Events
Explore the latest events attended/hosted by the CMCL team.
Connected Places Summit 2025
As always, it was a pleasure attending this year’s Summit ran by Connected Places Catapult and the Digital Twin Hub.
We had far too many conversations to list here, but it was a great chance to catch up with familiar faces in person. Keeping up with people virtually is great but there’s no substitute for a face to face chat.
Chatting to other SMEs at the event and discussing what we all found worked for us, and how to improve was very valuable. I think the network of small companies within this space is truly special, and I wish everyone success.
Also great to make connections with the Energy Systems Catapult and the Digital Catapult. The UK Catapult Network is key to helping SMEs like CMCL innovate and expand, and to boost the country’s competitive advantage.
A huge thanks and congratulations to the organising team for pulling off another excellent event!
Materials & Manufacturing Showcase 2025
The huge turnout at the Materials and Manufacturing Showcase 2025 event organised by Innovate UK Business Connect on 19 February 2025 at the fabulous St. Paul’s venue in London was another testimony to the UK’s thriving materials and manufacturing sectors in the face of ever-increasing cross-sector challenges.
Lots of interesting flash presentations, high profile plenary talks, panel discussions and nice exhibition of the capabilities within the community showcased the advances while at the same time called for further support and investment in the field to continue growing.
Our R&I Manager, Dr Bijan Yadollahi stated from the event – “It was exciting to see the key themes of “The World Avatar™” in digitalisation, interoperability, decarbonisation and resilience were also commonly recurring in the discussions during the day”.
CMCL’s solutions in the B2B and collaborative R&D space, for example, to our customers in the materials and automotive domain as well as projects such as DOME 4.0, OpenModel and OntoTrans highlight our commitment to contribute to advancing the Materials and Manufacturing sector in the UK and internationally.
Futureproofing the UK - ESA
Our CEO, Dr Amit Bhave, attended the European Space Agency ‘Futureproofing the UK’ event in Oxford on November 28th.
Discussions were varied, spanning climate resilience to rapid surveying. We see the rapid increase in availability of satellite data as key to future CMCL projects.
Highways UK 2024
Toby Greenwood once again represented CMCL at Highways UK 2024.
As always, there were many interesting talks on and it was great to hear opinions from George Economides, Mark Enzer, Glenn Lyons and Wolfgang Schuster, to name a few.
CMCL have recently been representing transport assets via mid-level ontologies, extending on the work we did during a TRIG project last year to support our current ‘DE-WASTE’ project with BNL. We see the transport sector as fundamental to our work with The World Avatar, and are continuing to build upon our cross-sector capabilities.
DOME 4.0 3rd Hackathon
The event contained discussions surrounding the work across data interoperability, semantics and ontologies, building up to live hacks where participants were introduced to the ecosystem.
Dr Chung Ting Lao delivered talks and two technical hacks on use cases, including a virtual sensor system for air quality, and another on self-driving labs. Chung leads our technical work in DOME 4.0, and has been instrumental to the delivery of the platform and the use case, working in collaboration with the core partners.
Dr Bijan Yadollahi led the discussions on the sustainability and business architecture aspects of DOME 4.0, fostering an open atmosphere enabling contributions from all participants.
Many thanks to our speakers:
– Dr Iker Esnaola-Gonzalez from BASF Digital Solutions
– Christoph Mertens from the IDSA
– Kate Lin from Google Research
Dr Amit Bhave, project coordinator, had a great time moderating the three keynotes and summarised the advancement of the DOME platform and the 9 B2B showcases. Insights into the latest breakthroughs in industry were invaluable to the consortium, and catalysed many fruitful discussions.
Many thanks to the team at UCL for hosting us at their East Campus.
DAFNI Conference 2024
Science in the age of AI
Toby Greenwood (CMCL) and Dr Jiaru Bai (UoC) represented The World Avatar™ at the Royal Society on the 28th May. The event was held to celebrate the release of the recent ‘Science in the age of AI’ report, and a range of organisations, government departments, and people with an interest in novel applications of AI attended.
The report can be read here and covers a range of contentious topics with input from a diverse group of experts.
OntoTrans Month 48
OntoTrans, a EU Horizon 2020 project is reaching its final concluding months, where years of intense work comes to fruition. Month 48 consortium meeting of the project was held on 19-20 March 2024 in Freiburg, Germany, to mark this milestone, and to discuss the status of the technical development in the project along with the execution of industrial challenges (Apps) in the project, and to lay out plans for the exploitation activities in the remaining time of the project.
As a part of the event, CMCL presented the progress on the Steel Section Mill user case in collaboration with ArcelorMittal to realise key objectives namely time-to-market, digitalisation and decarbonisation via introduction of its advanced digital workflow to gain more insight into the relationship between mechanical properties of steel beams and the underlying process parameters. Through a live demo, the integration between the execution of the user case and the OntoTrans Open Translation Environment was demonstrated. Further updates regarding the tools developed to enable semantic interoperability in this user case were also presented. Such demonstrations help showcase the benefits of the OntoTrans platform for the end users and provide an example of how the proposed approach in Industrial Translation can help tackle real-world industrial challenges.
It’s great to be part of the OntoTrans team, and see the progression of the system Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) as a result of the collaboration.
Connected Places Summit 2024
Toby Greenwood represented CMCL at the Connected Places Summit 2024, run by Connected Places Catapult. It was fantastic to see so many familiar faces, and equally exciting to make new connections.
A diverse range of industries were present, and plenty of cross-sector discussions were had! These reaffirmed the value of The World Avatar‘s interoperable and agnostic approach.
The CReDo project was well represented, where the direction of the project and exciting upcoming developments were showcased.
A huge thank you to the events/comms team at CPC for continuing to organise and deliver top quality events. They continue to be invaluable spaces to network and connect.
European R&I Days 2024
As a part of the Research and Innovation Week, the 2024 edition of the European Research and Innovation Days was held on 20-21 March 2024 at Tour and Taxis in Brussels. The flagship event gathered researchers, policymakers, industrial representatives and the general public to discuss the status of the Research and Innovation in the continent.
We are happy to have had the opportunity to join delegates and stakeholders from across Europe, to discuss our contributions to the Research and Innovation through our engagement in the Collaborative research initiatives.
In particular, our collaborative research efforts in digitalisation and decarbonisation fields, including the coordination of the actvities in the Digital Open Marketplace Ecosystem (DOME) 4.0 and providing the technical knowledge graph based framework for the Climate Resilience Demonstrator CReDo project were discussed with the delegates, emphasising on the importance of the data FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and sharing, as well as the climate resilience in a greener, fairer and more competitive Europe.
At CMCL, we are keen to collaborate towards accelerating Research and Innovation to help build a greener, fairer, and more competitive future. Engage with us to know more about CMCL’s digitalisation and decarbonisation solutions to realise such a future.
Aligning well with the project, the three themes for the conference this year were:
– Modelling for Resilient Infrastructure
– Challenges and Opportunities in Data Sharing
– The Impact of Digital Twins
Many thanks to the organisers, and to Aston University.