At this evening meeting in London, we return to the popular themes of open source 3D printing and making. We’re delighted to welcome three leading authorities in the field to speak to us. This is a joint meeting with the UK Open Source Hardware Users Group.

Each talk will last 30 minutes and include plenty of time for questions. We look forward to seeing you there.

We anticipate this evening may be oversubscribed, so please book promptly. We shall be videoing the talks for later posting on YouTube for those who are unable to make it.

Speaker(s):
Rachel “Konichiwakitty” Wong
Bracken Dawson
Adrian Bowyer

Summary of the event:
Fashion Technology, Stem Cell Research & Mental Health
Rachel “Konichiwakitty” Wong

Rachel will be talking about her personal projects in Fashion Technology and her work in stem cell research and how open source and social media communications has helped her achieve her goals. She will also touch on the importance of having a varied interest in relation to mental health.

Delta Printers Are Really Cool
Bracken Dawson

A short talk on the ups and the many downs of delta machines, when & why you should use one, what the challenges are and a few different ways to conquer those challenges.

In the future, everyone will work for 15 minutes.
Adrian Bowyer

There is much said about the coming impact on work of the robot and AI revolutions, some of it quite well-informed. But the powers of automation and intelligence are dwarfed by the power of something else: self-replication. After the fundamental forces of physics, self-replication is the most significant phenomenon that there is. Using the Sun’s energy over the last four billion years, self-replication and Darwin’s Law have created a world-surface that is knee-deep in reproducing nano-machines. Indeed, your very knees are made out of them.

Yet engineering hasn’t worked with the power of self-replication much, if at all, until now. This talk will be about the RepRap Project—an open-source project that has created humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine. It will examine the likely social and economic impacts of self-replicating technology, and draw parallels with a twelve-thousand-year-old industry that uses natural self-replicating machines, the industry without which we would all starve: farming.

Speaker Biographies (50 words per speaker):

Rachel “Konichiwakitty” Wong (@konichiwakitty) is a wearable tech innovator and a stem cell scientist. During the day, her PhD involves using stem cells to grow optic vesicles to study and find a cure for genetic childhood blindness. When she isn’t working, she creates wearable fashion technology. She combines her skills in sewing and jewellery-making together with programming and electronics. She exhibits and gives talks on her fashion tech projects around the world to encourage young girls into STEM education and careers. She was recently awarded an Electronics Weekly BrightSparks engineering award for her work in tissue engineering and fashion technology. She can be found on twitter as @konichiwakitty where she shares all her latest projects.

Bracken Dawson is a developer at IBM working on the Cloud. He was one of the five founding trustees of So Make It, the Southampton makerspace. He has been building 3D printers since the 3D printing boom in 2012.

Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. He was an academic engineer and mathematician at the University of Bath for 35 years, from where he retired in 2012 to become a director of RepRap Ltd., a company that sells RepRap machines and components, and that undertakes research and consultancy in RepRap-related projects. RepRap Ltd is an entirely open-source company, and all its designs, software and documentation are freely available to everyone.

His areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the creators of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. He is the author of about one hundred papers and books on many different aspects of engineering, computing, mathematics and biology.

Agenda:

Start: 18:00
End: 20:00

About the organiser:
The BCSOpen Source SG organises this event; find out more about the group at https://ossg.bcs.org

For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event, please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters.

Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. He was an academic engineer and mathematician at the University of Bath for 35 years, from where he retired in 2012 to become a director of RepRap Ltd., a company that sells RepRap machines and components, and that undertakes research and consultancy in RepRap-related projects. RepRap Ltd is an entirely open-source company, and all its designs, software and documentation are freely available to everyone.

His areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the creators of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. He is the author of about one hundred papers and books on many different aspects of engineering, computing, mathematics and biology.