Author: Wiktoria Tunska

High-Performance Computing and sovereignty considerations

High-Performance Computing (HPC) is a key infrastructure upon which UK’s future digital economy is being built; with a wide range of applications in science and commerce, with Artificial Intelligence being its most recent and popular application. HPC-sovereignty, a strategic national asset for digital sovereignty, is a country’s ability to develop, deploy and control supercomputing infrastructure independent from foreign interference. The UK’s public-HPC capacity can drive innovation across science and technology, and complement private HPC-infrastructure. EPSRC-funded researchers (EP/Z533701/1), on whose behalf this is contributed, are developing a road-map for an environmentally sustainable HPC landscape. The study also finds that different countries demarcate their HPC-sovereignty differently, based on their computing infrastructure and circumstances. Many countries in the developing world support national AI models for applications while continuing to rely on foreign cloud providers. The UK and other European countries have both datacentres and domestic AI models as their HPC-sovereignty. USA and China interpret sovereignty to encompass foundries for chip-manufacture, datacentres, and AI models, within national boundaries. Such sovereignty considerations are shaping company strategies for where they locate and what they invest into. Geopolitical uncertainties imply that domestic production capacity and computational capacity delineate one’s HPC-sovereignty.  

Reimagining women’s health through co-design | The Collective Innovation Lab

Conversations about innovation in healthcare often focus on emerging technologies: smarter diagnostics, faster data analysis, and the development of new medical devices. While these advances are important, the discussions often overlook a more fundamental question: who are these innovations actually designed for?

Historically, healthcare research and innovation have often assumed the male body as the default. Women have been underrepresented in clinical trials, biomedical studies and health technology testing, creating data gaps that affect the design of treatments, devices and services. As a result, women are more likely to experience adverse drug reactions and misdiagnoses, reflecting gaps in how health data has been collected and used in medical research. Addressing this problem, however, requires more than simply improving datasets. It also means involving women in research and co-designing healthcare innovations to ensure products and services meet their real needs.

This is the approach taken by the Collective Innovation Lab (CIL), led by Dr Celine Mougenot at the Dyson School of Design Engineering. Rather than simply designing innovations for women, Dr Mougenot and her team co-design with them, ensuring women’s voices are embedded in the process of developing new products and services.

Collective Innovation Lab research group meeting.

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