Lord Mayor’s Lecture | Making The Future: The Opportunity In Digital Manufacturing

Manufacturing is the lifeblood of economic growth in the UK, directly and indirectly supporting 23% of the British Economy and providing directly and indirectly over 5 million jobs, with salaries above the whole economy average. While manufacturing is the biggest contributor to emissions in the world, it is also the sector that can help create the infrastructure and products that are going to empower the future of our world, from hydrogen infrastructure, to intelligent prosthetics and advanced medical equipment.

The future is promising and digital technologies can be the fuel that accelerates and enables a better future. From supercomputing that can accelerate design, to additive manufacturing to let design freedom flourish, to smart factories and supply chains where decision makers can make fast, proactive and informed decisions, to smart products with extended lives, to completely connected product life cycles that enable a more sustainable and circular economy. All of this, accompanied by co-pilots, powered by advanced AI technology, that can work alongside humans, making technology more accessible, propelling productivity and empowering humans to achieve more than ever before.

Speaker:

Dr Lina Huertas FIMechE is the Manufacturing Industrial Advisor in Microsoft UK, helping UK manufacturers drive their digital transformation and driving value by adopting the breadth of technology solutions available from Microsoft and its partner ecosystem. Her focus is primarily on smart factories, accelerated product development and agile supply chains, and underpinned by sustainability, security and a human-driven approach. She has spent 15 years working in digital manufacturing innovation, including roles in national strategy, technology strategy, team leadership, programme management and digital manufacturing tool development. She is a Mechanical Engineer by training, completed her PhD on digital manufacturing from Loughborough University and is a Fellow of the IMechE.

Lord Mayor’s Lecture | Ending The Destruction Of Our Undersea Cultural Heritage

Background:

For too long criminals have been destroying our undersea cultural heritage (UCH), damaging the marine environment, and desecrating naval war graves through unauthorised salvage of wreck sites. No longer. By using satellites and artificial intelligence originally designed to stop illegal fishing, we can now detect unauthorised salvage activities anywhere in the world and help hold these criminals to account. The Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust (MAST) and OceanMind have teamed up to provide the Maritime Observatory, a UCH intelligence hub that supports governments with surveillance of important sites and investigation into suspicious activity. The Maritime Observatory is providing expert support to several active international cases.

Speakers:

Nick Wise is founder and CEO of OceanMind, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans. Using satellites and artificial intelligence, OceanMind powers effective fisheries enforcement and enables more responsible seafood sourcing, increasing compliance and sustainability. Building on this success, OceanMind is now developing AI to detect modern slavery on the oceans, particularly in fisheries, and to detect the desecration of war graves through unauthorised undersea salvage.

Nick has been designing large scale, highly secure software solutions for over 20 years, using innovative techniques focused on market needs. Before joining the ranks of social entrepreneurship, Nick’s journey saw him starting an Internet security business, as CTO of a mature SME, and managing product development in a billion-dollar multinational. As a DRK Entrepreneur, Nick now empowers people to solve global issues with technology.

Dr Giles Richardson is a maritime archaeologist, MA (Hons) PCIfA and an Invincible Project team diver. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bath’s History of Technology Research Unit, and completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology. His research focuses on the archaeology of the Victorian Royal Navy. He continues to work on projects across Europe, notably the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology’s excavations at the sunken Ptolemaic city of Heracleion-Thonis in Egypt. He holds HSE Surface Supply (Offshore Top-Up) and Professional SCUBA qualifications, and is a BSAC Advanced Diver and Open Water Instructor and a PADI Open Water Instructor.

Lord Mayor’s Lecture | The State Of Play With Fusion

Background:

For sustainable, non-carbon dioxide emitting, long-term energy production, nuclear fusion energy is widely perceived to be the ultimate terrestrial energy source. Fusion energy is experiencing a rapid period of investment, innovation, and growth that has never been seen before. As of today, many governments are enabling and funding public fusion energy projects, such as the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) whilst private fusion companies work towards commercialising fusion energy. Private fusion companies have received approximately $6.2 billion of private funding to date. The industry has been gaining momentum and this decade should yield milestone results to demonstrating fusion energy as a real source of energy. However, fusion energy environmental conditions for the structural and functional materials are extreme and still unsolved. This talk will discuss the latest updates and developments within the industry.

Speaker:

Dr Thomas P Davis is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Oxford Sigma, a fusion technology company that aims to provide materials technology and solutions for commercial fusion energy. He holds multiple patents and has published >10 fusion-related scientific papers. He has a PhD in Materials Science from the University of Oxford and is a Liveryman at the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers.

The Fuellers’ 18th Lord Ezra Memorial Lecture 2024

The 18th Ezra Memorial Lecture will be held at 1745 for 1820 on Wednesday 13th March 2024 at City & Guilds Building, Imperial College London. It is being given by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Professor Michael Mainelli.

For a colourless gas, hydrogen generates a lot of colourful prose, from blue to grey, green, black, brown, yellow, turquoise, white, and pink, if not purple. In this talk, Professor Michael Mainelli takes as his basic theme that the profusion of hydrogen colours is due more to the optics of economics than science and engineering. This lecture will examine various energy economic sub-systems from production, to transportation, to storage, to use. Increasingly these economic sub-systems lead the hydrogen markets to interact with the carbon markets. Along the way, the lecture will touch on market gaps, particularly the lack of baseload markets for electricity and financial tools for long-term government policy commitment. The lecture will conclude with some observations on how hydrogen economics is analysed, in particular using option theory and learning curves. The hope is that the lecture will provide ways to see the future of hydrogen through an economic prism, less darkly.

Professor Michael Mainelli MStJ FCCA FCSI(Hon) FBCS, The Lord Mayor of the City of London
Michael is a scientist and economist trying to promote societal advance through better finance and technology. Originally a research scientist in aerospace (rocket science) and computing (architecture & cartography), educated at Harvard, Trinity College Dublin, he gained his PhD from the London School of Economics, where he was also Visiting Professor in innovation and IT. He became a senior partner of accountants BDO Binder Hamlyn, and Corporate Development Director for the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Evaluation & Research Agency. During a mergers & acquisitions spell in merchant banking with Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, in 1994 he founded Z/Yen, the City of London’s leading think-tank. Z/Yen is renowned for its Global Financial, Green Finance, and Smart Centres indices, as well as notable ‘firsts’ in technology research including energy transmission. Michael has advised numerous governments and municipalities around the world, including four years as International Financial Services Advisor to the Office of the Taoiseach and developing sovereign sustainability-linked bonds. Michael is a fellow of Gresham College, Kings College London, and Goodenough College, visiting professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple, and non-executive director of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service and a listed mining company. He is active in fourteen livery companies, past Master of the World Traders, an Alderman of the City of London for Broad Street, and late Sheriff of the City of London 2019-2021, with charity interests in the environment, education, and care. His third book, written with Ian Harris, The Price Of Fish: A New Approach To Wicked Economics And Better Decisions, won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize. Michael was installed as the 695th Lord Mayor of The City of London on 10 November 2023.

PANEL SPEAKERS
Jon Clark, Partner at EY | EMEIA Energy and Resources – Strategy and Transactions | Chair of the Fuellers’ Industry Group
Professor Stephen Skinner, FRSE, FRSC, FIMMM, FHEA, CEng, CSci, CChem | Ceres/RAEng Research Chair in Electrochemical Devices for a zero-carbon economy – Imperial College London | Professor of Materials Chemistry | WPI Principal Investigator, International Institute for Carbon Neutral Energy Research, Kyushu University, Japan
Dr Angela Needle FEI, Strategy Director at Cadent | Vice President of Hydrogen UK

The Lord Mayor’s Big Curry Lunch 2021

by The Web Master19/10/2020

The Lord Mayor’s Big Curry Lunch is always a very popular event. Following this year’s cancellation, Co-Chairman Michael Hockney has revealed plans for 2021.

Read the letter from Michael Hockney

Arrangements for Common Hall: Election of Lord Mayor 2020

by The Web Master02/09/202003/09/20201 Comment

It will come as no surprise, in the current circumstances, that Government legislation and guidance, aimed at controlling the spread of the virus, continues to present significant limitations on the manner in which the proceedings for the Election of Lord Mayor might be conducted this year.

The plan