University of Minnesota hosts world’s largest medical devices conference

What: University of Minnesota’s Design of Medical Devices Conference
When: April 12-14, 2016
Where: The Commons Hotel, 615 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis and University of Minnesota McNamara Alumni Center, 200 Oak St. SE, Minneapolis
Medical device leaders from across the country in both industry and academia will converge at the University of Minnesota’s 15th annual Design of Medical Devices Conference April 12-14 at The Commons Hotel, 615 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis. The conference will address emerging trends related to medical device design, policy, engineering, education, and commercialization.
More than 1,300 people are expected to attend this year’s conference, making it the largest medical devices conference in the world. Additional walk-in registrations are welcome.
“The DMD conference continues to grow by all measures, illustrating the critical importance of medical devices and surrounding technologies, policies and clinical needs,” said Art Erdman, a University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor and conference co-chair. “Fifteen years ago we had a vision to establish an event where leaders from academia and industry would come together to share the latest issues in medical device design. This vision has become a successful reality and continues to exceed even our own expectations.”
The conference offers technical sessions on a wide variety of topics, including wearable medical devices, pharmaceutical delivery devices, robotics in health care, cybersecurity of medical devices, rehab technology, and much more. The third day of the conference will feature sessions on 3D-printed bionic and medical devices.
The conference also includes an interactive “A Heart to Learn” exhibit of real human hearts and two live clinical surgery cases that will be broadcasted from St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Penn. Lab tours will include the Interactive Visualization Lab, Medical Devices Center, Minnesota Nanotechnology Center and the Visible Heart Lab.
A scientific poster session will showcase more than 115 emerging topics in the areas of cardiovascular devices, nanotechnology, neuroengineering, surgical tools, orthopedics, computer modeling and simulation, urologic devices, human factors, rehabilitation, special devices, informatics and tissue engineering.
For a full list of speakers and workshops at the Design of Medical Devices Conference or to register, visit www.dmd.umn.edu.
The Design of Medical Devices Conference is presented by the University of Minnesota Medical Devices Center (part of the University’s Institute for Engineering in Medicine), the College of Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Several corporations are also providing industry sponsorships including 3M, AccelLAB Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, Computer Aided Technology, The Medical Alley Association, Medtronic, Inc., St Jude Medical, Institute for Engineering in Medicine, University of Minnesota and Ximedica.

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Eindhoven University of Technology

Dutch students open world's first drone café

A flying drone bringing drinks to customers in the world's first drone cafe in Eindhoven, Netherlands
Photo: AFP

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Published on Sunday, 24 April, 2016 at 16:15

Would you like a drone with your cocktail? The world's first café using the tiny domestic unmanned aircraft as servers has opened in a Dutch university.
The pop-up drone café will be serving up all weekend as part of celebrations for the "Dream and Dare" festival marking the 60th anniversary of the Eindhoven University of Technology.
The 20 students behind the project, who spent nine months developing and building the autonomous drone, aim to show how such small inside craft could become an essential part of modern daily life.
"It has potential as a useful tool for human kind. We see it as the next mobile phone. You choose and you programme it like you want," student and project leader Tessie Hartjes stated.
The drone, nicknamed Blue Jay, which resembles a small white flying saucer with a luminescent strip for eyes, flies to a table and hovers as it takes a client's order, who points to the list to signal what they would like.

More videos can be found on our video page
"The blue eyes of the first drone load" up by scanning the list to register the order, said Hartjes.
"Once it's fully loaded, then the order is ready. And another one comes with the order in a cup in the grip."
The café is offering four different alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktails, which are either bright blue or green -- the same colour as the drone's "eyes."
The drinks are picked up and carried by a set of pinchers underneath the drone, in a bid to show that these aerial machines could be used to carry out delicate missions such as delivering medicines or even helping to track down burglars.

The Blue Jay is an intelligent bird that lives in complex, social environments  

Each drone has cost about 2,000 euros to build, in a project funded by the university which the students say aims "to give a glimpse of the future".
Thanks to sensors and a long battery life they can fly inside buildings and navigate crowded interiors, unlike other drones, which rely on a GPS system.
"The Blue Jay is an intelligent bird that lives in complex, social environments," the students say in a video presenting their work.
They believe the drone's applications could be endless: as extinguishers to put out fires, alarm systems to warn of intruders or mini-servants which would respond to commands such as "fetch me an apple."
"We believe that one day, domestic drones will be a part of society. One day, a drone could be a friend," says one of the students in the video presentation.

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Can a young university be a world-leading university?

Youth is not a bar to excellence, despite older institutions’ rankings success. Jack Grove analyses how some youthful contenders have risen in the ranks

March 31, 2016

Source: Alamy montage

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When it comes to universities, students and academics alike tend to think that the older an institution is, the better it must be. But is that really true?
An analysis of the 800 institutions that feature in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016 suggests that it is – up to a point. Older universities do indeed tend to achieve a higher rank than newer institutions, and there is a weak correlation between the age of universities and both the citations they accrue and their performance on measures of teaching and research (especially their reputations in each). However, there is virtually no correlation between age and the other two main pillars of the rankings: industry links and internationalisation – except, in the latter case, a slight correlation between age and the proportion of internationally co-authored papers (see graphs, below).
Nor is it the case that the most ancient universities make up the most high-scoring demographic group. The 26 institutions in the rankings that are more than 600 years old include stellar performers such as the universities of Oxford (founded in 1096; second in the rankings) and Cambridge (1209; fourth), but also some relative underperformers such as Hungary’s University of Pécs (1367; in the 601-800 band).
In fact, it is the 20 universities between 500 and 600 years old that record the highest median overall score. These constitute a solid block of European powerhouses, among them Germany’s LMU Munich (founded in 1472; 29th), Belgium’s KU Leuven (1425; 35th) and Denmark’s University of Copenhagen (1479; joint 82nd).

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The age distribution of top 800 universities

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Another notable period for university foundation – especially when judged on the number of citations their modern incarnations accrue – was the 17th century. That group of 13 includes European top-100 institutions the University of Amsterdam (founded in 1632; 58th in the rankings), Utrecht University (1636; 62nd), the University of Helsinki (1640; joint 76th) and Lund University (1666; joint 90th). But the key factor is that this was the era in which American universities began to be founded: most notably, Harvard University (1636; sixth) and Yale University (1701; 12th). As there are just 13 institutions in the rankings that date from this period, these two institutions significantly skew the figures upwards – particularly if you look at means rather than medians.
The biggest wave of university establishment began in the 19th century: 278 universities in THE’s top 800 were created between 1817 and 1916 – almost seven times the number (42) established in the preceding 100 years. According to Michael Shattock, visiting professor in higher education at the UCL Institute of Education, it was primarily economic worries that drove the Victorian-era expansion. For instance, “people had come back to Britain from the Great Exhibitions in Paris [held between 1855 and 1900] saying: ‘We cannot match them in technology unless we start investing in education and our industrial base.’”
The epoch was one of the most fruitful periods in history for university foundation in terms of quality as well as quantity. Although the 278 institutions from that era in the THE World University Rankings have a lower overall median score than those founded in the 15th, 17th and 18th centuries, they considerably outpace every subsequent epoch. Many of the 19th-century institutions that perform particularly strongly are US state universities, often known as “land grant universities” after the vast swathes of land gifted to them by the 1862 Morrill Act, which was enacted shortly after the end of America’s Civil War, Shattock explains. That legacy guaranteed a degree of financial security and autonomy for the institutions – especially the University of Texas, whose 2 million acres of arid farmland turned out to be situated atop a massive oil and gas field that has yielded up to $1 billion (£705 million) annually in recent years.

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