Techweek, New Zealand’s festival of technology and innovation, is going to look a little different this year. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Techweek2020 is moving to July and will only involve digital events. 

The new dates for Techweek2020 are 27 July to 2 August. 

Moving Techweek2020 to late July gives Techweek the opportunity to be a channel and platform for positive regrowth, economic stimulation and connections during the COVID-19 recovery phase.

A digital Techweek

The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 means that we have made the decision to take Techweek entirely online this year. 

While this new format means that only digital events will be part of Techweek2020, it also means that people won’t be restricted by their geographic locations so they can attend any or all of the Techweek2020 events.

Event organisers are being encouraged to re-imagine their events as virtual experiences.  We look forward to seeing a broad range of events to engage, inform and inspire Kiwis, and to help us connect to our future. 

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Techweek, New Zealand’s festival of technology and innovation, is going to look a little different this year. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Techweek2020 is moving to July and will only involve digital events. 

The new dates for Techweek2020 are 27 July to 2 August. 

Moving Techweek2020 to late July gives Techweek the opportunity to be a channel and platform for positive regrowth, economic stimulation and connections during the COVID-19 recovery phase.

A digital Techweek

The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 means that we have made the decision to take Techweek entirely online this year. 

While this new format means that only digital events will be part of Techweek2020, it also means that people won’t be restricted by their geographic locations so they can attend any or all of the Techweek2020 events.

Event organisers are being encouraged to re-imagine their events as virtual experiences.  We look forward to seeing a broad range of events to engage, inform and inspire Kiwis, and to help us connect to our future. 

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The New Zealand Institute of International Affairs invites you to a public discussion on how Cyber security in the Covid-19 world presents new threats and issues for New Zealand.

Director General of the Government Communications Security Bureau Andrew Hampton will provide insights into the global cyber threatscape, the impact of COVID-19, and the role of his agency in helping defend against sophisticated, high impact, cyber threats.

Andrew will then and take part in a facilitated discussion to respond to questions around New Zealand’s place and role in addressing one of the most significant threats facing developed nations.

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This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

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The Waikato Public Law and Policy Research Unit of Te Piringa Faculty of Law are having an event in which faculty members will present their research on several legal dimensions of Covid-19.

The speakers and topics will be:

- Professor Claire Breen: “The Right to Health and Covid 19: A Core Right in New Zealand's Legal Response'

- Associate Professor Trevor Daya-Winterbottom "COVID - climate change, RMA reform, and the Rule of Law"

- Associate Professor Nathan Cooper: 'COVID-19 and identity: planetary boundaries, ethical boundaries, and the will to change'.

All are welcome to attend.

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Join the leading researchers and scientists from the ‘Melting Ice and Rising Seas’ team as they share the science of projecting sea-level rise

A group of more than 20 scientists from Wellington’s Antarctic Research Centre Te Puna Pātiotio, working in partnership with GNS Science and NIWA, has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Science Prize for 2019.

The ‘Melting Ice and Rising Seas’ project team of geologists, glaciologists, climate and social scientists discovered ice melt due to climate change could lift global sea-levels by up to 1.4 metres by 2100.

The team used ice and sediment cores drilled on annual expeditions to the Antarctic to make fundamental discoveries about the sensitivity and behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet in a warmer world. Then, together, with their world-leading ice sheet modelling and prediction capability, the team has improved knowledge of the consequences of sea-level rise and impacts, both globally and in New Zealand. This work puts New Zealand at the forefront of global environmental research and showcases the importance of University-led, long-term research in preparing New Zealand for the future impacts of climate change.

Join the leading researchers and scientists from the ‘Melting Ice and Rising Seas’ team as they share the science of projecting sea-level rise, the consequences both locally and globally, and how the team is working with communities and decision-makers throughout Aotearoa to help to prepare for the impacts of sea-level rise.

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Join in for our next Café Scientifique, a free public science talk series at Globe Theatre!

Dr Charline Lormand, Volcanologist, will be answering the question "Can volcanologists predict volcanic eruptions?". Don't miss out on this one-off opportunity to learn on a fascinating topic!

The talk will be on Wednesday 5 August, at 7 pm. Licensed bar/café service will be available at the Globe Theatre from 6 pm.

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This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

More information

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

More information

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

More information

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

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Inaugural Professorial Lecture - Professor Rhiannon Braund

Rhiannon’s research centers on medication, use, safety and effectiveness. This work has a strong equity and access focus, and considers patient behaviours regarding adherence and medication wastage. This expertise has been recognised across many clinical areas. Her research into advanced roles for pharmacists and support staff has resulted in multiple practice changes and new models of care both locally and internationally.

Further, her passion for pharmacy and student success was recognised in 2012 when she was awarded the Prime Minister’s award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence. Her professional recognitions include Fellowships of both the New Zealand College and the Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand. She holds national leadership roles to enhance the use of medications and improve patient access and outcomes through better utilisation of pharmacists.

This lecture will be followed with light refreshments, tea, coffee & juice.

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What’s next for New Zealand in the fight against climate change?

Join Professor James Renwick and New Zealand’s Minister for Climate Change Hon James Shaw for a conversation about climate change in New Zealand. They will discuss what is currently being done in our country to combat climate change, what more we can do in the future, and how COVID-19 may have changed things.

Professor Renwick and Minister Shaw will discuss their views and expertise on New Zealand’s climate change present and future for around 40 minutes before opening to the audience for further questions.

Registration is essential to attend this event.

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The natural sciences that allow us to understand the environment are at the heart of developing strategies to adapt to, survive, and thrive as climate changes. Water is at the heart of many of the most complex problems in climate sciences: understanding the behavior of clouds in a warmer world, how land ecosystems mediate evolving rainfall patterns, and when weather patterns trigger decline of the polar ice sheets. The behavior of these macrophysical problems can be interrogated by knowing the details of the microscopic properties of water: small variations in the abundance of naturally occurring heavy oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in water. Utilizing the stable isotope chemistry requires integrating many scientific disciplines and linking disparate areas of theoretical, observational and modeling techniques.

Professor Noone will give examples of the coupling of carbon and water cycles in forests, and in the interaction of forest fire and clouds. He will discuss the importance of the sciences which form the kernel that enable evidence-based decision making, and the opportunities for leveraging physical sciences to empower communities to shape their responses to climate change.

Professor Noone is a natural scientist whose specialty is on understanding relationships between water, clouds and changing global wind patterns. He is most well-known for his work blending isotope ratios in the atmosphere and on the landscape with more traditional atmospheric science, in both modeling and observational contexts. He helps build and use climate models that are used predict future climate change. He has served as a member of several NASA science teams including earth observing spacecraft and aircraft missions designed to measure the composition of the atmosphere.

Professor Noone's research takes him and his students around the world to investigate climate change: from the rainstorms over lush forests of New Guinea, equatorial oases of the Galapagos, desert mountain tops in Hawaii and the endless ice fields of Greenland. He delights in teaching weather and climate in the classroom, and on his field classes observing climate, but his preferred platform to observe wind and waves has a sail.

Refreshments will be served in the basement foyer of building 303 (303-B00L2) from 5:30pm, prior to the lecture.

An expert panel will discuss how they helped to engineer world-first quake-resilient buildings and structures, in an upcoming free UC Connect public talk on the evening of Wednesday 12 August.

The upcoming talk, UC Connect: Earthquakes + Innovation = Resilience will feature three revolutionary, award-winning UC academics – Distinguished Professor Geoff Chase, Professor Geoff Rodgers and Professor Alessandro Palermo. Each professor will highlight a different aspect of structural earthquake engineering advances made and lessons learnt, following the Canterbury earthquakes. Their talks will include an overview of some of the new resilient structures built using their novel solutions, such as state-of-the-art seismic dampers, and techniques, like in-silico “virtual buildings”, helping to engineer a more resilient future.

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This talk will provide a brief overview of research in GIS and geographical information retrieval in the School of Computer Science & Informatics in Cardiff University, and focus on two particular fields of spatial natural language processing and of environmental mapping with social media.

Automated understanding of spatial language is of importance in georeferencing textual information and in generating spatial language expressions that describe locations. A particular challenge is modelling the meaning and applicability of vague spatial relation terms such as near, at and north of. The talk includes an application of such models to generate rich natural language descriptions of the locations at which photographs were taken.

Social media has great value in recording events and phenomena in the natural environment. Recent research in Cardiff has demonstrated that social media tags can be used to infer aspects of the environment such as land cover, wildlife species distribution and landscape scenicness. Machine learning classifiers that exploit evidence from social media provide more accurate predictions of such phenomena than conventional structured environmental datasets (such as climate, soil, elevation and population) when they are used in isolation.

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The Youth19 Rangatahi Smart Survey (Youth19) is the latest in the Youth2000 series of health & wellbeing surveys.

Youth19 was conducted in 2019 in the Auckland, Northland & Waikato regions by researchers from The University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago & Auckland University of Technology.

Youth19 builds on previous Youth2000 surveys conducted by the Adolescent Health Research Group. Since 1999, the Youth2000 series has included over 36,000 young people in Aotearoa, with findings used widely to inform policy and practice, here and overseas. Youth19 combines core Youth2000 questions with a new focus on rangatahi wellbeing and, for the first time, direct access to digital help options for participants.

An overview of Youth19 findings will be released for the first time in person on Thursday 13 August at the Faculty of Education and Social Work.

This is a cross-school event, hosted by Learning Development and Professional Practice and Counselling Human Services and Social Work.

Speakers include:

Dr Terry Fleming, Victoria University of Wellington (Co-principal investigator)

Associate Professor Terryann Clark, The University of Auckland (Co-principal investigator)

Dr John Fenaughty, Dr Lara Graves, Dr Jemaima Tiatia-Seath and members of the Adolescent Health Research Group

Refreshments will follow the presentation and Q&A

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FULLY BOOKED

Bird curator Colin Miskelly has led four expeditions to southern Fiordland since 2016, all focused on seabird conservation.

These have included landings on 180 different islands between Doubtful Sound and Puysegur Point. In this talk, Colin will describe some of the highlights from these expeditions, including comparisons with what Captain Cook and his officers found in Dusky Sound in 1773, and changes in response to pioneering rat and stoat eradication successes since the 1980s. Colin’s most recent Fiordland trip, searching for nesting storm petrels on Secretary Island, was partially funded by the Friends of Te Papa.

To get a taste of Colin’s adventures check out this blog post he shared with us during lockdown. Colin’s talk will share rich details of his experiences and research, so we hope you’ll join us for what promises to be an intriguing hour of stories!

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"From embryos to organoids: harnessing stem cells to study disease"

Promotion to professor at the University of Auckland is a mark of distinction, recognising professional and academic eminence at an international level.

Please join us in celebrating Professor Alan Davidson's achievement at his inaugural lecture.

Abstract:

Stem cells offer great promise for new medical treatments because they act like a ‘fountain of youth’ to regenerate lost or damaged tissues. Amongst the most powerful of these are pluripotent stem cells, which resemble cells found in early embryos and can be ‘matured’ into all of the cell types of the body. Applying an understanding of embryonic processes to human pluripotent stem cells has led to the discovery that mini organs (organoids) can be grown and studied in the laboratory. This capability allows fundamental questions in human organ development and disease/injury to be investigated, as well as providing new ways to develop drugs. In the future, stem cell-derived tissues may even be used to regenerate damaged organs.

Professor Alan Davidson will share his success thus far with a personal story that reflects on his own ‘embryonic’ beginnings as a researcher and his contributions to the fields of kidney development and stem cell biology.

Biography:

Alan is the Head of the Department of Molecular Medicine & Pathology at the University of Auckland and uses kidney organoids, zebrafish and rats to study renal disease. Prior to returning to New Zealand in 2011 he was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Regenerative Medicine/Harvard Medical School (USA).

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Seaweed as an aqua-culture crop is attracting global attention these days – and NZ has some of the cleanest ocean seaweed in the world. Our one-day seminar will explore the practical side of growing and harvesting NZ high grade Undaria pinnatifida (Wakame) seaweed in an environmentally sustainable way. 

We are Bio-Grow organic certified seaweed processors and have been buying raw Undaria from NZ harvesters since 2012 to make our Waikaitu Ltd agricultural products. 

The seminar will be divided into two sessions: Morning session - overview of the global market, opportunities & hurdles in NZ, current research results, government rules, regulations & approved harvest regions. Afternoon session - best practice seaweed growing, harvesting, processing, transport, and storage, and plenty of Q&A time with presenters who will be revealed closer to the event date. 

Our engaging speakers are confirmed as: Alex Pressman, MBA, CEO Waikaitu Ltd.; Serean Adams, PhD. Cawthron Institute Aquaculture Group Manager; Paul Creswell, Senior Aquaculture Analyst within Nelson’s Aquaculture Team, Fisheries New Zealand; Lindsey White, PhD. Auckland University of Technology, Professor of Phycology and Fisheries; Jonathan Large, Marine Farming Assoc President; and Denise Briggs, Program Lead Specialist for Aquaculture and Marine Conservation, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology. 

If you are considering the seaweed industry because you are already in aquaculture - or are interested in starting up an environmentally clean business – do not miss this opportunity to hear about the blue-green economy. 

Date subject to change if govt moves to COVID-19 Alert Levels 2,3 or 4. 

Date: 14 August from 9:30am to 4pm. THIS IS A FREE EVENT. Venue: only ZOOM attendance is available at this point. Please book no later than 12 August 2020. CONTACT: Leanne@waikaitu.com with your name, email, hometown and professional background. 

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