The Oxfordshire Science and Ideas Festival 2018 starts today, running from 12th to 22nd Oxford. It’s an annual festival, organised association with Science Oxford and the University of Oxford, to bring science and ideas from the labs, colleges and lecture theatres of Oxford to engage with the public and build relationships. It has a phenomenal range of events and this year the Big Data Institue is diplaying some of its work through a series of posters ‘Big Data, Big Future!’ in the middle of Oxford, outside the Business School, passed by tens of thousands of people each day on their way to and from Oxford train station. It was a real privilege to be asked to create a poster for this exhibition, and to show some of the work that we’re doing on supermarket shopping, nutrition and public health, and you can see it both in person at the Business School, and also below. I passed the exhibition this morning and they all look even better in person, and as a collection, illustrating projects as diverse as using brain MRI images to better understand Alzheimer’s disease and how it could be predicted, investigating the relationships between traffic pollution and health, using wearables for accurately monitoring physical activity, creating long term evidence about the development of dementia through people playing games on your phone, and tracking the spread of malaria and efficacy of various efforts to combat the disease.

I’m looking forward to some of the other events this week, and if you get to see some of the presentations and exhibitions, I hope you find them both interesting and fun, and may see you at one of them!