Events

Landscapes are the arenas where people interact with nature and where land management decisions are made and implemented. Responding to changes in our landscapes, ecosystems and biodiversity will help us to meet multiple environmental, social and economic objectives.

Sandra Lavorel leads the Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation research portfolio at Manaaki Whenua. She is an agronomer and ecologist. Her research focuses on how ecosystems change in response to climate and land use and how this knowledge can help us manage landscapes for climate adaptation.

In this seminar, Sandra will discuss nature-based solutions based on ecological resilience and regulating functions, and their potential to support climate change adaptation. She will illustrate nature-based adaptation solutions in New Zealand and discuss the critical questions for managing landscapes to increase these nature-based solutions.

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There is near consensus in the emerging field of data ethics that processes and systems must be transparent and explainable to a wide range of stakeholders. A process or system is transparent and explainable if it is possible to discover and explain how and why a system made a particular decision. Such systems are to be contrasted with those that are ‘black-boxes’, which process data in ways which cannot be understood or explained to those they affect. In this talk, Professor Tim Dare will discuss why transparency and explainability have become central to data ethics and the reasons there are to question that centrality. Professor Dare will also discuss why we should be more concerned with reliability and with how automated systems compare, ethically, and with alternative ways of doing the tasks which might be done by automated systems.

Tim Dare is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He began his academic career in the early 1990s, earning a PhD in the philosophy of law following a brief career as a lawyer.

Professor Dare’s publications include books and articles on the philosophy of law, legal ethics, immunisation programmes, the significance of judicial disagreement, parental rights and medical decisions, the proper allocation of the burden of proof, and the use of predictive analytics in child protection.

Professor Dare is employed by New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development to provide data ethics advice and to develop privacy, human rights, and ethical review processes for proposed uses of client data. He has provided ethical reviews of a number of predictive risk modelling tools in New Zealand and the US. He also sits on a number of local and national research and clinical ethics committees.

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At the roadshows, MBIE staff will review the 2020 round and cover the different investment mechanisms, available funding, application process, key dates, eligibility, investment signals and impact categories, assessment criteria, and key documents.

The roadshows are an opportunity for researchers to engage with the Endeavour Team. The first hour will be the webinar presentation and the second hour will be available for Q&A.

Each roadshow will take place via a Zoom webinar. There are three time options:

Monday, 12 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

Tuesday, 13 October 2020: 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Monday, 19 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

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• Understanding tourist exposure to hazards in the South Island
• Tourism and emergency management connections and opportunities
• COVID-19 recovery issues for Regional Tourism Organisations
   

• Long-term recovery trajectories in North Canterbury and Kaikōura
• Re-imagining rural tourism in the shadow of a global pandemic
• Tourism as a tool for rural resilience in the context of compounding hazards: lessons learnt and the way forward.

At the roadshows, MBIE staff will review the 2020 round and cover the different investment mechanisms, available funding, application process, key dates, eligibility, investment signals and impact categories, assessment criteria, and key documents.

The roadshows are an opportunity for researchers to engage with the Endeavour Team. The first hour will be the webinar presentation and the second hour will be available for Q&A.

Each roadshow will take place via a Zoom webinar. There are three time options:

Monday, 12 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

Tuesday, 13 October 2020: 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Monday, 19 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

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All of us at the University of Auckland are engaged in some way in the enterprise of ‘making life better’ — for ourselves, our students, our whānau, our communities, our species, our planet. In doing so, we uphold important values: reason, evidence, scientific method, free-thought, liberty, and collegiality. Their application, seasoned with the wisdom we inherit from our various cultures, has allowed us to make measurable and profound progess: in contrast to prevailing impressions, the data tell us that life-quality continues to improve, and despite many ongoing challenges, there has never been a better time to be alive.

In this talk, I hope to remind us of the progress we have made, while overviewing my own modest contributions toward ‘making life better’ by applying my passion for physics, instrumentation and measurement to the fields of bioengineering and health. These efforts have mostly been in developing devices for better understanding the heart, and in inventing needle-free drug delivery technologies. In this endeavour, it has been a delight to work with many inspirational colleagues, and treasured students, who will not go unrecognised. Ultimately, I argue that it is the values that underpin academic life that continue to ‘make life better’, and that consequently we all have more to be grateful for than ever before.

• Refreshments begin at 5:15pm
• Lecuture begins at 6pm

'Tall Nettles: from plant collecting in Africa to nutrition research in New Zealand'

Appointment 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 Richard Mithen's achievement at his inaugural lecture.

Abstract:

In his inaugural lecture, 'Tall Nettles: from plant collecting in Africa to nutrition research in New Zealand', Professor Richard Mithen will share stories from his career and reflect on some of the challenging issues that we are facing today in food and health research.

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This year’s Wellington Faculty of Education Annual Lecture will focus on education and early intervention for children with autism.

The lecture will consist of two parts delivered in turn by Professor Jeff Sigafoos and Dr Hannah Waddington.

Professor Sigafoos will provide a general overview of the learning and behavioural characteristics associated with autism.

Dr Waddington will then review several recent studies conducted by her and her team on early intervention for young children with autism

Information about the University’s Autism Clinic will also be presented.

The lecture will also be live-streamed.

Register

For more information contact: Pam Berry

pam.berry[at]vuw.ac.nz

Speaker Bios
Professor Jeff Sigafoos teaches in the Master of Educational Psychology and conducts research on teaching adaptive skills to persons with developmental and physical disabilities.
Dr Hannah Waddington lectures across the Educational Psychology programme and her research focus is early intervention for children with autism. She is a practising educational psychologist and a certified Early Start Denver Model therapist.

Explore our local area of the universe with Antony Gomez of the Wellington Astronomical Society.
The talk will be followed by stargazing if the sky is clear!

Much of scientific research involves the generation and testing of hypotheses that can facilitate the development of accurate models for a system. In machine learning the automated building of accurate models is desired, however traditional machine learning often assumes that the underlying systems are static and unchanging over time. In reality there are many applications that analyse data where the underlying system does change over time, for example in atmospheric pollution monitoring. Whether this is caused by changes in the conditions of the system, or a fundamental change in how the system behaves, this issue confronts applications of machine learning in a real-world context. In this talk, Dr Yun Sing Koh will discuss research in the area of data streams and how we adapt to changes in the data.

Dr Yun Sing Koh is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. Her research is in the area of machine learning, with a current focus on data stream mining, lifelong and transfer learning, and pattern mining.

Dr Koh has published more than 80 research papers in this field at top venues and is active in the research community. She served as the Program Co-Chair of the Australasian Data Mining Conference in 2018 and as the Workshop Chair for the 15th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data MiningHeights, NY.

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It has now been two decades since Bayesian parameter estimation routines were first introduced for studies in gravitational waves and cosmology. Bayesian approaches have become extremely important for these disciplines, their use is ubiquitous and helped to significantly push our knowledge of the universe and its history.

On 14 September 2015, Advanced LIGO made the breakthrough first detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by accelerating massive objects, predicted by Einstein in 1916 as a consequence of general relativity theory. Since then, Advanced LIGO/Virgo have announced the detection of many more binary star mergers.

Professor Meyer will review the development of the statistical methods that enabled the estimation of the waveform parameters, such as the masses of the black holes and their distance to earth. A major focus of current research has been on a more robust nonparametric noise characterization aiming at a simultaneous estimation of the noise spectral density and gravitational wave parameters. This is critical now for LIGO/Virgo but it might prove to be even more important for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission to be launched in 2034. If robust methods can be developed to handle LISA instrument and galactic confusion noise, LISA will let us go further than any alternative towards the detection of a primordial gravitational wave background, the remnant of the Big Bang.

Renate Meyer is a Professor in the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland. After obtaining an MSc and PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Aachen, Germany, she took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland in 1994. In 2018, she was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship by the Royal Society of NZ Te Apārangi for research on noise characterization studies for laser-interferometric gravitational wave observatories and she is co-chair of the NZ Astrostatistics and General Relativity Group of the International LISA Consortium.

Renate has wide research interests in applied Bayesian inference and MCMC methods. She has been collaborating for many years with astrophysicists on the analysis of gravitational wave data. Her research areas comprise time series analysis with applications in astrophysics, state-space modelling in ecology, multivariate modelling using copulas, survival analysis in medical statistics, and stochastic volatility models for financial time series.

Refreshments will be served in the basement foyer of building 303 (303-B00L2) from 5:45pm, prior to the lecture.

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At the roadshows, MBIE staff will review the 2020 round and cover the different investment mechanisms, available funding, application process, key dates, eligibility, investment signals and impact categories, assessment criteria, and key documents.

The roadshows are an opportunity for researchers to engage with the Endeavour Team. The first hour will be the webinar presentation and the second hour will be available for Q&A.

Each roadshow will take place via a Zoom webinar. There are three time options:

Monday, 12 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

Tuesday, 13 October 2020: 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Monday, 19 October 2020: 10:00am - 12:00pm

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We are delighted to announce that the 2020 Hopkins Lecture will be presented by Ian Taylor, CNZM and 2019 New Zealand Innovator of the Year.

Thirty years ago Ian founded Animation Research Ltd, now recognised as one of New Zealand’s leading software computer graphics companies. Heading into 2020 all indications were that this would be the company’s most successful year. They had signed contracts for all of the major golf tournaments in the world, had begun developing a software platform to be rolled out over 2,000 games of baseball a season in the US, were in discussions with a major US broadcaster to provide graphics for 20 NFL games and were about to deliver their Virtual Eye graphics for the start of the America’s Cup World series in Italy. On March 13, Covid-19 brought ARL’s global sports business to a spectacular halt.

Ian will enthral, entertain and inspire you as he shares the story of how his team, working under lockdown, combined technology, #8 wire and Kiwi ingenuity to resurrect their business and open doors that did not exist before the pandemic hit.

The lecture will be followed by refreshments.

The annual Hopkins Lecture encourages discussion of engineering within the profession and public understanding of engineering issues, and is hosted by the Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering and supported by the Canterbury Branch of Engineering New Zealand.

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Sea ice covers vast areas of the Southern Ocean. It looks bleak, cold and lifeless. But it hosts a profusion of microorganisms, including phytoplankton and bacteria, that are a crucial food store for marine life in polar oceans. Because they endure many challenging and localised stresses, sea-ice microbes are the proverbial ‘canary-in-the-coal-mine’ and provide a fascinating insight into future environmental change.

Professor Ken Ryan from the School of Biological Sciences will summarise three decades of climate change research on sea-ice microbial communities, bringing together research by his postgraduate students and international colleagues.

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The topic of this forum ‘Gene Editing’ has been chosen because the report from the Royal Society Expert Panel on Gene Editing recommended that there was an ‘urgent need for wide and well-informed discussion and debate about gene editing’. Since the release of that report, the issue seems to have ‘gone quiet’, and there appears to be very little indication of where we might go from here. We are looking to take the next step – how might we start to think about the use of this technology in the future? The forum will cover how and why we might use gene editing technology in plants, animals and pests.

As advanced digital technologies become an indispensable part of nearly all aspects of everyday living, it is essential to consider the downstream effects on society. In this talk, Associate Professor Kumar Yogeeswaran will consider social scientific evidence on how these indispensable technologies shape people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.

Associate Professor Yogeeswaran will discuss the impact of social media, AI, and other digital technologies on extremism, social relations, and self-perceptions, among other aspects of social living. He will also discuss the importance of varied psychological forces in shaping the impact of technology on society, and the opportunities for greater collaboration between technologists and social scientists in order to improve human living.

Kumar Yogeeswaran is an Associate Professor in Social Psychology at the University of Canterbury. In 2012, he earned his PhD in Social Psychology with a concentration in Statistics at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, USA. Following this, Kumar moved to New Zealand to join the Psychology Department at the University of Canterbury.

Associate Professor Yogeeswaran’s primary research examines how people’s membership in social (e.g., ethnic, national, religious) groups shapes their attitudes, cognitions and behaviours toward other groups as well as their self-conceptions in culturally diverse nations. His secondary research examines the impact of technology on society.

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Public Health Seminar Series presented by Department of Preventive & Social Medicine in association with The Public Health Association Otago/Southland.

Dr Murray Laugesen QSO

My Life in Public Health is a memoir of my life in India and New Zealand. I describe my switch from surgery to village health work then to working with the Voluntary Health Association of India. I worked to eradicate smallpox, polio and tetanus; India is now free of these.

In New Zealand medical people wanted smoking controlled. This led to designing the Smokefree Environments Act. Then to the first research on vaping outside of China. This book marks my retirement. However, this election gives us the opportunity to create a Smokefree New Zealand.

Copies of My Life in Public Health available for purchase – $45 (cash only)

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How has the COVID-19 vaccine response benefited from struggles with earlier epidemics? What are the challenges and gaps of the current vaccine candidates? Which populations need more attention for effective vaccine development? How will VAANZ and New Zealand contribute? The seminar will address these questions from a global perspective, while reviewing current COVID-19 vaccine platforms and pipeline.

Dr Fran Priddy
Clinical Director, Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand – Ohu Kaupare Huaketo (VAANZ)

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During most of the 20th century, farming was one of the most celebrated professions in New Zealand and people saw farming as an exemplar of how New Zealand was a good country.

Now, we are experiencing a rising tide of political controversy, activism and loss of morale in farming sectors like dairying. This month Professor Hugh Campbell will be reviewing some of the key reasons why we’ve started to lose the “social licence to farm” and how this is shaping the future of farming in New Zealand.

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Launch of the biography of pioneer Aotearoa naturalist George Hudson, whose large collection of insects is now part of Te Papa’s collections.

The author, Hudson’s grandson Dr George Gibbs, and Courtney Johnston, Te Papa’s Tumu Whakarae | Chief Executive, will be in attendance.

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COVID-19 plunged the business world into endless zoom meetings and working from home, how did our leaders respond to this new digital world?

Join us to hear panelists Vodafone Head of IoT and Head of South Island Michelle Sharp, Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce CEO Leeann Watson, and Seequent COO Graham Grant, led by facilitator Advisory Works Founder and Partner Kendall Langston, discuss the insights and challenges of digital leadership during COVID-19.

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Join the Cawthron Institute online for their 77th Annual Lecture and hear three expert speakers offer their perspectives on the theme ‘Science Matters’, which will explore the value of scientific research and development to New Zealand’s society, now and in the future.

Featuring Keynote Speakers
Dr Siouxsie Wiles (Associate Professor, University of Auckland)
Professor Juliet Gerrard (Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor)
Dr Serean Adams (Aquaculture Group Manager, Cawthron Institute)

Event Programme
7pm – Live-stream begins.
7:05pm – Keynote presentations begin, featuring Dr Siouxsie Wiles, Professor Juliet Gerrard, and closing with Dr Serean Adams.
7:50pm - Q&A panel discussion with keynote speakers begins.
8:30pm – Event ends.