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College Dinner

Last week was the annual Open Day of the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University. I don’t normally manage to attend, but this year I made the effort. I was invited not only to attend the afternoon lectures and evening drinks reception, but to spend the morning judging the final year projects and recommending which should be awarded prizes. That’s new since my day, but was very interesting. There was a huge range of projects across all branches of engineering, and the winners included a structural analysis of the Great Albert Bridge over the River Tamar, a mobile phone app to identify the spread of disease-carrying mosquitos, real-time 3D image segmentation and reconstruction, and filters for electro-optic protection using switchable liquid crystal cells.

The keynote lecture was on “the Rise of the Machines”, and was a fascinating canter through robotics, automation and Big Data, with an emphasis on automating the mining industry in Australia. The lecturer had been at Oxford in the late eighties and had in fact taught me signal and information processing – a field that I’m still working in.

I was particularly honoured to be invited, by the Head of the Department, to join him, the guest lecturer, and a select handful of industry representatives and Oxford academics at a dinner in Balliol College that evening – my old college in fact. As usual, it’s who you know that counts, and the new Head of the Department was my D.Phil supervisor 25 years ago, so when he realised I would be attending the Open Day he wanted to make sure he got a chance to catch up with me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the dinner, and found my fellow guests – there was only about a dozen of us – very interesting. I’d known one of the industrial guests for well over twenty years, as he was involved in the research collaboration project that Christopher was working on when I first met him! That was a bit of a coincidence – but a bigger one was in store for me.

I was chatting away over dinner to the guest on my left, who was the research lead for “disruptive technologies” for a major blue-chip engineering company, when someone hollered “Hey Gillian!” across the table at me. He was one of the upcoming young ambitious professors from the Engineering Department, who was in fact on my “hit list” of academics whose research complements that of my team, and whom I really want to collaborate more closely with. I looked inquiringly at him, and he asked “Did you teach undergraduates here when you were studying for your doctorate?”. I said that yes, I had tutored Balliol undergrads in maths for four years. “I knew it!” he said, “I was sure I recognised that voice!”. It turns out that I had taught him linear algebra – so I confessed that I was only a few pages ahead of him in the text book at the time, and was getting my own tutoring over the phone from Christopher in the evenings! (Christopher had read mathematics at Oxford so was well able to help me when I got stuck, putting me in a position to be able to teach the 2nd year undergrads……)

That was a really weird coincidence. I’d completely forgotten his name and face, but the dates fitted and my teaching clearly hadn’t scarred him too much given his subsequent meteoric rise through the ranks of academia. And it does mean that I’ve got a personal connection to make use of, should we want to collaborate with his team in the future.