Our annual conference ran as a festival of webinars, networking sessions and workshops from Monday 14 June – Friday 18 June 2021, chaired by Dr Oliver Fisher.

For recordings from the week please go to our You Tube Channel where this is also a summary of the whole week in a 10 minute film.

Conference summary report:

The 2021 annual Connected Everything conference took a different turn this year taking place as a 5 day online festival of events during June 2021. It was great to see over 170
delegates join us throughout the week across our 8 sessions, which included presentations from our feasibility study teams, thematic areas’ panel discussions, multiple ECR career support sessions and a digital manufacturing 2050 foresight roundtable. This was all made possible by the 25 conference presenters and panel members that contributed towards these sessions. To make the festival a little bit different to other online webinars and add in more networking opportunities, the Network decided to build our own virtual conference space in Gather. This was a new experience for the network; however, it proved to be our largest conference yet with over 170 delegates throughout the week. The space allowed us to have a conference hall with a stage, research poster presentations, and network areas in the library and buffet space which you “walk” around with using your own avatar. While it felt quite a risk to move away from MS Teams, Zoom and the like, the feedback from delegates showed it paid off. People were able to “bump” into each other, people did have unexpected, unplanned conversations, new connections were made.

Keynote presentations were given by:

  1. Stefania Soldini (University of Liverpool), ‘Manufacturing of 3D-printed morphing
    origami solar sails for the next generation of CubeSats’
  2. Alexandra Brintrup (Cambridge University), ‘AgentChat: Feasibility of large-scale
    multi-agent based coordination for freight co-loading’
  3. Anna Chatzimichali (University of the West of England), ‘Embedded intelligent
    empathy in design’
  4. Azfar Khalid (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Studying mental stress factors in
    occupational safety in the context of smart factory and COVID-19’
  5. Rami Bahsoon (University of Birmingham), ‘Novel digital twins for compliance debts
    in smart manufacturing’

    Research Poster Winners
    The festival was all brought to a close on Friday where Dr Nik Watson presented the
    winners of the best research poster presentation and runner-up awards. All the posters
    were of the highest quality, which made the voting extremely close.
    Best Poster Presentation: Erhan Gulsen (University of Nottingham), ‘Combining Ultrasonic Measurement Methods and Machine Learning Techniques to Assess
    Baked Product Quality’
    Runner-Up for Best Poster Presentation: Laura Pereira Diaz (University of Strathclyde), ‘Prediction of Powder Flow from Physical Properties using Machine Learning

For an overview of all the posters presented go to this page: https://connectedeverything.ac.uk/connected-everything-festival-2021-posters/