Difference between revisions of "Team:Edinburgh UG/Engagement"

Line 7,236: Line 7,236:
 
                   </div>
 
                   </div>
  
−
                 
 
  
−
                    <p class="lead section-lead">Librarians</p>
+
                </div>
−
                    <p class="section-paragraph">EDINA, data librarians from the university of Edinburgh. They recommended that we keep track of the hardware and software being used to read stored data; DNA sequencing technologies aren’t likely to go “out of fashion”, but others - like tape reading technology - is. They also raised issues concerning methods for encoding, retrieval, storage (room conditions), retrieval fidelity, destruction. We considered all of these and are having a meeting about storage with them again. We have also considered the issue of data fidelity, which we are combatting with our error correction mechanisms. They finally asked about how text decorations such as italics, bold etc. can be encoded, but this does not pose a problem in our case since each of our BabbleBricks can code for any arbitrarily defined value. </p>
+
            </div>
−
                    <p class="section-paragraph">Lee Hibberd, NLS: really liked our idea as their archival data storage because of the limitations that tape storage imposes. Storing on tape requires renewal every years, is     prone to error and needs manpower and time.</p>
+
            <!-- /.row -->
 +
        </div>
 +
        <!-- /.container -->
 +
     </section>
  
−
                     <p class="lead section-lead">EPCC: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre  </p>
+
    <section>
−
                     <p class="section-paragraph">Liked our project, gave us advice on the speed at which human language changes and might affect the comprehensibility of our stored data. They also gave us a lot of insights into what audiences we should target that might be interested in using our technology (end users). </p>
+
        <div class="container">
 +
            <div class="row">
 +
                <div class="col-lg-12">
 +
                     <p class="lead section-lead"> Media Coverage</p>
 +
                     <p class="section-paragraph">We were very lucky this summer to receive significant media coverage of our project. At the start of the summer we were approached by PLoS SynBio to write a blog post for them as part of their iGEM series. This was great as initial exposure as we got to share our project with the far and wide synthetic biology community as well as other iGEM teams. </p>
 +
                    <p>Read the PLoS SynBio post here: <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2016/06/23/igem-blogs-the-dna-typewriter-edinburgh-igem-2016/"> http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2016/06/23/igem-blogs-the-dna-typewriter-edinburgh-igem-2016/ </a></p>
 +
                    <p>As a result of our collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, we were included in a press release from the Library. These publications were great in getting our project exposed to the local Edinburgh community. </p>
 +
                    <p>Read the initial press release here:<a href="http://www.nls.uk/news/press/2016/08/dna-data-storage"> http://www.nls.uk/news/press/2016/08/dna-data-storage </a></p>
  
−
                    <p class="lead section-lead">Computer Security </p>
 
−
                    <p class="section-paragraph">We chatted with several informaticians who all recommended we use a stream cipher for our encryption.</p>
 
  
−
                    <p class="lead section-lead">Erika Szymanski and Pablo Schyfter</p>
+
                  <div class="col-lg-12">
−
                    <p class="section-paragraph">They suggested that we limit our scope for the project - we shouldn’t assume that all users (people or companies that want to store information) will find our project equally useful. We should isolate specific cases and design a solution for them.</p>
+
                  <div class="featurette" id="contact">
 +
                  <img class="featurette-image img-responsive img-center" src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2016/e/ef/PREZZ2.jpg">
 +
                  </div>
 +
                  <p>The press release was also published on The Scotsman and STV News! <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225 "> http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225 </a></p>
 +
 
 +
                  <div class="featurette" id="contact">
 +
                  <img class="featurette-image img-responsive img-center" src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2016/e/ef/PREZZ2.jpg">
 +
                  <p>The press release was also published on The Scotsman and STV News! <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225 "> http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225 </a></p>
 +
                  </div>
 +
 
 +
                  <p>Here, we had a stall set up with our poster, a demonstration of our encode/decode software and an interactive game. This was a fantastic opportunity for public engagement as we interacted with a wide audience. Some people to vist our stall were adults or young students looking to study at the university; this was a great time to present our poster to them and let them know about the potential opportunities for research as an undergraduate. Others were children that approached our stall to play with our blocks (pictured). This was good fun because we were often able to engage the children with the interactive activity while chatting to the parents in more detail about our project. </p>
 +
                 
 +
                  </div>
  
−
                    <p class="lead section-lead"> Other iGEM Teams </p>
 
−
                    <p class="section-paragraph">We have been actively engaging with other iGEM teams from Scotland, England and the world. We have had many Skype sessions with them and exchanged a lot of ideas about project implementation, as well as Policy and Human Practices. Specifically we were inspired by the Newcastle iGEM team to use the stress-induced Dps proteins, which is found in Deinococcus radiodurans and serves to protect DNA from stress-related damage. This ties in very well with the rest of our project, as one of our aims is to be able to preserve DNA with as high fidelity of retrieval as possible, for as long as possible.</p>
 
  
 
                 </div>
 
                 </div>

Revision as of 11:30, 15 October 2016

Engagement

Engagement

Public Engagement

Over the course of the summer we were lucky enough to interact with and share our project with people in our community.

SynBioBeta

In July we attended the SynBioBeta Activate conference at the University of Edinburgh King’s Buildings. Highlights were hearing Emily Leproust from Twist Bioscience, Axel Trefzer from ThermoFisher and Kevin Munnelly from Gen9 do a panel discussion on DNA data storage. It was encouraging to hear the leaders in DNA synthesis speak about how DNA is the future of data storage.

During breaks and the networking lunch we walked around and talked to people about our project. Naturally, many attendees were familiar with iGEM and were quire excited to hear about our project. We printed out flyers before the day to hand out so people could find out more about our project. Although engagement is often seen to be an opportunity to share synthetic biology with non-experts, we really enjoyed engaging with professionals in the synthetic biology community and getting their feedback!

National Library of Scotland: Learning at Work Week

As part of our collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, we were invited to give a workshop during their “Learning at Work Week”. We put together a presentation including the background to our project, the basics of the biology and what we had achieved over the course of the summer.

The workshop also included an interactive activity that demonstrated the data-DNA encoding and decoding process. The audience was split up into small groups of 3, each group also included a member of our team. The groups had a basket of DNA bases printed on paper – synthetic nucleotides, if you will – that they had to put together and encode to the words in a given sentence. This demonstrated how depending on the length of a DNA fragment, the number of possible encoding changes. This process mirrored ours at the start of the summer when we were determining the content of a BabbleBrick.

After ‘assembling’ their new BabbleBricks together, another group had to decode this sentence. The participants said that doing the interactive activity helped engage them and as non-experts at biology they felt it made our project clearer to them.

Over the course of our Fresher’s Week and first week of Lectures we gave talks to various student groups. The first was a talk to new Biological Sciences first years as part of their welcome talk. This was great as we were able to introduce iGEM to a cohort of new students and explain to them what we had been working on over the summer.

We also gave presented to two student societies: Synthetic Biology Society and Edinburgh University Young Scientific Researchers Association. This was great as we were able to share BabblED with those interested in synthetic biology and scientific researchers from disciplines ranging from biology to computer science to physics to psychology. It was great to hear everyone’s feedback and get them excited about what were doing!

Doors Open Day

Every year, Edinburgh hosts its Doors Open Day: a day in which many paid attractions in the city open their doors to the public for free. The University of Edinburgh King’s Buildings opened their doors to the community and invited anyone that was interested in the research happening at the University to come and learn more.

Here, we had a stall set up with our poster, a demonstration of our encode/decode software and an interactive game. This was a fantastic opportunity for public engagement as we interacted with a wide audience. Some people to vist our stall were adults or young students looking to study at the university; this was a great time to present our poster to them and let them know about the potential opportunities for research as an undergraduate. Others were children that approached our stall to play with our blocks (pictured). This was good fun because we were often able to engage the children with the interactive activity while chatting to the parents in more detail about our project.

Media Coverage

We were very lucky this summer to receive significant media coverage of our project. At the start of the summer we were approached by PLoS SynBio to write a blog post for them as part of their iGEM series. This was great as initial exposure as we got to share our project with the far and wide synthetic biology community as well as other iGEM teams.

Read the PLoS SynBio post here: http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2016/06/23/igem-blogs-the-dna-typewriter-edinburgh-igem-2016/

As a result of our collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, we were included in a press release from the Library. These publications were great in getting our project exposed to the local Edinburgh community.

Read the initial press release here: http://www.nls.uk/news/press/2016/08/dna-data-storage

The press release was also published on The Scotsman and STV News! http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225

The press release was also published on The Scotsman and STV News! http://www.scotsman.com/news/mary-queen-of-scots-letter-could-aid-scientific-revolution-1-4199225

Here, we had a stall set up with our poster, a demonstration of our encode/decode software and an interactive game. This was a fantastic opportunity for public engagement as we interacted with a wide audience. Some people to vist our stall were adults or young students looking to study at the university; this was a great time to present our poster to them and let them know about the potential opportunities for research as an undergraduate. Others were children that approached our stall to play with our blocks (pictured). This was good fun because we were often able to engage the children with the interactive activity while chatting to the parents in more detail about our project.

Follow Us