Welcome to the University of East Anglia at Norwich and the AgriFoRwArdS summer school 2022.
The event will focus on "technology for food from water" and includes a team challenge, a trip to Cefas, talks and presentations, and an opportunity to network with scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Please meet for lunch at 12:00 on Monday 4th July at Productivity East (What3words ///window.tops.actor) on the UEA campus.
Please see the timetable.
List of students with team allocations.
Survey after survey implies that employers value what they call “soft skills” over technical ones. While you might suspect that such surveys are exaggerations there is certainly a grain of truth in them. If so, then if you are a PhD student, you may find such surveys depressing - what is the point in honing your technical skills if employability is all about soft skills? The truth is that a successful PhD is about developing technical and soft skills and this summer school will help you do that. We’ve identified four groups of soft skills that we think this Summer School will improve:
We all think we know how to learn things – after all everyone on this School has already completed many years of education. However, some people just seem to pick up stuff quickly. They are not especially brainy, they have some life skills which are not very well known but are very useful. Speed-reading, note-taking, summarisation, and reflection are all skills that can be taught. We will try to give you tips and tricks that should help.
Most people on this School are already quite experienced in specialised forms of analysis but may not be practiced in tricks and techniques for figuring things out quickly. If we asked you to estimate how many car repair service stations there were in Norwich, how would you go about it? Or if you had to estimate how many people are studying numerate PHDs in the United Kingdom, how would you do the calculations. This week is all about making reasonable estimates using partial data so you should get plenty of practice.
Although the standard of presentations has improved over the years, many students fail to get jobs because they are poor communicators. Communication is not just written reports, although these are important and it most certainly not just powerpoint presentations, although these are also commonplace. Communication is a life skill that covers your whole attitude to being a human being.
Managing yourself and others is clearly a skill that is highly correlated with your personal happiness and perception of success. But teaching it can be tricky – students come with different experiences so there is always a danger of what is awfully threatening for one is highly simplistic for another. Nevertheless this course will teach you to manage. We will do that via groupwork and by regular reflection. By the end of this course you will be a better manager – guaranteed!
But there is more. We also want to discuss fish and fishing.
Fishing is a fascinating industry with a long history. Like agriculture, it does not always get the nuanced press coverage it deserves and, like agriculture if suffers from many similar drivers: it is dangerous; the rates of pay can be low; sustainability does not always align with consumer preferences; and there is a massively complicated regulatory system which has led to war between nations.
That said, food from the sea has the potential to be tasty, nutritious and sustainable. Furthemore, The Sun newspaper declared fish-and-chips to be one of Britain’s Top-20 Favourite dishes — the only seafood in the Top-201.
Your mission is to build a robot to catch, sort, and cook fish and chips. Your machine will be capable of producing what every seaside caterer desires: fresh fish and chips, caught and cooked sustainably and sold at a premium price.
We when say “build” you should add a pinch of salt2 — we do not have the time nor money to build such a machine. This is a very familiar situation for engineers — they have an idea but not, yet, the money. So the usual solution is, via a series of paper investigations and crafty demonstrators, to build enough confidence with investors, that such an idea could be viable. That is what we are going to do. On Thursday afternoon, you will pitch your idea and on Friday you will receive feedback and other delights.
Do not worry if starting and pitching a business is alien to you - we will explain the process. So, in addition to those soft skills, we hope that by the end of this week you will also have an appreciation of the fishing industry and related activities and the essence of the start-up process and how it links into innovation and research.
To make the task even more manageable we have split you into Teams. Each Team will focus on a different aspect of the robo-fisher:
It’s quite possible for a fishing boat to spend several days at sea without catching a single fish of value. How can we maximise the sustainability of our fishing missions? More ...
Obviously we could program a robot arm to catch a fish - and we have robot arms available to you so could you program them as proof-of-concept demonstrator? More ...
it’s one thing to catch a fish, it’s another to decide if that fish meet your quota and consumer need. How easy is it to sort fish? Perhaps you could produce a proof of concept demonstrator? More ...
People pay good money to have their fish prepared and cooked. How practical is deep fat frying a fish on the back of a fishing boat? Or are there alternatives? More ...
Fish is a commodity so its price varies and it varies depending on what state it is in. How can you maximise profits for the fisher and avoid middlemen, brokers and others who would charge the customer merely for moving fish from one customer to another? More ...
Of course you will not be left all at sea (note that this Summer School will also encourage the use of feeble fish-based puns). You will have access to the best experts that can be found on the topic of fish and fishing — some of these are at Cefas (The Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science) but there will also be visit from experts in the economics of fish, automated cookery and you will also have access to the expertise and equipment of the newly opened Institute of Productivity.
But the most important thing is to enjoy yourself - the pandemic has been a killer of collaboration and playful exploration of research ideas. If we achieve nothing else, we hope we will persuade you of the benefit of practical hands-on discussion and discovery.
Richard Harvey, Kieren Hyder, Robert Blackwell, Rob Lloyd, Michal Mackiewicz,
1: For those of you who want the gory details of British culinary tastes then the URL is provided here. Trigger warning - you may need a sick bag. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14283687/britain-family-meals-roast-dinner-fish-pizza/
2: But no vinegar obviously - people who put vinegar on fish-and-chips should be prosecuted for crimes against culinary good sense.
Coding for Crayfish a documentary by Abalobi.
The good fish guide published by the Marine Conservation Society.
Artificial Light in Commercial Industrialized Fishing Applications: A Review
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