Water, Climate, and Society: Who invited the mechatronics engineer?

July 5, 2016  |  by

Oxford’s REACH Water global consortium involves partners from many countries and organisations. Credit: REACH2016 I’m a robotics engineer from South Africa. I like technology, control theory, and data science – mostly things that don’t  (and can’t) get wet!  I know very little, if anything, about marine governance science, watershed management, or international water law. So…

Can a Rural Handpump Tell You it’s Not Well?

April 25, 2016  |  by

Predictive health monitoring is widely used in engineering applications to detect damage to infrastructure as early as possible. Forecasting failure rather than merely detecting failure once it occurs helps to reduce the downtime of systems. Ideally, predictive maintenance can be used to avoid downtime completely. With this approach already widely used in many fields from commercial and…