The Manchester Cancer Research centre is a hub of scientific innovation in research, driving decades of practice-influencing cancer care. One of the mainstays of the innovative approaches employed is Team Science, where scientists, clinicians and patients come together in joint sessions. These sessions lead to new research ideas within scientific “Town Halls”.

But despite the increasingly sophisticated technologies available for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, a crucial factor is still being ignored: patient complexity. This omission is leading to unrepresentative research in the lab and inappropriate design of clinical trials. What can be done to fix this?

Led by Robert Bristow, Cancer Research UK’s unique mission in Manchester is to provide “Precision Cancer Medicine for All”. This approach contrasts to studies that are highly selective of patients from Eurocentric backgrounds and/or may be relatively healthy.

The Manchester research centre also recognises the importance of addressing the needs of medically and socially complex patients, many of whom are currently excluded from UK and global precision oncology trials. Manchester has numerous underserved populations secondary to socioeconomic hardship who have multiple health problems.

As patients age, other non-cancer health conditions invariably develop with new medications used for their diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis. These factors can affect therapy side effects and treatment success, including a patient’s response to immunotherapy.

Manchester’s approach is to recognise and work within the diverse populations in Greater Manchester and in so doing, ensure the research is equitable, diverse, and inclusive (EDI). With an EDI lens, specific exemplars will be presented that use scientific and public engagement across these populations for the design of new clinical trials. This will exploit opportunities to drive innovative care changes that will impact our patients in the UK and worldwide.

Join us to find out more about the innovative methods employed by Manchester Cancer Research from Robert Bristow, a multi-award-winning Research Scientist and Scientific Advisor.

Cognitive Robotics combines insights and methods from Artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive and biological sciences, and robotics. It’s a highly interdisciplinary approach that sees AI computer scientists and roboticists collaborating closely with psychologists and neuroscientists.

Angelo Cangelosi, Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics, will use the case study of language learning to demonstrate this highly interdisciplinary field, presenting developmental psychology studies on children’s language acquisition and robots’ experiments on language learning.

Growing theoretical and experimental psychology research on action and language processing, and on number learning and gestures in children and adults, clearly demonstrates the role of embodiment in cognition and language processing. In psychology and neuroscience, this evidence constitutes the basis of ‘embodied cognition’, also known as ‘grounded cognition’.

In robotics and AI, these studies have important implications for the design of linguistic capabilities – in particular, language understanding in robots and machines for human-robot collaboration. This focus on language acquisition and development uses Developmental Robotics methods, as part of the wider Cognitive Robotics approach.

During the talk, Angelo will present examples of developmental robotics models and experimental results with the baby robot iCub and with the Pepper robot. One study focuses on the embodiment biases in early word acquisition and grammar learning. The same developmental robotics method is used for experiments on pointing gestures and finger counting to allow robots to learn abstract concepts such as numbers.

Angelo will then present a novel developmental robotics model, and human-robot interaction experiments, on Theory of Mind and its relationship to trust. This section of the presentation will consider both our Theory of Mind of robots’ capabilities, and robots’ own ‘Artificial Theory of Mind’ of our intentions. This will demonstrate that trust and collaboration is enhanced when we can understand the intention of the other agents and when robots can explain to us their decision-making strategies.

The implications for the use of such cognitive robotics approaches for embodied cognition in AI and cognitive sciences, and for robot companion applications, will also be discussed. Angelo’s talk will also consider philosophy of science issues on embodiment and on machine’s understanding of language, the ethical issues of trustworthy AI and robots, and the limits of current big-data large language models.

We hope you’ll join us, Angelo, iCub and Pepper for a really absorbing talk and practical presentation that will really get you thinking.

Hear about the truly astounding next-generation radio telescopes, built by a global consortium anchored in North West England, from one of the project’s leaders.

What are radio telescopes exactly? And why is the history and development of them particularly significant to our region?

Radio telescopes are used by astronomers to study radio waves emitted by distant objects in the universe. They can be used in the daytime as well as at night and are less sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

Since astronomical radio sources – planets, stars, nebulae and galaxies – are extremely distant, the radio waves coming from them are very weak. Moreover, radio waves have long wavelengths relative to optical waves. For these reasons, radio telescopes need large antennae and highly sensitive receiving equipment. It is also better to locate radio observatories as far as possible from centres of population to avoid interference from man-made electronic devices.

The world-famous Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire – which has a large single dish antenna – meets these criteria and has been used to make significant contributions to radio astronomy over the years. How has the technology developed since the Lovell was completed in 1957?

Rather than being based on a single antenna, the latest generation of radio telescopes use arrays of antennae that are linked together to form the equivalent of a much larger single antenna. Over the last three decades, astronomers and engineers from around the world have been planning, designing and, finally, building two huge, next-generation radio telescopes. One is located in the Karoo in South Africa, the other in the Murchison region of Western Australia. The whole project is run by the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), whose headquarters are located at Jodrell Bank.

Phil Diamond’s talk will provide insights into the scientific motivations behind the SKA, covering subjects as diverse as the evolution of the Universe and the origins of life. He will describe the history of the project, in which Manchester and Jodrell Bank play a key role, and explain some of the differences between SKAO and traditional observatories, both optical and radio. As an example, one of the key differences is the sheer volumes of data that will be generated. What are the strategies and techniques being developed to manage this oncoming deluge of data? Phil will talk to us about that. And we’ll also get the chance to see the latest images of the construction progress, which is now at a very exciting phase.

Don’t miss out on what promises to be a brilliant talk by a multi-award-winning scientist from the University of Manchester. The event is open to anyone interested in science and technology and you don’t need any specialist knowledge to enjoy it.

Black holes are fascinating objects because of the way they force us to address the biggest questions in physics such as the essential nature of space and time.

Black holes are formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Their gravity is so strong that light cannot escape from them. The first direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published in 2019 using observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017.

Jeff Forshaw will introduce black holes and go on to examine the consequences of trying to track the flow of information into and out of a black hole. Recent insights indicate that space and time are emergent features related to key concepts including “quantum entanglement”, and in a fashion that bears some resemblance to “quantum error correcting codes”, such as are needed to make stable quantum computers.