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A Boost for Data Science in Ireland

Posted in Cardiff, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on March 11, 2019 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know that before I moved to Maynooth University I worked (part-time) in the Data Innovation Research Institute at Cardiff University, during which time we were very happy to be awarded a Centre for Doctoral Training by the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), shared across Cardiff, Swansea and Bristol, as part of a big investment in this area by the UK government.

Now Science Foundation Ireland has announced a similar programme in Ireland: on Tuesday 5th March, Minister for Business, Enterprise, and Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD, and Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan TD, announced investment of over €100 million in six new SFI Centres for Research Training in the fields of ICT and data analytics. I’m very pleased to hear that Maynooth University is involved in two of these; there’s a news item on the University web pages here.

One of the new SFI Centres for Research Training, in Foundations of Data Science, is a joint initiative of Maynooth University, University College Dublin and the University of Limerick, with the support of Skillnet Ireland underpinning its industry and enterprise engagement. This Centre was awarded a total of €21 million, including industry and university contributions to train 139 PhD students towards a world-class foundational understanding of Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Machine Learning. This represents the largest ever investment in mathematical sciences research in Ireland. The Maynooth involvement is based around the famous Hamilton Institute.

I’m not involved in this initiative myself, at least part of the reason for which is that I didn’t even know about the scheme until the results were announced, but I do hope there will be opportunities for my future PhD students working in `Big Data’ problems in cosmology to benefit from some of the training opportunities it provides.

A much wider issue is that companies based in Ireland have reported difficulties in filling vacancies with candidates sufficiently well trained in data science so hopefully this will help close the skills gap here.

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Quality Cat

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on March 6, 2019 by telescoper

Well, today is the first day of the Quality Review Panel visit to the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. It has come up very quickly; I blogged about the preparations some weeks ago.

Anyway, what with the Quality Review and regular teaching and marking I’m going to be a bit preoccupied for the rest of today and tomorrow. I was in early this morning ahead of the first meeting, and noticed Maynooth University Library Cat was on sentry duty at his usual post:

More surprisingly I learn that said cat now has his own Twitter account, so please give him a follow!


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“No Erasmus please, we’re British..”

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on February 28, 2019 by telescoper

As the ongoing Brexit fiasco systematically trashes Britain’s international reputation, the consequences for the UK University sector are becoming increasingly obvious. In particular, the realization that Britain now defines itself exclusively by its xenophobia has led to a decision by Spain to remove the UK from the list of potential destinations for students under the Erasmus scheme. I’m sure other nations will soon make the same decision.

The European Union has agreed to honour Erasmus grants this year to UK students wish to study at European universities under Erasmus regardless of whether there is a Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and EU, but this is unlikely to be anything other than a stop-gap. It’s very sad to think that British students will be denied access to the Erasmus scheme in future, along with losing all the other benefits of Freedom of Movement.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. Irish universities are more than happy to accept Erasmus students, and the one I work in (Maynooth) has a very active involvement in the scheme. So if you’re a student based in the EU, and want to study at an English-speaking university, why not apply to study in Ireland?

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What a difference a year makes

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , on February 27, 2019 by telescoper

All this week we’ve seen very nice sunny weather in Maynooth, with temperatures reaching around 16 degrees (which is unusually high for February). This is in remarkable contrast with this time last year, when Ireland was facing the Beast from the East. The roads were blocked, the airports were closed, people were panic-buying bread, and the scene on campus was this:

It’s not been quite as warm here as it has been in England and Wales, where temperatures have exceeded  20°C, but it’s still been very pleasant – apart, perhaps, from being a bit warm in the computer laboratory.

One can’t help thinking, though, that there’s something disconcerting about this weather. It’s almost as if the climate might be changing or something like that.

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Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

Posted in Literature, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , on February 21, 2019 by telescoper

Before Christmas I attended a very enjoyable event here in Maynooth featuring journalist, historian and literary critic Fintan O’Toole talking his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. I bought the book and had it signed by the author. Sadly, as I do far too often these days, I put the book on my shelf and promptly forgot about it as I got distracted by a myriad of other things.

This week I finally got round to reading it and very enjoyable it is too, though I expect people who voted Leave won’t like it, as it is probably a bit close to the bone for them.

The book deals with the Brexit referendum, the chaos it unleashed in British politics and the challenges posed to the island of Ireland by a ‘No Deal Brexit’. In particular the book examines how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatization that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. He also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, or Franklin lost in the Arctic. Now failure is no longer heroic – it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit’s supporters, and by those who may suffer the consequences of a hard border in Ireland and the breakdown of a fragile peace.

It’s a very witty book which is at its best picking apart some of the some-contradictory rhetoric deployed by Leave campaigners, such as how the UK can be both grandiosely jingoistic and bullied by the EU at the same time, pulling in references from historical events and literature as well as contemporary culture (including Fifty Shades of Grey, the references to which were lost on me because I haven’t read it). It’s also very perceptive in its observation of how strongly the legacy of World War 2 pervades attitudes towards Brexit, especially the silly references to `Dunkirk Spirit’ and the rest that are the stock-in-trade of many Leavers.

Anyway, I heartily recommend this book to both Leavers and Remainers but it might induce a sense of humour failure in the former.

 

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Back to Victory

Posted in Biographical, Crosswords, Maynooth with tags , on February 17, 2019 by telescoper

Well, I got back to Maynooth from my little tour last night, on time and not too knackered. Credit where it’s due to Ryanair, in that all three flights I took last week (Dublin-EMA, Luton-Copenhagen, and Copenhagen-Dublin) were in good order and on schedule, as well as being very cheap.

Today I’ve been in the office for a few hours catching up on some preparation for tomorrow’s teaching. I’m starting a new topic in my Engineering Mathematics module so had to assemble a new problem set for distribution.

That done I downloaded a batch of weekend crosswords. I’ve decided not to buy any more British newspapers and to get my news instead from the Irish Times. However, the Financial Times, Guardian and Observer all put their prize crosswords online for free so I can keep up the crossword habit at a much lower cost.

Downloading this week’s FT Prize Crossword, I found that I’m actually a winner:

It’s interesting that two of the three winners are based in Ireland, though I would not wish to over-interpret this datum.

I wonder how long it will take for the prize to reach me in the post? It’s
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, not a dictionary but a book about a dictionary. Meta.

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Mumps and Mumpsimusses

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on February 12, 2019 by telescoper

I noticed that there has been an outbreak of mumps among students in the Dublin area (including a case in Maynooth). I had mumps when I was a kid and I can tell you it was no fun at all. I had thought mumps had been virtually eradicated by vaccination; the MMR vaccine was brought into use in the UK in 1988, and I had mumps long before that. I suppose one can lay the blame for the current outbreak at the door of the anti-vaxxers.

That brings me to one of my favourite words – yet another that I found out while doing a crossword – mumpsimus. Here is (part of) the OED entry:

Wikipedia gives “traditional custom obstinately adhered to however unreasonable it may be”, which is in the OED further down the page.

It seems to me that belief in idea that one’s children should not be protected against mumps is a mumpsimus, and people who cling to that belief are mumpsimusses.

 

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The Tree of Liberty Stone

Posted in History, Maynooth with tags , , , , on February 10, 2019 by telescoper

I had to come into the office today to do a few things ahead of what will be another busy week, but when I stepped out I found the weather to be much more pleasant than it has been of late, so went for a short stroll around the town of Maynooth. I’m also house-hunting, so I took the opportunity to have a look at the locations of a few properties I’d seen on the market before deciding whether to check them out in more detail.

Anyway, at the opposite end of the Main Street from the Maynooth University campus, I found the above monument, the Tree of Liberty Stone, which commemorates the (failed) Irish Rebellion of 1798 which had sought to emulate the French Revolution (which began in 1789) in overthrowing British rule in Ireland. This rebellion was launched by the Society of United Irishmen.

Incidentally, one of the founders and leading lights of the Society of United Irishmen was a character from Belfast by the name of Henry Joy McCracken. That name will be familiar to many astronomers, and especially to people involved in the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, as there is an astronomer with exactly the same name who did his PhD in Durham and who now works in Paris. Whether the present Henry Joy McCracken is directly related I don’t know.

The historical Henry Joy McCracken was executed by public hanging on 17th July 1798 after the failure of the 1798 rebellion. He was just 30 years old. Another thing worth mentioning is that he was a Protestant republican. There were more of those than people tend to think.

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Banging the drum for ESO

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 6, 2019 by telescoper

It was a pleasure to welcome Rob Ivison, Director of Science at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) , to Maynooth this afternoon for a colloquium.

I was on my best behaviour introducing his talk and even refrained from pointing out that his native Lancashire is actually in the Midlands.

Ireland became a full member of ESO earlier this year and Rob has been touring Ireland giving talks to encourage Irish astronomers to make the most of the many opportunities membership presents. Having already visited Cork and Galway he passed through Maynooth today before ending up in Dublin tomorrow.

It was an enjoyable and impressive talk and very nice to chat with Rob afterwards over dinner.

Bon voyage to Rob and thanks for the visit!

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John & Pat Hume Doctoral Scholarships

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on February 5, 2019 by telescoper

You may or may not know that former Northern Irish politician John Hume, is an alumnus of St Patrick’s College Maynooth and thus has close connections with Maynooth University. There’s a building named after him, for one thing.

In the words of the Maynooth University website,

Born in Derry/Londonderry, John Hume was the second leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) from 1979 to 2001. He has served as a member of the European Parliament and a member of the UK parliament, as well as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

He is regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent political history of Ireland and one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace process. The co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with David Trimble in 1998, Hume was also recognised with the Gandhi Peace Prize and the Martin Luther King Award – he is the only recipient of all three major peace awards.

In 2010, he was named ‘Ireland’s Greatest’ in a public poll by RTÉ. It is fitting that Maynooth University recognises the contribution of John and Pat Hume to peace on the island of Ireland.

One of the most important manifestations of the connection between John Hume, his wife Pat Hume, and Maynooth University is a programme of Doctoral Scholarships, which are now being advertised for entry in September 2019.

These are available to fund a PhD in any academic discipline so I encourage anyone interested in doing graduate research to have a look at the details which can be found here. Maynooth University is particularly keen to encourage more women to pursue careers in STEM disciplines, so we particularly encourage female applicants.

If there’s anyone out there who might be interested in doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics or Astrophysics please feel free to contact me directly! And I’d be very grateful if others who see this could draw it to the attention of potential candidates.

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