Prof. Roger Whitaker: Welcome to Cardiff University

PROF WHITAKER: Good morning everybody and thank you for the invitation to come along. I’m Roger Whitaker Dean of research for physical sciences and engineering and I’m also here in a personal professional capacity because I’m a researcher in computer science and in particular mobile and social computing and the group that I work with have made really good use of Django over the years so it’s something we like to see prosper. But on behalf of Cardiff university and on behalf of the Vice Chancellor it’s a really great pleasure to welcome again the event at Cardiff and it’s nice to see so many people here, it requires dedication to come along, as a delegate on a Sunday morning when it’s raining, so very impressed indeed.

I’m biased because I’m in the discipline but Django is really important and I was asked by some senior staff in the university what Django was and I managed to recall the tag line around helping perfectionists meet their deadlines and I think that sums it up really well.

I think also what particularly pleasing about this event and much of the activity going on at Cardiff in this area is that it is very much grassroots participation and snow balling of people’s interest collectively that has led to so much activity in this area. And that goes hand in hand with what the university is trying to achieve and is much higher on the university agenda at the moment and the umbrella term is innovation and innovation in whatever form is something the university is keen to help try and catalogue and I just thought I would say to close, I know we’re running behind so I just want to keep this short and sweet, but I just thought I’d give a few pointers around some of the investments that the university is making in terms of innovation in ways that the university here at Cardiff hasn’t done so in the past, this is very much new activity.

First and foremost, there is a very large project going on in the order of £200 million and innovation system which is an extension to our campus on the Maindy Road site and there are a number of facilities and centres that have been earmarked and developed to go forward around the area of innovation.

One of them on that site is the university social science park which will be one of the first kinds of facilities certainly in the UK and beyond and within that there will be a computational social science lab where people from different disciplines will be interacting with ways that we haven’t seen before.

There is also going to be an innovation centre there on site, a separate facility, which will allow SMEs and companies to come in and work alongside Cardiff university staff, Cardiff university research.

The university is also planning data innovation institute which is going to be a large pan university facility that will be working across biological and life sciences, arts, humanity social sciences and also physical sciences and engineering bringing together people around data science and broadly speaking pulling knowledge from data in new ways. So these are really exciting times for innovation at Cardiff not least in the technological domain.

Last but not least I should mention my home school computer science and informatics which is developing a new way of teaching software engineering so that is going to be coming forward and advertised very shortly but something that is intimately connected to Django and this conference and I am sure there will be a way to link those activities together.

So, on behalf of the university I hope it is a great success, I am sure it will be and thanks to everybody involved organisation.

{Applause}.