Ling Ge

A new AI Growth Zone in the North East is set to bring more than 5,000 jobs and up to £30 billion of investment in an attempt to position the region as one of Europe’s leading hubs for AI and data centre infrastructure. Great to see Newcastle University playing a role in supporting businesses in the AI Growth Zone. https://lnkd.in/e77h3r8M

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NEW on Wonkhe: The KEF dashboards are out and there is a trove of evidence about how universities make their places better and the economy stronger. James Coe asks whether it's time to better reward this work and fund knowledge exchange differently. https://lnkd.in/erDK3vWt "The road to a new kind of KEF is long. However, if the debate about REF has taught us anything, it’s that trying to change a single exercise is exceptionally hard. If the current arrangements feel tired, and reform feels piecemeal, perhaps now is the time to look at the whole ecosystem and look at a system which prizes universities third mission as much as their other work."

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Here is an interesting new piece benchmarking how the UK’s priority sectors in its industrial strategy perform across the G7. It’s exactly the kind of comparative, data-driven analysis we should be doing in Canada but rarely undertake. Without it, we don’t actually know how our strengths, capabilities, or gaps stack up internationally. Part of the reason industrial policy has developed a bad reputation is that it often lacks a rigorous framework for what problem we are trying to solve—and how we will measure success and failure. Too often, we create a program in one budget and assume it will still be needed, unchanged, a decade later. A modern approach needs to be much more DARPA-esque: identify clear problem statements, track progress, and stop or redesign what isn’t working. G7 benchmarking is a practical way to impose that discipline. It gives us clear indicators to track over time: • the depth and mobility of talent pools • research intensity and public R&D effort • commercialisation and IP retention performance • inward investment flows • export strength in key sectors • employment trends across high-value industries • and productivity growth over time This kind of measurement is foundational to building the science and technology strategy and architecture Canada needs. Without a shared view of what we are measuring, our S&T system cannot be adaptive or strategic. And this matters now. Canada has a real opportunity to modernise its S&T architecture at this moment of sovereign capacity building. But that opportunity will only translate into economic advantage if we anchor it in evidence, benchmarking, and continuous evaluation of what is working and what is not. Getting the measurement right is the difference between another cycle of fragmented programs and a sound policy architecture that can truly shift our trajectory. Here’s the article: https://lnkd.in/gZCNWKj8

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I am excited to share our latest forecasts for UK CPI, in partnership with Prof Huw Dixon at NIESR (https://lnkd.in/eJ4iXVSt), Prof Jane Binner at Uni of Birmingham and Prof Barry Jones from Uni of Binghamton. We have been optimising our Multi-recurrent Neural Network (MRN) ensembles for predicting UK inflation from Nov 2025 to Oct 2026. Our predicted value of UK CPI for Nov 2025 is 3.4% (down from 3.6% in Oct). However, this dip appears short-lived as we see our different MRN forecast UK inflation to fluctuate between 3.2% - 3.9% for much of 2026. Note that the Simple MRN consists of past inflation rates whereas the intermediate MRN also includes rGDP, UK 10 Year Gilt Yield, Bank of England Interest Rate, Sterling Exchange Rate and PPI. Prof Huw Dixon's blogs covering our work can be found here - with an update due soon! https://lnkd.in/eQT-4eb8 The Office for National Statistics release the actual figure for Nov tomorrow (17th December).

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Can’t argue with the conclusion in the final paragraph, but no mention in this piece about increasing profitably through digital transformation or alternate operating models, including private partnerships and being part of the “gold standard” apprenticeships that will be part of new Government targets announced today. #HigherEducation

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