By Trevor Cox
Meet inspiring and diverse engineers whose ground-breaking work is making a difference and inspiring writers who create compelling fiction.
Engineering is at the heart of being human: for
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The podcast currently has 13 episodes available.
Ruth Amos visits the Acoustic Laboratories at the University of Salford. She gets to experience the test chambers with their extreme acoustics, from the oppressive silence of the anechoic chamber, to the booming reverberation chamber.
So this is an Inventive episode with a twist, as previous guest Ruth Amos turns interviewer, and we hear about the acoustical engineering done by Inventive's normal host Professor Trevor Cox.
Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction, as it features groundbreaking engineers and brilliant writers. This episode features a story exploring unusual hearing from science fiction writer Stephen Cox. And yes, Trevor and Stephen are related. Stephen's story The Magic Flute draws on Trevor's Cadenza project, which aims to improve how music sounds on hearing aids.
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Put your headphones on and take some time out to listen to this episode. Your ears are in for a treat! Thanks to Adam at Overtone Productions, we're bringing you outstanding sound design in the final episode of this series.
Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction - featuring engineers whose work is transforming the world we live in and award-winning writers who transform their stories. We have another first for you in this episode as we feature sublime poetry from Katrina Porteous interwoven with presenter Trevor Cox's interview with electrical engineer Jack Haworth. Jack works with robots designed for extreme environments at the clean-up of the Sellafield nuclear site.
When he was at school, Jack thought he was going to university to study business and become the next Alan Sugar. But he took the long road into engineering instead. On the graduate scheme at Sellafield, he's working with machines that go where human beings can't - inspecting outdoor areas for radiation and highly radioactive nuclear cells. But what about the darker side of robotics? Will they put people out of work or even take over? And what made him choose an industry with such a bad reputation?
Katrina doesn't have any qualifications in science – not even a GCSE! But she's worked for many years with scientists and she believes the distinction between the arts and sciences is an extremely unhelpful one. It's all about imagination – for engineers and artists, it's all about imagining new worlds.
Katrina's poem is a response to Jack's chat with Trevor, interwoven throughout the episode, and explores themes that include how the data-driven systems that increasingly dominate our world may impact on our freedom and, on a more optimistic note, how we may gain more freedom by the possibilities for interaction between human consciousness and machine learning.
A informative and highly creative listen!
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A fascinating insight into how AI will influence how cities operate in the future and the ethics of collecting big data.
Larissa Suzuki is a polymath – she's a computer scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, writer, inventor, and philanthropist. She was awarded the Engineer of the Year at the Engineering Talent Awards 2021 and the Royal Engineering Society's Rooke Award and she made The Guardian's Top 50 Women in Engineering.
She has one foot in academia and the other in industry – she's an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London and she's a Data Scientist at Google working on Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities and the Interplanetary Internet – that involves connecting devices and satellites to ensure we have connectivity to provide services to the international space station and remote planets.
Larissa is autistic and she tells Trevor Cox that it's important that companies hire people who don't fit a particular profile as that's not the way to create better products and be more successful. She's an advocate for women in STEM. The pioneering computer scientists were women, so why were they not given credit for their achievements?
Trevor and Larissa delve deep into the ethics of collecting data on citizens for smart cities. Should we be even more concerned about our privacy in the future?
Author Tim Maughan's short story, My City is Not a Problem, focuses on the first AI system built for the public sector. It appears to know how to solve London's problems better than its politicians.
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How can we create carbon-free energy? The future is hydrogen. As Glasgow hosts the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, engineer and activist Enass Abo-Hamed and systems integration engineer Manjot Chana from renewable energy company H2GO chat to Trevor Cox about their groundbreaking plans to help save the planet.
The carbon we produce in heavy industries, aviation and energy supply emits pollutants. 1.2 billion people in the world don't have control over energy supplies – they can't get it at the flick of a switch.
Chemical engineer Enass from Palestine is as much an activist as she is an entrepreneur. She is passionate about raising awareness of the problems associated with climate change and set up her company H2GO to provide a solution. Palestinian Enass explains her vision to Trevor Cox - to store renewable energy as low-cost hydrogen with zero emissions.
Manjot began his career as an apprentice engineer with Jaguar. He tells Trevor how his desire to change people's lives for the better led him to switch to a career in renewable energy - and it turns out the skills he learned in the car industry are transferrable.
We mix fact and fiction in Inventive and in this edition, writer George Sandifer-Smith's short story highlights one of the biggest challenges in the climate change movement - people. There's conflict when engineers are sent to repair green energy boxes smashed by conspiracy theorists.
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This episode of Inventive Podcast is an exciting insight into a profession we only get a glimpse of in news reports, through the eyes of an engineer who wants to make a positive impact on the world.
Disaster Risk Engineer Josh Macabuag been at the scene of major natural disasters around the world. He was part of the SARAID (Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters) relief team at the tsunami Japan in 2011, the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and, most recently, the earthquake in Haiti in 2021. As a volunteer with SARAID, he has to find the least dangerous way of getting people out of collapsed buildings, making on-the-spot decisions relying on his intuition. His day job involves quantifying the risks and costs of catastrophes for The World Bank. Josh was the first person in his family to go to university, studying engineering at Oxford. He counts his dad, a car mechanic, as one of his major influences. A humanitarian and engineer, Josh tells his remarkable story to Trevor Cox.
Writer Nina Allen, a winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award, is included in The Guardian's 2018 list of 'Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read now'. We asked Nina to write a short story based on Josh's interview with Trevor. On the process of writing her story, 'Forces and Loads', Nina says, 'It was the most engaging and inspirational, most unusual participation that I've ever experienced'. Her sinister story uncovers more than people trapped in the rubble of an earthquake.
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Josh Macabuag - https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/civil-engineer-profiles/joshua-macabuag
SARAID - https://www.saraid.org/
The World Bank - https://www.worldbank.org/en/home
Fresh Voices: 50 writers you should read now: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/31/fresh-voices-50-writers-you-should-read-now
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Join us for a brand new series of Inventive Podcast. We're launching in World Space Week - this year, it's all about celebrating Women in Space - so who better to launch our new series than Spacecraft Engineer Sian Cleaver! Sian chats to Trevor Cox about her work on the Orion European Service Module for NASA's Orion spacecraft, built to take humans farther into space than ever before. Being an astronaut or working in a space-related job has always been on Sian's mind. When she was a child, her dream was to have the first baby in space! She's passionate about science and exploration space missions and inspiring the next generation of young women into careers in STEM. Telling Sian's inspirational story in rhyme is the rapping scientist and aeronautical engineer Jon Chase.
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www.inventivepodcast.com
www.NASA.com
www.airbus.com/space/space-infrastructures/Orion-ESM.html
www.worldspaceweek.org
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Inventor and Engineer Ruth Amos has a fantastic job! She runs Youtube Channel ‘Kids Invent Stuff’ where children get the chance to have their invention ideas built by Ruth and her friend Shawn. They’ve built some amazing stuff! A bike that feeds you cake, a three-storey bath, an electric dog car - farting staircase anyone? Ruth’s idea behind the channel was that she wanted children from all backgrounds to have the opportunity to see their ideas made. She didn’t go to university, her way into engineering was novel - Ruth was only 16 when she won a prize for a brilliant product she designed while still at school. Writer Jaqueline Yallop takes one of Ruth’s inventions as her inspiration for a very moving story. Ruth’s reaction to it? You’ll have to listen to find out!
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Manufacturing engineer Greg Bowie uses science to make stuff that heals broken bones. The material he works with has something in common with the network of pipes at the bottom of the ocean that carries the internet around the world and Greg himself has something in common with former US President Barack Obama. There's a Neo-fascist government in America in writer Emma Newman's short story, influenced by Greg's work, focusing on espionage and a tribute to people who go up against tyrants, Emma is interested in the interaction between humanity and technology and how people can use technology in the fight against fascism. Edge of the seat stuff!
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Chemical engineer Askwar Hilonga wants to be a billionaire - by saving a billion lives. Growing up in rural Tanzania, life was hard. His mother and father didn't go to school and he suffered from water-borne diseases throughout his childhood from drinking contaminated water. Askwar wanted to use his education to help his community and, using his expertise in nanotechnology, he has developed a water filtration system and a network of water purification stations around Africa. He tells his story to Trevor Cox in the fourth episode of Inventive Podcast. Novelist Sarah Franklin, who runs the ‘Short Stories Aloud’ events and is also a judge on the Costa Short Story Award, has written a moving short story based on Askwar's life and work.
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Trevor meets aerospace engineer Sophie Robinson, who's working on groundbreaking eVTOL, electric vertical take-off and landing, aircraft that will change the way we travel in the future. Writer Tony White's inspirational story 'The Hotwells Cold Water Swimming Club’ captures perfectly what Sophie gets up to in her spare time - she’s a self-confessed mermaid! - and the ethical dilemmas she has faced at work.
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The podcast currently has 13 episodes available.