliefs. But the one thing that history can teach is that culture does change.

The Everyday Sexism blog, which documents incidents ranging from trivial to criminal anonymously, as a way to share frustration and rage, is inconceivable in any previous century -- and not just because the internet is recent.

Jennifer Saul’s article ‘Stop Thinking So Much About “Sexual Harassment”’ (Journal of Applied Philosophy 31/3, 2014) directs attention away from the legal procedures and towards practical means of intervention in unacceptable situations, to intervene in the culture that tolerates discrimination. 

Cambridge University’s Breaking the Silence campaign, as well as the wider movements of #MeToo and Time’s Up both speak to the possibility of changing the ‘climate’ of our institutions, even as we can expect to have to work towards that end on a daily basis.

When girls get shamed for their appearance, or boys for emotional vulnerability, or the founder of #MeToo gets abused as ‘too ugly to rape’, or one of your peers after a few too many says ‘you only got the job because you are a woman/black/asian’, it can be hard to remember that we are living in the 21st century.

Why is this kind of hatred and fear still around, in apparent contradiction to both laws and generally tolerant cultural norms?

Challenging a culture of discrimination

An institutional ‘climate’ of discrimination may arise from countless small incidents: a racist or sexist joke that passes unchallenged, for example; or a series of meetings or public forums where the voices of white men dominate.

These days, discriminatory comments may be subtle, or passing, or ‘jokey’, in such a way that makes them not worth following through with a formal complaint. Most of us don’t know how to respond in such situations, whether we or someone else is the target: we are embarrassed or freeze, hoping it will go away, or perhaps it never really happened?

But the one thing we can be sure of is that this situation will arise again. And if we do not intervene, it will continue to happen, and perhaps even more frequently. Bystander training offers options to stop the behaviour and give support to those who are targeted. The aim is to change the accepted cultural norms of workplaces and communities, even of a conversation, because most of us want to live and work in a more tolerant and supportive climate.

Sympathetic but effective interventions counter everyday sexism and racism. For example, one of the best ways to ways to deal with offensive ‘jokes’ is not to laugh. Smiling or laughing gives the speaker the impression that everyone around agrees with him.

Often comments are more thoughtless than malicious. Open-ended questions that give the speaker the chance to apologise are a good way to challenge quickly and effectively: "Why do you say that?""How did you develop that belief?" If our first response is anger, then questions like these can help to buy time to recover our temper and think more clearly.

It can be hard to challenge prejudice without feeling like you’re making a scene or causing a fuss. It is hard to step in, and can feel costly. But as The Breaking the Silence film says, it is also hard to imagine that the cost you may experience will be equal to a victim’s suffering.

Alone, we can’t change a culture, but if attitudes are challenged, together we can change a climate of discrimination.

Join this week's Breaking the Silence campaigning to increase bystander interventions to stop sexual harassment as part of National Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week 2018. Download materials here or at www.breakingthesilence.cam.ac.uk.

The concept, known as ‘mobile ready hero images’, was designed to make shopping for grocery products faster, by making it easier to quickly spot key information about a product, such as size, type or flavour.

For example, searching for ‘soap’ on Amazon or other retail websites will bring up hundreds of images, and most customers will scroll quickly through the list on their phone in order to find the particular item they want. However, based on product images alone, it can be difficult to quickly spot the differences between items: whether an item contains one, three or ten individual bars of soap, for instance.

“While traditional pack photographs can be effective on desktop screens, different flavours and sizes of products can look identical when these photographs are displayed on mobiles, reduced to the size of a postage stamp,” said Dr Sam Waller from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, who led the project. “This is especially problematic for older consumers with age-related long-sightedness.”

To date, mobile ready hero images have been adopted by over 80 retailers in more than 40 countries. India – where 65% of all online shopping transactions take place on mobiles – has been one of the fastest countries to adopt these images.

In addition to making the mobile shopping experience easier for customers, mobile ready hero images have also been shown to have a positive impact on sales. “Magnum ice cream is one of our billion dollar global brands that has adopted hero images,” said Oliver Bradley, e-commerce director at Unilever. “During an eight-week A/B split test with a retailer, Magnum’s hero images led to a sales increase of 24%.”

In order to meet retailers’ demands for consistent product images across all brands, Unilever commissioned Cambridge to develop a website for hero image guidelines, with freely available templates to help brands create improved product images.

To date, some brands have created mobile ready hero images using the Cambridge templates, while others have developed hero images in a different way. Some retailers have chosen to accept all kinds of hero images, while others will only accept some kinds of hero images, resulting in an inconsistent experience for consumers.

GS1, a global non-profit organisation which sets standards for consumer goods, has recently established a working group to focus on mobile ready hero images.

“We spotted the opportunity to improve the current situation using our Global Standards Management Process,” said Paul Reid, head of standards at GS1 in the UK. “The aim of the working group is to get agreement between competing brands and retailers, leading to a single, globally applicable set of guidelines for mobile ready hero images. These guidelines will help brands and retailers make the shopping experience better and more consistent.”

“Inclusive design can help improve the visual clarity of hero images, making them more accessible to a wider range of consumers,” said Waller. “In particular, our SEE-IT method can estimate the proportion of the population who would be unable to discern the important information from e-commerce images. We have joined the GS1 working group in an advisory capacity, and we are looking forward to contributing our expertise to help inform the critical decisions.

“Grocery products are just the start: we want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.”

Inset image: Examples of mobile-ready hero images. Walkers is a trademark owned and designed by PepsiCo and used with permission.

It has become impossible to ignore the alarming extent of sexual harassment and violence in our communities, particularly against women

For example, 25% of female students report having been sexually assaulted (NUS, 2011).

In response to this widespread issue, the bystander Intervention Initiative was developed by the University of the West of England upon receipt of a grant from Public Health England, a telling indicator that the scale of sexual violence is now being seen as a public health issue.

Now being trialled in seven Cambridge Colleges, the initiative is an eight-session course designed to train those who may witness a problem situation (i.e., ‘bystanders’) to act as prosocial citizens and to help prevent harassment.

The program addresses our culture’s common attitudes and norms that are part of the problem (such as victim blaming and gender stereotypes). One of the key objectives of the course is to identify and challenge our common barriers to intervening when we witness a problem situation arising.

What stops us from stepping in?

While many people acknowledge the problem of sexual harassment and violence, we often do not intervene, despite our core belief that it is wrong. Understanding barriers to action is the first step to overcoming them.

In one scenario I discuss as a facilitator for the programme, we imagine a first-year undergraduate student.  She is bright and sociable.  Her first class is in physics, and the lecturer is very difficult to understand.  During the lecture she begins to panic, thinking to herself: “What have I got myself into?!  I don’t belong here in University! I’m going to fail!”

She notices that most people appear to understand the material very well, nodding their heads, and seldom asking questions.  After the lecture, she approaches several students for help.  To her surprise, they confess that they, too, understood nothing.

The same applies to many situations, including sexual harassment; we might all register an act of harassment taking place, but group inaction reinforces a false social norm for the perpetrator’s action, which becomes increasingly difficult to challenge.  

The example with the student also illustrates an effective way to combat a pluralistic ignorance that leads a bystander to wrongly conclude that they are in the minority when thinking something is wrong. First identify the problem; then reach out to another person and, finally, ask questions (which you may have incorrectly thought were ‘stupid’).  

Now imagine a girl at a party when a man aggressively puts his arm around her waist – she cries out, ‘Leave me alone!’  What do you do?  The situation may seem confusing.  You might think to yourself that maybe they are dating and just having a tiff – but that’s irrelevant to whether or not it’s OK, right? It happens again before you have a chance to do anything.

Now fear of retaliation is not always imagined – sometimes it’s better to leave and report it, or ask friends for help in stepping in.

Be the first to speak up

But there are several barriers to even taking that step. Diffusion of responsibility is a tendency for people to feel less responsible when others are present. Breaking the norm is difficult. Inaction can be justified: ‘There are so many people here, I’m only one person, why should it be my job to intervene?’  The trouble is that most people tend to feel this way when in large groups. One consequence of this diffusion of responsibility is the ‘Bystander Effect’ – the decreased likelihood of someone intervening when more people are watching. 

And when a perpetrator witnesses no one in a room of 50 people saying anything about what they are doing, false consensus can encourage them to believe that the majority agree their actions are acceptable.

Say something.  Anything.  Simply ask what is going on, or state that something makes you feel uncomfortable. Or just ask a question to disrupt the situation.

When you step in, you’ll find others who feel and think the same as you do. Step up and you can encourage others to do the same. Do this enough times, and you begin to challenge a destructive norm and create a new culture of zero tolerance.

Join this week's Breaking the Silence campaigning to increase bystander interventions to stop sexual harassment as part of National Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week 2018. Download materials here or at www.breakingthesilence.cam.ac.uk.

For centuries, scientists and non-scientists alike have been fascinated by the beautiful and often complex collective behaviour of animal groups, such as the highly synchronised movements of flocks of birds and schools of fish. Often, those spectacular collective patterns emerge from individual group members using simple rules in their interactions, without requiring global knowledge of their group.

In recent years it has also become apparent that, across the animal kingdom, individual animals often differ considerably and consistently in their behaviour, with some individuals being bolder, more active, or more social than others.

New research conducted at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology suggests that observations of different groups of schooling fish could provide important insights into how the make-up of groups can drive collective behaviour and performance.

In the study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers created random groups of wild-caught stickleback fish and subjected them repeatedly to a range of environments that included open spaces, plant cover, and patches of food.

Dr Jolle Jolles, lead author of the study, now based at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, said: “By filming the schooling fish from above and tracking the groups’ movements in detail, we found that the randomly composed shoals showed profound differences in their collective behaviour that persisted across different ecological contexts. Some groups were consistently faster, better coordinated, more cohesive, and showed clearer leadership structure than others.

“That such differences existed among the groups is remarkable as individuals were randomly grouped with others that were of similar age and size and with which they had very limited previous social contact.”

This research shows for the first time that, even among animals where group membership changes frequently over time and individuals are not very strongly related to each other, such as schooling fish or flocking birds, stable differences can emerge in the collective performance of animal groups.

Such behavioural variability among groups may directly affect the survival and reproductive success of the individuals within them and influence how they associate with one another. Ultimately these findings may therefore help understand the selective pressures that have shaped social behaviour.

Dr Andrea Manica, co-author of the paper from the University of Cambridge, added: “Our research reveals that the collective performance of groups is strongly driven by their composition, suggesting that consistent behavioural differences among groups could be a widespread phenomenon in animal societies.”

These research findings provide important new insights that may help explain and predict the performance of social groups, which could be beneficial in building human teams or constructing automated robot swarms.

The research was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Reference
Jolles, JW et al. Repeatable group differences in the collective behaviour of stickleback shoals across ecological contexts. Proceedings of the Royal Society B; 7 Feb 2018; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.2629