ArtsKeele S/S 2018 Arts Keele Spring Summer 2018 v4 | Page 52

FREE
INAUGURAL LECTURE
PROFESSOR GILLIAN LANCASTER
TAKING THE GLOBAL
INITIATIVE: MEASURING EARLY
CHILD DEVELOPMENT IN
NON-WESTERN SETTINGS
Tuesday 6 March 2018 | 6.15pm
WESTMINSTER THEATRE, CHANCELLOR’S BUILDING
It is estimated that 219 million children (39% of the under 5 years population) living in
low and middle income countries are failing to meet their developmental potential.
The new United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 include access to
quality early child development as essential for fairer, inclusive and less poverty stricken
societies. Charting advancement towards this goal requires appropriate benchmarks to
determine where children in a certain population are in comparison to children in other
populations. The accurate measurement of early childhood development is therefore key,
and also crucial for directly assessing the effectiveness of intervention programs. The
urgent need for culturally appropriate measurement tools has been widely acknowledged
and hampers current initiatives sponsored by UN organizations and international funding
agencies. This lecture will highlight the work that has been done to create robust
developmental assessment tools, the new techniques that have been developed to
identify and select appropriate items and the ultimate construction of the World
Health Organisation Key Indicators of Development Scale (WHO KIDS).
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BIO
Gillian Lancaster is Professor of Medical Statistics in
the Institute of Primary Care and Health Sciences.
She was awarded her PhD in Applied Statistics from
Lancaster University and came to Keele University
in 2016. She has been a medical statistician for over
25 years working in medical research with clinical
colleagues. Her research scopes many medical
and social applications, with a specific interest
in methodology for developing patient rep orted
outcome measures and assessment tools for use
with children and young people. She is also Editor
in Chief of the new BioMed Central journal Pilot and
Feasibility Studies.
FREE
INAUGURAL LECTURE
PROFESSOR ZHONG FAN
THE INTERNET OF THINGS
AND DATA DELUGE
Tuesday 17 April 2018 | 6.15pm
WESTMINSTER THEATRE, CHANCELLOR’S BUILDING
Big data is a buzzword for the past few years. A huge amount of the data come from
so-called Internet of Things (IoT) applications which are gathering momentum across
many industrial sectors worldwide. Many research problems arise from IoT data, e.g.
reliable wireless communication solutions for data collection and delivery, efficient data
processing techniques for different industrial applications, quick decision making based
on data mining and machine learning, security and privacy. In this lecture I will discuss
some of these issues based on my previous and current research work, with application
examples in areas such as smart energy, e-health, and smart city. I will finish by addressing
some of the research challenges in our exciting new project called SEND at Keele.
BIO
Zhong Fan is a Professor and Academic Director
of SEND (Smart Energy Network Demonstrator)
at Keele University, UK, where he is leading R&D
of a 15M pounds project that aims to build one of
Europe’s largest live smart energy demonstrator
on Keele campus. Before Joining Keele, he was
a Chief Research Fellow with Toshiba Research
Europe in Bristol, UK, leading research teams on
IoT, smart energy, and 5G communications. He is
an advisory board member of the IEEE Industry
Community on IoT. In his early career, he worked
as a Research Fellow at Cambridge University,
a Lecturer at Birmingham University and a
Researcher at Marconi Labs Cambridge. He was
also awarded a BT Short-Term Fellowship to work
at BT Labs. He earned his BS and MS degrees from
Tsinghua University in China and PhD from Durham
University. He has authored over 160 papers in
leading international journals and conferences
and holds 35 patents.
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