Prof. Patrick Degenaar

It was great to host a fact-finding delegation from South East University, China this week. I was proud to be able to show the standard of our teaching and research here at Newcastle. SEU is a great place. Looking forward to the reciprocal visit.

It's great to have a visiting fact-finding delegation from EEE at South-East University China. Proud to show how we do things here at Newcastle.

YouTube video by Boston Dynamics What's in a humanoid hand? | Boston Dynamics

youtube.com/watch?v=gS4r...
Great to see progress on robot hands - it's the final piece in the research puzzle before we all get robot butler.

Image of peaceful counter demonstrators preventing far right thugs from entering the main square.

Newcastle is a wonderfully friendly and welcoming city. So today I was especially delighted to see thousands of ordinary Geordies show up to prevent a few hundred far-right hooligans from giving the city a bad name.

I reviewed this fascinating piece of work today at TU Delft. Dutch PhD vivas are somewhat different in format to here in the UK. But in the end it is the quality of the candidate that matters. And happy to say he passed my thorough grilling. 😁

It was wonderful to give my lecture on "Responsible Use of AI for Engineers" to our new MSc cohort today. A great bunch! and we had fun going through the tools together!

hoppingsfunfairs.com

University life can be fun as well as work! From Friday, Newcastle will host its giant funfair called "The Hoppings", a yearly activity dating back to medieval times.

ugrf.nu.edu.eg

My Egyptian friends at Nile University have opened a junior research competition with the theme: “Young Minds, Global Vibes”

Great to have Jason from Synopsys here in @nclengineering.bsky.social to give a seminar on their RTL Synthesis tool

Celebrating Women Engineers and Their Lasting Legacies Discover the women who are shaping the future with groundbreaking innovations and inspiring leadership.

Equality has unfortunately become unfashionable in some quarters these days. But we absolutely need to inspire the next generation. It was wonderful to read about this collection of female engineers and their contributions to our collective wealth. www.electronicdesign.com/resources/in...

We have very exciting job posts as part of a collaboration between Oxford, Bath, Sheffield and Newcastle to build a new type of implantable fuel cell for medical devices. Newcastle: jobs.ncl.ac.uk/job/Newcastl... Bath: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/FM12468 Sheffield: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLJ247/r...

If you fancy getting involved in developing an implantable fuel cells, we have some opportunities! the first is for excellent chemical engineers at the lab of Mirella Di Lorenzo - my Bath collaborator on our Vampires project. www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

It was wonderful to have a visit from Prof. Jong Mo Seo, Seoul National University to here in Newcastle. He gave a great talk on retinal prosthetics and we had lots of fun playing with our femtosecond super-laser!

Great to see the Chinese New Year festivities today in Newcastle. It is an interesting image together with the Irish Centre. Both communities actually have historical overlap from the 1840s and co-located in various UK, US cities.

YouTube video by South China Morning Post Dancing robots take the stage at China’s Spring Festival Gala performance

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-k4...

Every year, the Chinese have a New Year gala on TV to celebrate the new year. This year, they did a joint show with humans and robots! It is still a few years away, but I'm looking forward to having a robot butler that does the dishes!

UK will not be able to resist China's tech dominance China's AI success has come from policy and Chancellor Rachel Reeves's recent visit to China highlights the importance of a close relationship.

Daft panic over Deepseek. Two visions for AI: (1) AI that is operated by one or two cloud monopolies with total undemocratic control of the world's information. (2) Private efficient AI’s running on people’s devices under individual control. I prefer the latter!
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sunderland Parkinson's patient 'feels cured' with new device Kevin Hill, who has a computer in his chest linked to a brain implant, says he has his life back.

Great to see an adaptive DBS system implanted here in Newcastle: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Parkrun is one of the best pro-health institutions in the UK and it is FREE!!!. My local one in the Jesmond Dene is beautiful and the crowd is very supportive. They are all over the UK! www.parkrun.org.uk/events/

‘Never seen anything like this’: Trump’s team halts NIH meetings and travel In an unprecedented move, research-grant reviews have been suspended indefinitely at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

Holy Moly.. Politicians should not be interfering with science like this.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...