Dr David Hardman works in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and is a Henslow Fellow at Fitzwilliam College. He completed his PhD in Cambridge's Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, where he focused on the implementation of unconventional soft materials in robotic systems, with a particular interest in medical applications.David's current research tackles the challenges involved in equipping robots with a sophisticated sense of touch and tactile perception. This requires the design, development, and fabrication of soft and flexible tactile sensors, in order for robots to accomplish a comparable range of physical and dextrous tasks to humans.Human skins provide flexibility, compliance, pressure sensing, temperature sensing, and stimulus localisation whilst also being able to detect and heal damages. Sensing tasks which we perform with ease, such as high resolution tactile localisation or multimodal sensing, are extremely cumbersome to reproduce for robots; artificial skins are usually covered with hundreds of high-density wired sensors, which are expensive and highly fragile when the skin is stretched. Humans reduce the need for universal high-density sensing by varying the sensor distributions across their skins: our fingertips are much more sensitive than our palms. As technologies move towards the design of increasingly general-purpose robots, we require soft sensors which replicate these essential properties without sacrificing robustness, longevity, or straightforward fabrication. By combining robotics, mechanical design, materials science, and machine learning, David explores the challenges behind developing single-material 'e-skins' which replicate all of these properties, enabling robots to sense, perform, and recover from complex and dangerous tasks. Beyond the application of these technologies to artificial skins for robots, he also researches the benefits of their application in wearables, prosthetics, and interactive devices.
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The fundamental laws of physics look different when reflected in a mirror. This is the statement that the laws of physics have a handedness, what physicists call chirality. This is one of the most important facts that we know about the universe, a fact that, remarkably, goes a long way to fixing the mathematical structure of the laws of nature. I will explain how we know about this handedness, why it’s so important, and why there are still several chiral mysteries that remain unsolved.
Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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