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Staying curious: Reflections on six years as the Hartree Centre Director

As the longest serving Director of the Hartree Centre, Alison Kennedy has taken the Hartree Centre from strength to strength during her six years of leadership. In 2021, she led the team to successfully secure over £200 million of government funding to run the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) programme, applying advanced digital technologies such as high performance computing, data analytics and AI to enhance productivity in the UK industry.

On Alison’s departure, we asked her to share some of her thoughts and experiences advancing the industry application of digital technologies and look forward to what the future might hold.

Where are we now?

This year, 2022, marks the ten year anniversary of the Hartree Centre. It’s an interesting year for us, seeing how far we’ve come, and for me particularly it marks a transition in my career as I move on from my Directorship of the Hartree Centre.

The Hartree Centre had 12 staff when I started, and now we have a team of over 110 people and growing. We’re in a strong position as a department of STFC’s National Laboratories but we’ve had to work hard to transition from being dependent on funding from a series of fixed-term projects to becoming a sustainable entity with a distinct role in the UKRI landscape. Our current status reflects a recognition and appreciation of  the value of our work at the intersection of HPC research, business networks and national and regional government infrastructure. Being at that intersection is what makes us unique and what makes us strong.

“The practical application of science is fundamental to its value.”

 The importance of the Hartree Centre, a department specifically dedicated to supporting businesses and public sector organisations to adopt and apply new digital technologies cannot be overstated. We allow organisations to experiment and learn in a safe environment to ensure they know what technology works for them before they fully invest in it – de-risking that process of exploration. We’re flexible in our approach to emerging technologies – even beginning to investigate the potential of quantum computing for industry in collaboration with the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC). But what makes us unique and what really matters to us is that we work very closely with businesses, technology partners and the public sector to ensure that solutions and applications we develop are useful and usable.

Embracing change

One of the things that’s difficult to immediately grasp is that when the Hartree Centre was founded, the notion that high performance computing could be adopted and being used by industry in a whole range of areas was really novel and exciting. Supercomputers were primarily a tool for scientific research, and they were portrayed as being very expensive, very difficult to use, and suitable only for a adoption by a small minority of scientists with long experience in difficult computing simulation and modelling problems.

So for the Hartree Centre, one of the key motivators for us has been the challenge of “democratisation” of high-end novel technology.  How can we make it much more accessible to a much wider range of people? How can we understand what some of these industrial challenges are so we can apply it effectively?

Alison Kennedy taking part in a panel session at STFC’s Digital Tech Cluster launch event.

In the last decade, the world has moved forward in immeasurable ways. We’ve seen profound changes in both the technologies and the language we use to describe them. When I started working at the Hartree Centre, we talked about cognitive computing – now the world is more comfortable with terms like artificial intelligence and AI being used in the workplace. These technologies are no longer the preserve of science fiction and people have learned and begun to accept that these technologies don’t mean fewer jobs – just that everyone’s job spec will change.

“I think that the best piece of advice I’d give to anyone at the start of their career is to stay curious and be adaptable.”

When I look back at the changes in technologies and opportunities over the past 40 years, I’d say it’s very, very unlikely that if you work in technology, that you’ll be doing a similar job in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years’ time. Many of the jobs that we are now recruiting for at the Hartree Centre really didn’t exist in their current form five or ten years ago. If you can stay adaptable, and think about where the technology is going and how you can apply it in other areas, you’ll be set to succeed. Think about what you are interested in, think about what skills you can develop, be enthusiastic, be open to learning new ideas and you will then definitely be part of the solution.

Making digital technologies work for businesses

I think one of the first things we realised early on working with businesses is that it is easy for people who are excited by technology to engage with people in industry who are excited by technology.

However, if you want that technology to be adopted and to be used, then you need to engage the hearts and minds of a whole range of people who are working in industry, from their funders and executives to their customers and their supply chains.

“It’s not just about having a good technology solution. It’s about ensuring that the people you work with understand the power of digital transformation and how adopting digital solutions will benefit their businesses.”

Our projects are not about somebody coming in and doing something for a company using our “super technology powers”. We build multi-skilled teams with professional project management that work collaboratively with our partners so that we can get the best results for them. By talking to our teams and answering their questions, the company is part of the project development not just the “end user”.

Hear more from Alison Kennedy in her recent interview with Cambium LLP.

Acknowledging the power of diverse, multidisciplinary teams

I’ve always thought it’s important that our technology teams reflect society at large. If we’re going to effectively tackle a whole range of challenges, from environmental to societal to economic, then we need to have people who understand what these challenges are who come from a variety of backgrounds and who reflect our society.

Also, from a practical point of view, the areas that we are working in – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) – have a shortage of applicants. There’s not enough people in the UK with these skills to meet the demand in research and industry sectors. We need to be as open as possible to say: “What’s absolutely essential for this job vs. what can we teach people when they get here?” I’m really pleased that over the years I’ve been at the Hartree Centre, we’ve developed into a more diverse team of people working on our projects – I think this has really benefited us in terms of being able to understand and contribute to some of the challenges that we’re working with – but there’s still a way to go.

Alison Kennedy with Hartree Centre staff at Supercomputing 2019 in Denver, Colorado.

I’m also interested in the way we are moving beyond thinking just about STEM skills in the UK – I’ve noticed more of a focus to add the arts into that mix. It’s important that we are able to illustrate to people in industry and government what the possibilities are. We need to be creative to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what the results of a particular project might be. So, when we look to recruit new team members at the Hartree Centre, we are not just looking for people who have good technical skills. We are also looking for people who are good communicators, who can manage projects to high standards, who have an interest in challenges and who understand the impact of solving them. Our people don’t just want to develop very deep expertise in one area.

To this end, we also have people on our team in the Hartree Centre who have an understanding of digital communications and social media who can interpret our work in a more creative way to engage with different audiences, as well as people who work on the data visualisation side of things. One of our big investments at the Hartree Centre has been a visualisation suite, where we can bring the results of many of our projects to life in a really visual way. We know that for the vast majority of people, this makes it much easier to understand than looking at statistics and formulae.

We use everything from infographics to advanced visualisation to films about our work, anything which helps to convey the power of these new technologies and to spark interest in people to inspire them.

“We want people to think: Wow, that’s really great! I wonder if these technologies could be applied to my particular problem.”

Looking forward, I think there’s a huge amount to be excited about. We’re seeing new applications of existing technologies in an increasing number of areas, alongside the advent of emerging technologies like quantum computing, which is radically different from traditional computing and will enable us to look at problems that cannot be solved on current mainstream computers.

From developing more personalised medicine and healthcare treatments to applying AI in conjunction with simulation and modelling to speed up the refinement of an aeroplane wing design, we have truly only touched the tip of the iceberg. And I for one am excited to see what the Hartree Centre does next!

Alison will be succeeded by Professor Katherine Royse in April 2022.

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Building a Climate Resilience Demonstrator

How can digital twins help us respond to climate change? We asked Hartree Centre Data Engineering Specialist and Technical Architect on the Climate Resilience Demonstrator project, Tom Collingwood, to tell us more. 

With all the recent storms causing damage and flooding across the UK, it couldn’t be a more relevant time to talk about climate change!

To start us off, can you explain to us what climate resilience means?

It is very topical right now with all the storms we’d had recently and it seems to be a developing issue that is worth looking at. Most people will be familiar with the idea of climate change causing all kinds of disruption – from flooding to droughts to storm damage. On the extreme end of the scale, they can pose a threat to our safety whether directly or indirectly by disrupting an essential service or system – for example, the power going out in a hospital, or emergency services losing signal on their way to an accident.

This kind of work is distinct from trying to slow/stop climate change – which is incredibly important too – instead, we’re trying to help inform the understanding around what might happen to our infrastructure if/when more severe climate events do occur, and hence how we might prioritise resilience planning around assets which are crucial to whole-of-system resilience.

This means there is huge potential in terms of damage prevention, cost savings and service reliability for immediate services like telecoms, energy, water and utilities – but these also cascade down to any industry that relies heavily on or would be affected by disruption to those services. Which is pretty much all industries!

So that’s where the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) comes in?

The Climate Resilience Demonstrator, CReDo, is a digital twin demonstrator project to improve climate and extreme weather resilience across infrastructure networks – the first of its kind in the UK. We narrowed down our focus to look specifically at the effects of extreme flooding on the communications, power and water networks in a specific area of the UK. We have developed a prototype digital twin that takes in data from climate, water, utilities, telecoms and energy industries and applies flood impact models which predict where flooding will form in the UK, how those floods might affect the equipment they touch and how knock-on impacts spread out to the rest of the networks outside the immediate flood zones.

We wanted to demonstrate how those who own and operate infrastructure can use secure, resilient, information sharing, across sector boundaries, to mitigate the effect of flooding on network performance and service delivery to customers, so we’ve been developing reliable approaches and frameworks for secure data sharing and information management that can inform this kind of model and be scaled up.

Why is a digital twin useful when tackling the challenge of climate resilience?

Lots of niche areas of utilities and telecoms will have specific experts or teams who have been responsible for that same machine or equipment for the last 50 years and if you lose that person or team – all that operational knowledge goes with them. If you start using digital twins and connected data, you need to get that specialist information out of their head and turn it into models that can run in AI and machine learning systems, providing 24 hour access to that information.

Many people think of digital twins as operational tools streaming live data from sensors and adjusting ongoing processes accordingly, such as in a manufacturing facility. With climate change, the feedback loop we are looking at might take 100 years to complete, so in this specific use case our digital twin isn’t streaming live data and instead is operating in a way which provides resilience planners with predicted outcomes for a given set of inputs, so they can use the information when making decisions about the future networks they’re supporting. We’re only scraping the surface of what digital twins can do for climate resilience with this specific use case. Bringing operational sensor data into the mix (from river levels to real-time asset monitoring) would broaden the application out to explore current and potentially upcoming failures via predictive maintenance modelling, or branching out into other climatic effects such as wind and extreme heat to inform how we make the whole network more resilient to a variety of new challenges over the coming decades. You’re building the foundations for a digital decision support, and potentially future decision-making, assistant that always gives consistent advice to actively support the experts making vitally important decisions about our countries’ infrastructure.

“That’s the thing – if you get this kind of work right, basically no one will ever hear about it. Life goes on as normal, the power stays on, the communications don’t go down and the damage is minimal.”

Tom Collingwood – CReDo Technical Architect

How do you teach a computer to do that?

You have a structured conversation with the experts, you ask them to tell you how things might break – even in strange or temperamental ways you wouldn’t expect – and you incorporate all those cases to develop a model that provides more accurate predictions. The more you know, the more data you have to keep running through the system to refine it and make better decisions and better decisions in future.

Can you talk us through an example to illustrate what kind of scenarios you’re modelling?

One of the examples we looked at was a water pumping station. So we had to factor in variables like knowing what will break if the water reaches a specific depth because that would submerge the electronics and potentially start a fire. Or if the fuel has been stolen from a backup generator, which will mean everything switches off in an emergency – but imagine cases where there are no sensors detecting whether the fuel is still there.

Our approach means that in the short-term we look at the statistical probability and frequency of those factors to make more accurate predictions of when and how failures might occur. In the long term we’ve discovered what data would be useful so you can put the technologies in place – in this case, you’d install fuel level sensors in the tanks.

So the process goes something like this:

  • Learn from experts what variables affect potential failures or faults
  • Make a plan for which data you need to start collecting
  • Create a model that uses that data to make predictions, and provides sensible approximations where the data aren’t readily available to the system yet
  • Keep feeding in new data to refine the models over time
  • Review the outputs of the models with the experts running the machines/assets, and tweak as necessary to ensure the models give sensible outputs using the current information at hand
  • Use the predicted outputs to inform plans to mitigate the failures

So with the flooding example, you can’t stop the weather but you can predict when it’s likely to happen and put up defences in time to minimise damage or disruption?

Exactly. And the next stage is to look at what knock-on effects happen when a fault or failure occurs – so if it’s a power plant that went down, everything it supplies power to has now lost its primary power supply. What would that mean for vital infrastructure, like healthcare? This was what the short film we funded through the project was exploring – that something like loss of power – even over a short period – can actually be life or death.

The ultimate impact of a single asset going down isn’t something which is immediately apparent – we have to cascade those failures across multiple networks throughout the system if we want to understand the real impact, and with complex network interdependencies that’s not an easy thing for humans to resolve quickly, whereas the right computational models can be very well suited to doing this quickly and repeatably.

Short film “Tomorrow Today” was produced by the National Digital Twin programme and Climate Resilience Demonstrator to explore the potential impact of digital twins.

What was the Hartree Centre’s role in the project?

The Hartree Centre was brought into the consortium originally to provide leadership of technical delivery, and I was given the role of Technical Architect accordingly. This meant my job was to oversee the successful delivery of a technical plan, so I had to do a bit of planning first and then ensure we could make it happen. We also had several other members of our Data Science and Research Software Engineering teams working on different aspects of data analysis and code optimisation for the project.

I’ve had oversight of what’s being done across the consortium of project partners: STFC’s Hartree Centre and DAFNI, CMCL Innovations, the Joint Centre of Excellence for Environmental Intelligence (JCEEI), the National Digital Twin Hub and the Universities of Edinburgh, Warwick and Newcastle.

On the industry side, Anglian Water, BT and UK Power Networks provided infrastructure data and Mott MacDonald supported us with domain expertise in infrastructure and flood modelling.

That’s lots of pieces to bring together!

Yeah, it’s a massive and quite complicated stakeholder map with a lot of moving pieces! So I’ve spent a lot of the last year joining the dots and doing agile programme planning. We’ve approached it with telecoms, water and utilities providers as the “customers” we had in mind as they’re the ones who would ultimately be able to benefit from the outputs of the project and use them to increase reliability and functionality.

A bunch of very talented people were put in front of me and I had to figure out how we could deliver as much as possible simultaneously and get it all done in time for the close of the project. We set up a secure cluster on DAFNI to put data from the asset owners all in one place, so that the scientists working on the project could access it and connect it up to develop models, without it being shared or accessed by anyone else.

What are the next steps?

The project comes to a close in March 2022, so we’re currently writing up the reports and planning a webinar to present our experiences, talk about technical achievements and lessons we’ve learned along the way so that hopefully others can learn from them too and continue to develop our ideas.

The project partners are going to collate reports and write executive summaries so we have something to help us engage with business leadership audiences that are less technical but have decision-making authority to try implementing these concepts at scale. The technical reports are there in more detail so that technical staff can understand what needs to be done.

We’re also going to continue working with the partners on this project to seek funding for the continuation of development, and hopefully further scaling up of this project. Watch this space!

Find out more about the Climate Resilience Demonstrator.

Missed the show-and-tell webinar? Watch it now

Read the technical reports

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What our customers think | Managing our Impact

Hear from our Head of Impact Management Karen Lee and find out about her role at the Hartree Centre and her highlights from our recent commercial outcomes survey.

Karen Lee, Head of Impact Management

Anyone working in the research and innovation eco-system will be very familiar with the concept of ‘impact’ and generating benefits to the UK economy and its people.

As an applied research centre focused on supporting industry in their adoption of transformational digital technologies such as AI and data analytics, this one word, impact, summarises what the Hartree Centre is all about. My role is to help us show it.

The recent AI Activity in UK Businesses report estimates that companies’ annual expenditure on AI technologies was over £62 billion in 2020. With the right conditions in place (for example by reducing the barriers to adoption… which is what we do), they predict that total AI expenditure could grow 11-17% annually over the next five years. Whilst the Impact of AI on Jobs report estimates that such technologies could boost our economy by as much as 10% of GDP by 2030. So we are talking pretty significant numbers here!

It’s exciting that the Hartree Centre (and therefore my talented colleagues) is one of the delivery mechanisms to achieve this. As their Head of Impact Management, my focus is on demonstrating the benefits from our portfolio of projects and programmes by helping us to measure and understand the value we contribute to the organisations we collaborate with, as well as to the wider economy and society.

One way this is done is by capturing information – via surveys and interviews – on customers’ experiences of working with us and tracking this over time. We’ve just published an independent report which has provided useful insight into our portfolio of commercial projects.


The key findings from the report are based on 31% of past user organisations engaging in commercial projects completed up to the end of January 2021.

The Commercial Beneficiary Outcomes report is interesting to me on a number of levels. First off, I want to put a shout out to all of the people that make the Hartree Centre ‘work’ and I am proud that 94% of respondents stated they already had, or would, recommend us to others. The work my colleagues do is remarkable – it is right on the cutting-edge and more often than not beyond my realm of understanding.

Back to the organisations… even if you just look at the sectors they operate in, it really does show that digital technologies pretty much touch every part of the economy.

And these businesses are not all at the same stage of their digital transformation journey either. Some are just starting out, with an idea in mind but unsure of whether it would work or where it might take their business, whilst others are optimising processes or product development. I think this is demonstrated in the range of outcomes reported, which indicate important improvements in productivity, performance, skills and R&D investment. For example:

  • 76% reported that the strategic importance of adopting and applying digital technologies had increased
  • 65% have seen an increased investment in R&D within their organisation
  • 84% have improved the extent to which their organisation uses or exploits data.
  • 89% have increased their in-house technical expertise and capabilities

Other benefits reported included:

  • Enhanced confi­dence in products and services
  • Improved effectiveness of product development
  • Optimised processes
  • Reduced product development costs
  • Reduced time to market
  • Increased sales or profi­tability
  • Enhanced reputation

Although after a project you’ll get a picture of the early outcomes and future potential, the nature of innovation is such that full benefits often take time to be realised. Our survey reflects this in that 79% of participants said that they expect to see further commercial benefits over the next 1-3 years.

Following this research, as part of the Hartree Centre’s continuous improvement work, we’ve enhanced our evidence collection so that we capture information before, after and 2-3 years after our projects to track how benefits accrue to achieve impact over time.

If you’d like to find out more, take a look at the public summary of the report or our infographic. We also have some fantastic case studies which tell a powerful story of some of our individual client projects.


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Meet the team | Training and Events Manager

We spoke to Nia Alexandrova about her role at the STFC Hartree Centre, what keeps her coming into work every day and how the shift towards remote-working has changed the way events are run.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role at the Hartree Centre?  
I am the Training and Events Manager, so my responsibilities involve building and designing the Hartree Centre’s training strategy and programme. This means working with the researchers in their area of applied research to design specific courses and learning materials for different audiences and entry levels. It can also involve managing the process of organising and delivering an event. Because of my background and own research, I am able to support people in finding better ways to teach depending on different audiences. Specifically, my research is in collaborative training and collaborative learning in technology-rich environments. 

So your background is in research? 
My education was in engineering but that was a very long time ago! I started as a research assistant and was involved with some programmes that were being overhauled and transitioned from Liverpool University to the University of Reading. I then went to work in Barcelona Supercomputing Centre to help define and develop their training programme. We built up a team, starting with myself and later Maria-Ribera Sancho (former Dean of FIB – Barcelona School of Informatics), to create a coordinated approach. from the ground up to create a coordinated approach. When I came back to the UK, I joined the STFC Talent Pool and this opportunity in training and events came up which was well suited to my skills! I also knew Alison Kennedy (who had just become the Director of the Hartree Centre at the time) from being acquainted with Women in HPC and she confirmed to me that this was probably a place where I would want to work! 

A woman with mid length brown hair and a mustard coloured shirt presenting in front of a large curved screen showing an image of a supercomputer.

So she was right then! What keeps you coming to work every day?  
I hate doing the same thing over and over again and working at the Hartree Centre is very exciting and quite challenging in that way – every day is different! For example with HNCDI’s EXPLAIN training programme, we are working on the challenge of enticing people to engage with training they may never have thought they needed. It’s easy to present supercomputing and AI to an academic audience but more difficult to engage with individuals or private companies and their leadership, who may not be aware of the benefits of upskilling their teams in digital transformation, computing or AI. At the moment we are in an interesting time, people are becoming aware of the need for digital transformation. 

For the Hartree Centre too, the entire time I’ve been working here we have been growing and evolving. We are finding different ways to develop things, finding the best way to support people and exploring how to teach in the best possible way. The challenge is ensuring that when you’re training individuals, you’re giving them the skills they need not just in their own job, but to go and change behaviours and attitudes to digital transformation in their own company. 

What would you say has been your biggest challenge recently? 
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, all our training has been hands-on and face-to-face in the physical Hartree Centre building. So the recent – and very sudden – transition to virtual events were initially very disruptive for us and a time for fast problem-solving! 

However now we can recognise that it was an inevitable step forward that was just accelerated by the global circumstances, and the Hartree Centre Training, Events and Communications teams worked together really well to find a way to support everyone digitally in a short timeframe. It became an ultimately positive experience that enabled us to enhance our training offering and we are continuing to explore the use of hybrid, virtual and face-to-face events and refine our approach. 

Woman wearing mustard colour shirt pointing at a computer screen and smiling.

So as an events manager, what kind of events do you like to attend? 
 Big international conferences like Supercomputing or ISC are always interesting. When you are physically attending these exhibitions, they feel enormous, we are talking about thousands and thousands of people – and that is an exciting atmosphere. I can share best practice with the global HPC training community and be part of meetings and get involved with the communities that I wouldn’t encounter locally. It helps you to see the bigger picture and also gain some exposure for your organisation. I have seen some really interesting keynotes and in recent years there was a trend of not only inviting people from  the high performance computing (HPC) industry but people who are slightly outside of it. That is a really interesting way to see how someone’s work in industry intersects with HPC outside of the HPC research community.

When you’re not at work, what do you most enjoy doing?  
I love drawing so I go to a life drawing group every Monday. I don’t like to sit and watch TV, I have to have my hands busy so I do knitting and crochet a bit. I love the Daresbury Laboratory book club, it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad we continued it on Zoom during the pandemic. I’m grateful for living near Daresbury because it is a very beautiful area. I always knew this but during lockdown, I started to appreciate it even more because it allows you to do 5 or 10 minute walks very close to home and you get to go around and see ducks, flowers and woodlands and all the time I’m thinking if I was living in a big city I would miss this. 

You can catch up with Nia’s work by exploring our upcoming training events on the Hartree Centre website, register your interest for fully booked events or sign up for future updates by subscribing to the Hartree Centre newsletter.  

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Data science and AI help for SMEs in Cheshire and Warrington

Hi! I am Tim Powell, a Business Development Manager at the Hartree Centre. In this blog post I am going to be talking about a relatively new funding opportunity for SMEs that I’m working on at the moment, Cheshire & Warrington 4.0. 

Tim Powell, Business Development Manager, STFC Hartree Centre

So, what is CW4.0? 

Cheshire and Warrington 4.0 (CW4.0) is an EDRF fully-funded programme of hands on support for businesses in Cheshire and Warrington focused on the exploration and adoption of digital technologies. The programme is built on the success of LCR 4.0 which supported over 300 companies in the Liverpool City Region to develop new products, decrease time to market, and accelerate productivity and turnover – all while creating 125 new jobs!  

Through the CW4.0 programme SMEs in Cheshire and Warrington can access technical expertise from our team of experts here at the Hartree Centre. Our data scientists and software engineers have a strong track record of working on collaborative projects to solve industry challenges. To give you an idea, here are some examples of the areas we work in:

  • Artificial Intelligence applications, including machine learning and natural language processing 
  • Predictive maintenance and data analytics 
  • Modelling and simulation 
  • Software development and optimisation 
  • Cloud migration and applications 
  • IoT (Internet of Things) integration 

Our first CW4.0 engagement has already kicked off with G2O Water Technologies, Tristan Philips the VP of Engineering has this to say about his hopes for the outcome of the project: 

“Being able to do Computational Fluid Dynamics at Hartree is essential to model and design enhanced membranes that are able to filter almost unfilterable waters, extract precious materials from water streams and decarbonise the water industry.”

Tristan Phillips, VP Engineering
G2O Water Technologies

We have also just kicked off a project with Chester-based Circles Health & Wellbeing who are looking to develop an AI chatbot for assistance in mental health services and are developing more projects in the pipeline covering areas such as predictive maintenance, using machine learning to improve routing algorithms and building data warehouses. 

“We are excited to be working with STFC on this hugely important healthcare project. Mental health patient numbers are ever-growing and placing a huge strain on healthcare services which are buckling under the pressure. Working with the Hartree Centre – a respected AI development partner – will enable us to build a dedicated healthcare assistant solution that will set a benchmark for similar future conversational AI assistants, delivering cost-efficient, patient-centric support services that enhance a client’s healthcare experience, build confidence in more human/tech blended healthcare solutions and deliver positive, measurable outcomes. The pressure to get this right is colossal and we are delighted to have such a talented and knowledgeable partner to work alongside us.”

Tom Mackarel , Director and Co-founder
Circles Health & Wellbeing

How does it work? 

CW4.0 projects can vary from creating a brand new proof of concept (PoC) or minimum viable product (MVP) to help accelerate a start-up to market or to add value to an existing product through digitisation. The process of engaging with us on a CW4.0 project is simpler than many other grant applications.  

After an initial discussion with me to define the challenge statement followed by an eligibility check, I engage with our technical staff to write a project scope that will look to create a custom solution to a company’s specific industry challenge. The project scope will be presented back to the company for fine tuning before we go ahead and submit the final application with each CW4.0 technical project typically lasting 2 – 4 months. 

The process works really well for companies who already know how and what they want to innovate on but if your company is interested in digital innovation and not sure which direction to take or the options available to you, don’t worry, we can help with that too.  

CW4.0 is also designed to help signpost companies in the right direction by offering a fully funded, risk-free, feasibility study or digital innovation report. Our experience working across a wide range of industries from engineering and manufacturing and life sciences to energy, professional services and transport will be used alongside our technical expertise to benefit you. The feasibility study or digital innovation report will be created working alongside your company as domain experts to discover what will work best for you.

Manufacturing your digital future | CW4.0

Not just digital innovation – from virtual to physical 

Here at STFC, alongside the Hartree Centre there is another department who are delivering support as part of CW4.0 so I would like to take some time to showcase how the Campus Technology Hub (CTH) can also benefit SMEs across Cheshire and Warrington. 

Companies can access a range of 3D printing capabilities and explore how 3D printing could aid product development and streamline manufacturing processes to reduce time and costs and look at rapid prototyping of complex designs on a project-by-project basis. With 3D printers ranging from desktop-sized, fused deposition modelling printers that can print in a variety of plastics, through to industrial metal 3D printers and material varying from plastics like PLA or ABS, to material reinforced with fibreglass or carbon fibre, resin polymers and 316 stainless steel – the possibilities are endless! 

To find out more about accessing support from the Campus Technology Hub specifically, you can contact my colleague Michaela at michaela.kiernan@stfc.ac.uk. 

Am I eligible? 

The main eligibility criteria for CW4.0 are that the company is classed as an SME, haven’t used the allocated state aid, and have a registered premise in the postcode catchment area below: 

Cheshire Warrington Chester 
CW1 WA1 CH1 
CW2 WA2 CH2 
CW3 WA4 CH3 
CW4 WA5 CH4 
CW5 WA6 CH64 
CW6 WA7 CH65 
CW7 WA8 CH66 
CW8 WA13  
CW9 WA16  
CW10   
CW11   
CW12   

Who can help me? 

To discuss how the Hartree Centre can provide innovation support to your business, help increase productivity, access new markets, kickstart new product and job creations and enable growth through CW4.0, please get in touch with at info@candw4.uk. 


Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), CW4.0 brings together the combined expertise and capabilities of the Virtual Engineering Centre (University of Liverpool), Liverpool John Moores University, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Northern Automotive Alliance. 
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Collaborating to deliver projects

On 8 October 2019 Business Transformation Manager, Neil Runciman and Head of Programmes, Claire Trinder went to a joint conference from the Association of Project Managers (APM) and Institute of Collaborative Working (ICW) with the theme of “Collaborating to deliver projects.” They both share experiences and reflections from the day:

Claire Ward and Jeremy Campbell from the Institute of Collaborative Working (ICW) set the scene for the day with their “Delivering more through collaboration” presentation highlighting how embedding collaborative working in to organisations assists in building long term, sustainable relationships which help to deliver projects. They mentioned the House of Commons and UK Home Office had particularly been enthusiastic in their adoption of collaborative working while also discussing reasons that collaboration can fail. Often this is due to perception of collaborative working, some see it as a selling technique or don’t understand the requirements leading to individuals acting in silos and not demonstrating the appropriate skills or behaviours.

Image credit: APM Events

The next session was led by Ben Cross who shared lessons learned from delivering the £1.5billion A4 road programme – collaboration was key to this, not only between three main contractors but also between a myriad of subcontractors to ensure project success. Actions taken throughout the project to encourage a culture of collaboration included:

  • Common procurement, reducing stoppages and securing better pricing for materials and machinery
  • Open book reporting for all contractors
  • Board members for collaboration, procurement and stakeholder management
  • A commitment to recruit or develop excellent project leaders throughout

A common vision connecting teams to a purpose and ensuring sufficient resources and training were embedded throughout the actions above, ultimately helping the team to deliver the project to cost, with minimum traffic disruption and a low accident rate.

Next up was something a little more practical, led by John Doyle to demonstrate working towards shared objectives with shared benefits. The exercise saw us work in teams of six to design and build part-sections of paper bridges to transport a table tennis ball over three metres but using only A4 paper, sellotape and scissors! Our team enjoyed this and were successful in putting our project management expertise to the test by quickly identifying and filling the necessary roles, working well as a team and overcoming last minute obstacles while still achieving a win-win situation with both client and supplier benefitting.

Neil Runciman taking part in the practical bridge building session. Image credit: APM Events

Jonathan Canioni from Warwick Business School offered an academic perspective to the conference discussions, quoting several successful examples of collaboration including ‘Food for the Soul’ – a programme between an established chef, the Catholic church, local markets and supermarkets in Naples to provide food to those living in poverty. Discussions continued to examples where collaboration had failed – a private banking app that misunderstood the relationship between bank and customer – when even best intentions and aligned incentives can be administered ineffectively. Key learning points from Jonathan’s talk were that collaboration and coordination are bound together in a number of ways, therefore, although coordination is not quite as valuable as collaboration, it is a necessary step on the way and worth striving for if collaboration is unattainable.

“Hartree Centre places tremendous value on and recognises the benefit of collaborative work and we embed this in many ways. From multi-partner grant funded consortia, to individual collaborative research projects with SMEs or larger national organisations, to our most recent 5 year collaborative Innovation Return on Research programme which partners with IBM Research and UK plc. The workshop was a great opportunity to step away from the day to day and reflect on how we achieve our collaborations and opportunities for us to improve on these in the future. The presentations throughout the day gave great insight, especially on how to define collaboration behaviours up front and as Neil highlights, the criticality of great leadership in supporting this. I really enjoyed the practical exercise as well, although I think our session was slightly more chaotic than Neil’s! However the same is often true in real life, and it is how chaos and uncertainty is managed that is also key to success.”

Claire Trinder, Head of Programmes

“For me, this was an interesting day full of sharing experiences and offering new perspectives. I found Ben Cross’ presentation particularly worthwhile as it offered learning points that are directly applicable to complex projects with multiple suppliers while also highlighting the wide benefits of great leadership. I would have appreciated hearing a contractor’s view of collaboration to ensure a balanced view of the reality of collaborating to deliver projects.”

Neil Runciman, Business Transformation Manager
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Better Software, Bigger Impact

Since the term was first coined in 2012 , Research Software Engineering has experienced a rapid growth, first in the UK and then overseas.  Today there are at least 20 RSE groups at Universities and Research Institutes across the UK alone, alongside thousands of self-identifying RSEs, numerous national RSE associations, and since earlier this year, a registered Society of Research Software Engineering* to promote the role of RSEs in supporting research. 

The core proposition of RSEs is “Better Software, Better Research” – by improving the quality of software developed by researchers, we enable higher quality research.  Software quality is a broad topic, but the most common benefits of academic RSEs are:

  • improved reliability – fewer software errors leading to incorrect results
  • better performance – enabling more accurate and/or bigger science
  • reproducibility – increasing confidence in scientific results.

Since early 2018 the Hartree Centre has been building up an RSE capability of its own, but for slightly different reasons.  Rather than being measured on research output, Hartree Centre’s mission is to create economic impact through the application of HPC, data analytics and AI.  Most often this means taking existing research software, and applying it to solve industrial challenges.  One of the key challenges we have is crossing the “valley of death” from a proof-of-concept, where we demonstrate that a given tool, algorithm or method can in principle be used to solve a problem, to actual industry adoption of this approach.  While reliability and performance are still important here, often the key issues for a company adopting new software are usability, portability and security.

In practice, while our RSE team shares many skills in common with academic RSEs – such as employing best practices for use of version control, code review and automated testing – we specialise in areas like building simple User Interfaces for complex software, automating workflows involving HPC and deploying web applications securely to the cloud ready for industry use. 

Introducing some members of the Hartree Centre RSE team.

Our team has grown to 14 staff, comprising a range of roles from Degree Apprentices, RSEs with specialisms in HPC, AI and data analytics, to Full Stack Developers and a Software Architect. 

Just like academic RSEs, we’re at our best when working in collaboration, whether that’s with the other technology teams across the Hartree Centre, commercial clients, or our technology partners like IBM Research. 

Some of the projects we’ve been working on recently include:

We’re still recruiting – if you want be part of the Hartree RSE journey please apply here, we’d love to hear from you!

*Full disclosure: I’m a founding trustee of the society.

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Meeting the Women of Silicon Roundabout – present and future!

Aiman Shaikh, one of our Research Software Engineers recently attended Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019 – one of the largest gatherings of female technologists in Europe – held at ExCeL London. In this blog post, Aiman tells us more about her motivations for attending the two day event aiming to make an impact on the gender gap and boost careers of attendees.

My main motivation for attending the conference was the opportunity to be among 6,000 attendees who were all like me: eager to connect, learn and take action on gender diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019 brought together a programme of inspirational keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, technical classes, and career development workshops – it was the first and only conference I have attended where female technical speakers took centre stage.

For me, the chance to hear from inspirational leaders – many of whom were women – about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, blockchain and cloud computing. This coupled with the strong messages throughout the conference about the importance of diversity and inclusion was truly incredible.

Over 6,000 delegates attended the two day event at ExCeL London.
Image credit: Women of Silicon Roundabout.

One of the many worthwhile sessions I attended was from Denise Jones, Senior Product Manager, LetGo. Denise discussed whether AI has given rise to new and distinctive ethical issues and she challenged the group with statements like “algorithms can predict user preference based on previous activity and based on other users who are like them” raising important questions about how we as technologists can be mindful of bias in our work with AI. It made me really consider the balance of collecting data to provide a better user experience and product personalisation as good thing but collecting too much data and over-targeting audiences can go wrong and be frustrating for users if it’s not relevant.

I also attended the “Confident Speaking for Women” workshop led by Sarah Palmer, Director of European Business Development at PowerSpeaking. This was an incredibly useful 60 minutes packed full of exercises specifically designed to improve presentation skills. It gave loads of helpful tips for ‘presentation newbies’ like myself such as the importance of trying things out in advance and how to project confidence and credibility, especially through using effective nonverbal language. I’m looking forward to implementing several of these strategies in my own conference talks!

Another real highlight of the conference was the Women of Colour networking lunch on the second day of the event. Organised by Google, it was a chance to ‘inspire and be inspired.’ I was fortunate enough to meet with so many role models in tech and find out from them how they progressed in their career, how they managed their work/life balance and grow my own professional networks. I was also lucky to be able to meet with groups of fantastic early career women who were keen to find out more about my job and the Hartree Centre. I really enjoyed telling them more about my role and day to day life as part of the Research Software Engineering team – I hope to see some of them apply for some of our job vacancies as they would be great assets to any team!

Aiman Shaikh | Research Software Engineer | Hartree Centre
Image credit: STFC

I loved this conference – it provided a much-needed, necessary platform to women in technology, inspiring attendees to talk and network with women working across different industries and using a variety of emerging technologies in their day to day jobs. I’ll certainly be taking many of the lessons learned back to the Hartree Centre – it has inspired me to think about AI and data analytics in some of my upcoming projects and how I can make sure I continue to incorporate diversity and inclusion in to my work and professional networks.

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Research Software Engineering conference 2018 #RSE18

On 3rd September the peaceful campus of Birmingham University came alive with bubbling groups of research software engineers, talking in excited tones about their latest optimisation tool and favourite python library, as the third annual conference of Research Software Engineers was started!

A real global affair, #RSE18 had 314 delegates from 12 countries. That represents a nearly 50% increase over last year’s attendance and also a 7% increase in women attending compared to 2017.

Big News!

UK RSE Association is turning into the Society of Research Software Engineering! A legal, independent, professional organisation!

The UK RSE Association has seen significant growth since its inception in 2013, to over 1000 members. The community’s growth has made the informal, volunteer run format unsustainable. The move will enable the society to hold funds, employ staff, and operate as an independent organisation to represent the interests of the RSE community. Visit the RSE website for more information and sign up to receive updates.

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