In our previous lecture, we were discussing about some examples of applications of microfluidics and we will continue with some more examples in this particular lecture. In previous lectures, we were discussing about some applications related to medical sciences and some applications where we were discussing about DNA cells and all these. Many of these fundamental studies could be directed towards medical diagnostics and we will come into that later on. But in addition to medical diagnostics, in microfluidics, we are also looking for possibilities of delivering medical treatment that how can microfluidics help towards delivering medical treatment. So I will talk about one example which is based on collaborative work between us and the Tokai University at Kanagawa, Japan and this work is related to the development of a painless microarray for blood extraction and drug delivery. So again I want to give you a broad picture before entering into this example. So like I can give you the example of management of diabetes although this particular innovation is not restricted to management of diabetes but I can just give you a perspective that there are many diabetes patients who need regular monitoring of the blood glucose level and who need regular injection of insulin. Now this is something which is for example as you can see that these like injection of insulin requires I mean some pushing of a drug and that many times is considered to be a little bit painful considering the psychology and the physiological aspects together. I mean it is not something which is very comfortable. On the other hand many times the dosage of insulin which is given is based on some average value that is prescribed and it is not consistent with the requirement of the insulin that is necessary at that instant of time. So sometimes maybe the dose is overdose sometimes maybe the dose is under dose. So the objective of making a new device is to design a painless system for testing of the blood and then delivering necessary insulin based on the level of glucose at for existing at that instant of time in the blood sample. So how this is done? Just look into this cartoon that is going on it is just like a wristwatch type of device. So it I mean it gives an elusive appearance that it is a wristwatch but actually there are micro needles at the back of this wristwatch.  So these micro needles can suck blood in a particular using a particular mechanism which I will discuss in details in one of our later lectures but in short we are trying to we have tried to design it in a painless fashion. So how is it possible? Here is an important concept that is used many times not in microfluidics only but in many of the micro and nanotechnology applications that is bio mimetics. That means mimicking the biological world for making a device. So towards that what has been done is something like this.  And therefore if you can emulate that through a engineering device which can create a suction pressure in a miniaturized environment then by suction pressure the blood is sucked into the needle and that is a small amount of blood but that is good enough to make the test. Next question is when the blood is sucked how will it be transported through the needle? Because it is a micro needle there because of the micrometer dimension surface tension is a very important force. So by surface tension driven flow blood is transmitted from one end of the needle to the other and then that blood what is done again let me run the movie of the device again and what happens is that there is a micro electrical pumping system for blood extraction using a piezoelectric micro actuator. So basically there is a blood extraction system and this system is designed based on a female mosquito's blood sampling mechanism then there is a MOSFET based biosensor to detect and evaluate the amount of glucose in the extracted blood. So in the same device there is a biosensor the biosensor detects and evaluates the amount of glucose in an extracted blood using an enzyme such as glucose oxidase and then when the device senses that this is the amount of glucose that is there in the blood sample then there is a delivery of the necessary amount of insulin based on the level of glucose of blood at that particular instant of time. So this entire activity is sort of I mean compacted in the form of a wrist watch type of device and this device is claimed to be painless because of several reasons. I mean when we are thinking of pain, pain has 2 different facets one is the physical aspect of pain I mean which is taken care of by the painless action of the needle of the micro needle because it takes the blood by creating a suction pressure by itself the way in which a mosquito sucks blood. Now we can always argue that when a mosquito is sucking blood we are feeling some irritation but that irritation is not because of the mechanical pain associated or any mechanical indentation pain associated with the penetration of the labia of the mosquito that is just because of a chemical irritant that the mosquito spreads during the biting process. So mechanically it is a painless process on the other hand from a psychological point of view also instead of like somebody extracting blood and delivering a drug using some injection syringe if you feel if you see that the same thing is taking place by virtue of a device which is like a wrist watch and which is operated just by pressing a button then you feel much more comfortable mentally instead of somebody using a reasonably sized injection syringe for taking blood and delivering the necessary drug. So this combination makes it painless device so to say. Now I mean we worked on this project through an Indo-Japan the DSTJSPS collaborative program and as you can understand from the total scope of this project that it is a true interdisciplinary project as one of the points that I highlighted the microfluidics is an interdisciplinary field by itself. So you can see that this entire gamut of activities that has led to the development of this wrist watch type of device it is not something which is alone within the scope of microfluidics. So microfluidics is only bothered about the design and analysis of the micro review and then that has to be integrated with several other technologies which are closely related to microfluidics may be memes, sensors, actuators and all these and then packaging, integration all those things together make a device which I mean sort of tries to propose an alternative diabetes management as compared to what is routinely done in under normal circumstances. So we have talked about some bio examples just for a change let me talk about an example of like thermal management this is not a biological application but it is an application of a different kind. So the background of this is something as follows as we have reduced the sizes of the electronic devices what happens is that the rate of heat dissipation per unit volume has increased because the power rating of the devices have not decreased but the size of the device has decreased. So the volumetric energy dissipation rate because of heating of these devices has gone up. So when that has occurred it is necessary that you manage these devices thermally by devising a cooling strategy. Now how do you cool these devices? Now to cool these devices one possibility is that you use a fan like fan cooled CPUs are very common in desktop computers. Now when you think of using a fan in a miniaturized device you are actually losing the advantage of miniaturization because you have made the device small for certain advantages. Now if you are using a big fan to cool a small device then your entire purpose of miniaturization is lost. So what you want to do is you want to have a system of thermal management which is commensurate with the miniaturized design of the electronic device itself and this is very very important because in many of the electronic devices the devices actually fail not because of the failure in the electronic design but maybe because of the failure in thermal design. So one has to be very very particular about that. So to do that there are several technologies I will talk about one such technology which is called as micro heat pipe. So I will talk about two technologies one is micro heat pipe. So what is the heat pipe? So if you can see here that this is essentially a capillary where in contact with the heated section some fluid will evaporate and then this evaporated fluid is transmitted by capillary action to the other end which is cooler one and there it is condensed and the condensed liquid is again back. So in this way what happens is that it is possible that it is like a circulation loop that goes on evaporation condensation then back evaporation condensation like that. So this type of system this type of arrangement is called as a heat pipe. So if you are using no mechanical pumping but you are using just capillary pumping to drive the evaporated fluid or to drive the condensed fluid then that is something which is called as a micro heat pipe where in a micro scale arrangement you are using the capillary action to drive the transport otherwise you require weeks for transmitting the fluid. So I mean these kinds of devices I mean have already emerged in the practical scenario and these devices have several advantages. So no use of mechanical pumping micro groups enhance capillary pumping no requirement of weak in heat pipes because the capillary action itself takes care of the transport over small scales. Lower volume to surface area ratio leads to efficient control over interfacial transport as I already mentioned that in these kinds of devices because of miniaturization you have large surface area by volume ratio that means that the heat transfer or as a matter of fact even any transport may be heat transfer may be mass transfer the transport coefficients are large and one can control the transport processes further by patterning the weightability and roughness of the substrate. This is something which is very unique to small scale system in a large scale system it is not so easy to control the transport by controlling the roughness and weightability but over a small scale by controlling the roughness and weightability of the substrate it is possible to control the flow in a nice manner. So that is one of the applications and we have worked on certain projects in this particular area and I will talk about another example which is going on in this movie I mean which is pointed here that you are using droplet to cool at electronic gadget. So how is it possible? So if you have a droplet you can move the droplet by use of electrical field. I will show you later on how that is possible I am not going into the science at this stage that how you can move a droplet by using electrical field.  So if you apply a voltage to a droplet then there will be a change in contact angle. Now if you are applying the same voltage to all the corners of the droplet then the change in contact angle will be symmetrical and there will be no resultant force but if you are applying 2 different voltages at across 2 ends of a droplet then the contact angles at the 2 ends will be different and that will give rise to a net surface tension force in a certain direction and that will move the droplet from one location to the other. So if you can so this kind of microfluidics where you handle droplets is called as droplet based microfluidics and sometimes the droplets are considered to be carriers of digital information so it is a particular example of something which is called as digital microfluidics. Not that all examples of droplet based microfluidics are digital microfluidics but if the droplets are considered to be carrying digital information I mean we can perceive that as digital microfluidics. So what is happening that the droplet is moving in a certain path let us say there is a source of the droplet and there is a destination. The destination is a location which is a point which is a hotspot in the device. So we have to understand carefully that first we have to know the temperature distribution in the device. So you require to either have a thermal imaging of the device or better if you have a nice simulation tool then by solving the heat transfer equations the energy equation you can get a distribution of temperature over the device. Then you know where the hotspots are located where there are locations of high temperature. So what you can do you can target your droplet to go and sit on a hotspot. So then you have to design electrodes and you have to design such that design a algorithm such that the droplet moves by an optimal path for going from the source to the destination. This is a problem of computer science. So as I told you that these kinds of problems are interfaces of say fluidics with other branches of engineering, other branches of science. So it is not that just like somebody with traditional knowledge of fluid mechanics will alone be able to solve this problem. So this requires interfacing with electrical and computer sciences. So then the droplet is targeted to move in a certain manner and when the droplet moves in a certain manner so you can see in this movie that like these are electrodes and these electrodes are sequentially switched on and off on and off like that. When the droplet goes from one electrode to the other then the previous electrode is switched off and the next electrode is switched on and then we have to design what should be the voltages for how long this droplet should be kept switched on and then off and so on. So these are all nice design problems. So then finally the droplet goes and sits on the hot spot and takes the heat. Now a good thing about the droplet is that it can take the heat in the form of latent heat so that there is no appreciable rising temperature of the system and when the droplet takes the heat in the form of latent heat it may be locally evaporated also and then you replenish that by a new stream of droplets that goes and sits on the hot spot. So it is possible to selectively address hot spots by targeting droplets to hot spots. So this is a very modern outlook of thermal management of electronic devices and we have worked on a project where we have tried to implement this for laptop computers for cooling of laptop computers. So droplets can have various operations so you can see that this is an example where 2 droplets have merged and I mean these are all examples from our own lab. So these droplets have merged and once these droplets have merged so I have shown this example for chip cooling but the same problem can be used for considering droplets as reactors. So if we run this again let us say that this red droplet has reactant A and the other droplet has reactant B so once they merge together the A and B will mix quickly and they will react to form a product C. So that can be used to achieve biological or biochemical reactions. So the same technology can be used on one hand for thermal management on the other hand the same technology can be used for bio applications or chemical application. So you can see that interesting fundamental science can lead to so many applications in the microfluidics domain. So I mean previously we were discussing about low cost healthcare that how is it how microfluidics can help in achieving the paradigm of low cost healthcare. So as we see in many applications related to medical technology see medical technology is a huge area and it is not that microfluidics alone plays a role in that area there are several aspects of medical technology but I am just trying to address some aspects which are covered by microfluidics. So on one side we have seen that like we can address cells, DNAs through microfluidics. On one other side I have shown you that how you can make say for example micro needles for blood extraction and drug delivery using microfluidic principles but you have to keep in mind that one big part of the domain that remains to be challenging not just in the developing world but also in the developed countries is proper medical diagnostics. So when we say diagnostics again diagnostics is a huge area so I am restricting myself only to those cases where the diagnostics implies the testing of blood urine saliva these types of fluids because I mean essentially when we are handling small volumes of fluids that is where microfluidics comes into the picture. So let us say I am just giving an example from the perspective of say rural India as an example. So let us say that somebody is suffering from a particular ailment let us say fever some kind of unknown fever for a few days then when the person is suffering from fever for a few days and the fever and he or she is not recovering from fever then there is a suspicion that it could be some vector bond disease for example there it could be malaria, dengue or even it could be typhoid I mean whatever I mean sometimes symptoms are so vague that it is very difficult to identify from the symptoms that what is the origin of the fever. So then the patient has to be tested for his or her blood sample. Now this kind of healthcare facility is not available at all remote locations and it is well understandable. I mean there is nobody to be blamed for this because in a huge country I mean which is very densely populated and I mean there are places where there is not so much access to modern healthcare I mean this is something with which we have to live with but we have to get a solution to overcome these constraints. So I will tell you that what kind of solution is possible and how can microfluidics play a role in that. Traditionally what will be done the patient will be taken to a healthcare center which may be is located a few kilometers from his or her own location. Then the blood sample will be taken there not a small amount of blood sample but a significant amount of blood sample which adds to the agony of the patient but anyway we are all habituated and accustomed to this. And then that particular blood sample if it requires a specialized testing then that will be taken to a very specialized lab which again may be located at a far off distance. And then that sample will be tested and the result if it is a specialized test it may take a few days for the result to come and by the time the result has come many times we are lucky if the patient is still surviving. So that is how these kinds of I mean this kind of scenario I mean it is not very uncommon and that is how it traditionally goes on. And now think of an alternative system I am proposing an alternative system which appears to be something I mean which is a sort of a dream system but this is just an alternative microfluidics based approach. So instead of a very expensive lab which is doing this test you what you do is you employ a health worker a health worker who is not very highly trained but just good enough to prick the fingertip and take a single drop of blood from that and not a huge amount of blood just a single drop of blood and that will be loaded in a handheld miniaturized device which is a microfluidic device what kinds of devices these are we will talk in great details of that through in this particular course. But for the time being assume some handheld type of device if it is if the handheld type of device looks like a compact disc look like a CD it is called as lab on a CD that is where the entire activities of a chemical laboratory are sort of integrated in a small disc like device. So then this device is run by a motor and when the motor runs this device and you load the device with a blood sample and in many of the in these devices there are many radial and cross radial channels which are made these are micro channels again I will demonstrate you that how micro channels are made in these devices. So when you make channels in these devices then what will happen and let us say that you sort of load each of the channels with a particular chemical that will test the existence of a certain disease in the blood sample. So the very common principle can be that in contact with the blood sample if so these chemicals are essentially like antigens or antibodies. So if there is a matching antigen or antibody in the blood signifying the disease there will be an antigen antibody reaction and there because of the antigen antibody reaction there will be a change in color. So the change in color may be visible but that is very ideal many times it may not be visible very sharply. So one has to do an image processing and then by image processing one can one can sort of decide whether a particular disease is there or not. So this device is rotated in a motor and the images of the blood sample as the blood is being transmitted in some in in these channels then those images can be taken and then when these images are taken then what happens then the question is how will these images be processed. Now I mean when we first started working in this particular field I mean many of my students were sort of trying to do that image processing using MATLAB. There is nothing wrong with that but in a in a sort of a more convenient paradigm one can nowadays use instead of such complicated image processing capabilities much simpler may be less accurate but more or less giving the solution type of technology that is using just the android based platform of a smartphone to grab the image and then based on that image will be processed and when that image is processed the result of the image processing by an SMS will be sent to a medical doctor who is sitting in a big city and that medical doctor will look into that result of the test and immediately give necessary advice through a return SMS and that starts the treatment. So this entire process has several advantages so what are the advantages see I mean there of course you can see here is that it is a integration of microfluidics technology with mobile technology information technology and all this. I am not bringing the information or the mobile technology part into the picture here because that is not an explicit contribution of microfluidics but what microfluidics is achieving here you see that first of all you do not have to do the tests in a big lab you do it in a miniaturized device and this device can be fabricated in a very low cost manner I will show you that how you can fabricate these devices at a very very low cost and then you use only a small volume of blood and because you use only small volume of blood you require only very small volume of reactants the chemicals which will react with this blood for the blood testing so that will reduce the cost because of high surface area to volume ratio you will see that these devices are highly reactive and you can you can expect rapid reactions and rapid outcome of the test. So you can do low cost rapid diagnostics in a portable manner and this is called as point of care diagnostics that instead of taking the patient to the hospital you sort of bring a mobile hospital to the patient and then do the necessary testing so this is a sort of a paradigm which is not just suited for a country like India but many countries throughout the world for diseases of any for say diagnosing diseases of any generic type and you can appreciate from this discussion that how microfluidics can play a big role towards that. So now these devices you can make more inexpensive by having very simple innovations this is what a point I want to highlight that in microfluidics for the low cost medical diagnostics it is not the complexity of the system that may be an USP of your device it can actually be the simplicity of the system that can be an USP. So this is a device that we innovated in our group this is called as paper and pencil device. So you have a simple paper based microfluidic device paper based microfluidic device is not our innovation it is an innovation from professor Whitesides group in the Harvard University. So but we made certain innovations to make the fabrication of micro channels on paper based devices in a very inexpensive manner I mean which is greatly advantageous as compared to what is done routinely but I will come into that later on when I discuss about fabrication of microfluidic channels. But on the top of that what we tried to do is as I discussed earlier that in many microfluidic systems you can augment the rate of fluid flow by applying electric field. So we try to apply electric field on the paper based device to make the water move faster or for example here the blood sample for diagnostic device it will not be water but a blood sample that we can make it to move faster. So what I what we did is something like this that we had to fabricate electrodes. Now electrode fabrication is a very involved process in MEMS devices. So here what we did instead is that instead of going for expensive or elaborate electrode deposition techniques what we did is we scratched the paper you can see this black region which scratched the paper with HB pencil just HB pencil and the graphite in the pencil helped to act make these scratched locations act as electrodes. So this device is made just by a simple paper with a simple printer used to sort of print channels on these papers and then scratching pencil makes electrodes. So by using a simple printer a paper and pencil we can make a smart microfluidic device which you can use for blood testing this is called as paper and pencil device. So I mean there are several innovations possible I will talk about the scientific aspects of the paper and pencil device how these how do these devices work and so on. But for the time being we will move on to some other examples. So I talked about some examples related to bio and some other examples which are not related to bio but as I hinted that there are some applications in microfluidics which relate or nanofluidics which relate to energy and in energy sector microfluidics is now becoming a very key area I mean which is playing its role. So I will talk about some concept which is called as nanofluidic battery it can also be microfluidic battery but just that these devices are more efficient if we go to the nanodomain than in the micro domain. So that is why I have made like the title as nanofluidic battery but I mean it could also be microfluidic battery. So what is the principle? So again we will discuss about that in details. So you can see there is a pressure driven flow if you follow this movie there is a pressure driven flow that is taking place there is a parabolic velocity profile you see this is a pressure driven flow and there are ions moving with the flow. So how you do you have ions in the flow so you have a device in the device the surface gets spontaneously charged and the surface gets spontaneously charged because of sudden electrochemistry at the interface between the substrate and the fluid I will talk about this later on that how the surface gets spontaneously charged. Let us say that the surface gets negatively charged this is just an example. So if the surface gets negatively charged and the entire fluid is electrically neutral so the bulk of the fluid will have more positive charge than negative charge and when this pressure driven flow is occurring then this excess positive charge will be accumulated in the downstream direction and that means that a voltage is created across the device. So when this voltage in a dynamic condition is created across this device and then if you connect this with an external resistor which is not shown in this cartoon if you connect this with an external resistor then a current will flow through the external resistor and a power will be generated. So you have an input energy which is the hydraulic form of energy and the output energy is an electrical form of energy. So this is hydraulic to electrical form and this is this kind of device is called as nanofluidic battery. So I will later on discuss that how you can you can have enhancement of efficiency of these devices what are the challenges. Now each of these devices can have energy conversion I mean the power generated may be of very low magnitude that is say few milliwatts may be for example but in many devices you can have large number of parallel arrays of micro channels and nano channels. So if each of these devices can generate a few milliwatts of power then it is possible to generate a good amount of power using these devices. You cannot use these for large scale applications but in small scale applications it is very much possible to use these for energy purposes. So one of the big advantages is that it is a clean energy generation technology. So it does not require any combustion of a fuel and all these things so it is direct conversion from hydraulic to electrical form. Now one of the limitations when we try to learn a device we have to also appreciate what are the limitations. Why are these devices not in the market? I mean these devices have very low energy conversion efficiencies. So may be I mean the maximum value that people have realized so far in experiments is at the most I mean not even 10% but I mean it has been shown theoretically that if you go to nano fluidic devices then in the nano fluidic domain you can use the slip boundary condition at the wall to have instead of the no slip boundary condition to have a more rapid rate of transport of these ions and that means more current. So to have more current in the system you should the current is a combination of advection because with the fluid flow the ions are moving and the like something called as electro migration. Electro migration is the movement of electrical charges because of applied field. So here no electric field is applied but an electric field is induced a back electric field is induced and what the back electric field does is it creates a current due to electro migration which is a back current which is shown in this direction and there is a forward current due to advection. At steady state these two currents should balance so that net current through the system is 0 because you have no excess charge in the system. So the net current must be 0 but there is a potential and you can realize a current the a net current by having an external register but not the through the system the net current will be 0. So coming back to the point so the efficiencies of these devices is low. So you can enhance the efficiencies of this device and if you can do that if you go to the nano fluidic domain and if you can enhance the efficiencies of these devices then it may be possible that using this kind of devices you can compact the entire device the entire power generation device and that device can work in a cyclic process just like a power plant you can you can miniaturize that in the form of a chip. So I mean we have undertaken such a project titled plant on a chip. So we are trying to now make a small miniaturized power plant on a chip by using this particular principle. So I can tell you that this is not a technology of the present but I mean this is currently in the lab scale and many people are investigating fundamentals of this but sooner time will come when this will be converted into viable technology. Another example this is not based on work from our group but work from some other research group synthetic lives for power generation. So the reference from which this work is taken is highlighted here. So if you are interested you can read this paper. So this takes an example takes a clue from photosynthesis for pumping fluid. So what it is doing is water is sucked from the main stem of artificial system at 1.5 centimeter per second it moves toward the edges of the leaves and evaporated through the created pores. So this is something what commonly takes place. Now how can you harvest energy from that? So that is done by this innovation. The main stem has metal plates connected to circuits and the charge plates and water within the stem form two conducting layers separated by an insulating layer. So it is a system where you have a dielectric. Now as the liquid is getting converted to vapor during evaporation the permittivity of the system changes because the dielectric constant of the liquid is different from that of the vapor. So the charge stored in the system you know q equal to c into v and c is a function of epsilon like for a parallel plate capacitor is epsilon by d. So c is a function of epsilon the permittivity. So if the permittivity changes with time because of a dynamical evaporation process then the capacitance also changes with time that means q also changes with time because q equal to c into v so you have a dq dt that means you have a current. So that is how in the system you can harvest energy and it is possible that a tiny amount of electricity is generated the output may be 2 to 5 micro volt with a power density of about 2 micro watts per cc. So you can see that this is a very interesting way of harvesting energy. I will discuss about a couple of more applications before we call it a day today. Now I have discussed about biological applications energy related applications. Now an application related to computer science this is called as bubble logic microfluidic bubble logic. Again this is not a work done from our group this work has been done by one of my friends Dr. Manu Prakash I mean when he was a student of the Harvard University. So you can see here like let us say that you have say bubbles or droplets they are arriving at a junction one from the direction A and another from the direction B. Bubble arriving at the junction at the junction always enters the wider channel right it has a option whether it will enter the wider channel or the narrower channel because the wider channel has a less resistance any system remember always has the tendency to go through a least resistance path. So the bubbles will initially go to this junction that is the direction of A plus B increasing the output flow resistance of A plus B and after sometime the bubbles will be diverted to the other direction that is A dot B. So you can make a logic circuit using that and in this movie you will see that how like bubbles arrive at junctions and after sometime you will see that instead of going through the wider channel it will start going through the narrower channel. So these bubbles if they contain digital information then it is possible to make new generation computers using this microfluidic logic and this is called as bubble logic. So these are very fascinating areas of science that can be addressed by microfluidics. So I have talked about many applications but I mean I will try to wind up today's lecture with some little bit of science that may go in some of these applications. Now in many microfluidic channels we will we find that roughness is very critical roughness of the channel is very critical and the reason is straight forward in a microfluidic device or even in a nanofluidic device the roughness length scale is comparable to the system characteristic length scale. So roughness plays a very critical role and poorer the manufacturing technique is rougher is the substrate and we consider that as a negative consequence that is an adverse effect on the device because we expect that friction will increase because of the roughness. Now this was an understanding for a long time and this is something which is very intuitive but in science studies are often non-intuitive that means certain experiments revealed that if you are having a rough micro channel then you are actually getting a very smooth flow instead of a rough behavior instead of a high resistance against the flow. So this is something which we tried to look into from a fundamental theoretical perspective because this is something which is which at that point of time when this was addressed by the research community appeared to be an outstanding problem I mean a problem which is associated with lots of anomalies and then what came out of the investigation to cut the story short that it was revealed that roughness of the surface in conjunction with the weight ability that if you have a coupling of hydrophobicity and roughness. Hydrophobic micro channel surfaces are very common because many of the microfluidic substrates are normally hydrophobic and they are actually treated specially by some oxygen plasma or maybe some other technology to make hydrophilic otherwise these surfaces will be hydrophobic. So when these surfaces are hydrophobic and they have roughness elements then roughness and hydrophobicity combination can give rise to small scale bubbles which are nano bubbles these bubbles are residing on the surface of the micro channel. The bubble formation in microfluidics is a very critical thing if you have bubbles which are having the same laying scale as that of the system then these bubbles will block the flow and bubble clogging is a very serious problem in microfluidics I mean anybody who has done practical work with pressure driven micro flows will know that it is actually a great job to see that the fluid is actually flowing through the micro channel forget about the science part of the work that many times occurs because the bubble is clogging the flow passive. Now here we are not talking about such bubbles we are talking about nano scale bubbles that is bubbles which are say of the laying scale of around 10 nanometers or so these bubbles are very stable and these bubbles are standing on the microfluidic substrate. So when these bubbles are standing on the micro fluidic substrate then what is happening then the liquid which is flowing on the top of these bubbles that liquid is not directly encountering the roughness elements. So that liquid is flowing as if on a cushion of bubbles. So the bubbles are acting like blankets which are not exposing the outer liquid to the with the roughness elements which are there on the surface. So that makes the flow apparently frictionless or with very low friction because instead of the liquid encountering the roughness elements the liquid is smoothly sailing over the bubbles. So the in systems where bubbles are not there then what will happen that instead of bubbles you can have a low density depleted layer which may not be bubble but a low density layer adhering to the solid boundary over that you have the bulk density. So the bulk density fluid is moving on a low density cushion that is being separated by the surface roughness elements and therefore although the surface is rough you can see that how rough it can be this is an image of atomic force microscopy so you can see how rough these are but if this is blanketed with a low density fluid then the high density fluid which is flowing on the top of it is not exposed to these roughness elements and what has given rise to this low density fluid it is the combination of roughness and wettability. So here the roughness acts as the blessing in disguise and we call it the rough makes it smooth. So it is the roughness that gives rise to the smoothness of the flow and this is something which is very non-intuitive and that is why it is a very interesting and fascinating aspect of science as all of us grow up we tend to realize that there are certain things which are very intuitive right even a little child does not put his or her finger in fire because he or she will know that that will burn who has taught this just maybe nature has taught this to the young child so this is from intuition. So most of the learnings that we have in science are primarily out of intuition and there is nothing wrong with that but as we move ahead with our life we understand that there are certain things which do not occur just out of intuition they are actually counter intuitive if we keep our eyes open towards that and do not think that as a mistake and instead of that we try to understand or unveil the science that goes behind that non-intuitive finding to me that is what is learning of science and that is how learning of science progresses. So this is one particular example I mean this kind of example is thought of can be thought of as hyper fluidity in micro or nano channels we have done some work on this but it is very difficult where the challenge remains is that this inception and distribution of nanobubbles is actually a stochastic phenomenon. So it is not possible always to make a reproducible engineering device out of this fascinating science. So that remains still as a challenge that to translate this science into a device and if we can translate this science into a device then you see that it again like it can add value to many systems for example the low cost medical diagnostic devices because they are of low cost they are made of such manufacturing processes which can give rise to serious roughness elements and those roughness elements can be then exploited as a benefit so that you can have rapid transport of the blood sample and you can have rapid reaction. So but this is not already realized in a device I am just trying to give you a futuristic outlook that how can this science be brought into a technology which may be useful for the common people. So in microfluidics we handle or we deal with many such fascinating examples where there are wide ranges of applications and the beauty of the subject is that on one hand you have lots of practical applications on which you can work as an engineer on another hand you are fascinating science which you can bring into the technology to make the technology more effective and one requires experiments and theory combinations of both to address these particular needs. So there could be many more examples which I would have talked about but I think we should be restricted here in terms of the number of examples and it is good time to talk about that we now enter into the theoretical and the experimental foundations of the subject. So in the next lecture what we will do with that we will revisit the classical continuum equations typically the Navier-Stokes equation, the energy equation and the species conservation equation the mass transfer equation these equations we will derive starting from the very basics so that everybody comes to the common platform and then we will use those equations for certain applications related to microfluidics and try to find a contrasting feature with the corresponding macro flows and see and try to also discuss about situations when those equations may break down either those equations or the boundary conditions accompanying those equations. So we will start addressing those from the next lecture onwards thank you very much.


現 accused say that in our past better and better much does needs deserve to demand and that as you know the focus of today's event is identity in data. Researchers are expanding their focus on exploring how discourses of self and identity and access remain inclusive from the perspective of those populations, communities and individuals. Data collection methodologies are also developing these methodologies are increasingly becoming perceived As significant an impact for search assets in their own right. In these developments in themselves a critical element of the social construction of statistics. of data subjects. Shortly, we will be hearing from researchers and policymakers from UK academia, public and voluntary community sectors. We will hear how they use and gain insight into discourses of representation in data focused on populations, communities and individuals. We do recognise that as the first event in this area, the UK data service is facilitated. We're not able to present all of the characteristics that may be missing from data. We hope the discussion that follows from the event will be just shared with you. Now, I'm delighted to introduce our keynote speaker, Lemsisee. Lemsisee MB is a BAF-denominated award-winning writer, international poet, performer, playwright, artist and broadcaster. He was the first poet commissioned to write for London Olympics and poet of the FA Cup. He's also the Chancellor of the University of Manchester, which is one of the partners in the UK data service. On to our first panelist, who's Dermi Cepardia, now, I started introducing her earlier, but Dermi is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester and a member of the SSC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity. She was a member of the UK data services first cohort of Data Impact Fellows. She's got expertise in social statistical methods and her main areas of research are ethnic inequalities and health and access to health services. She's also conducted research on ethnic inequalities in the labour market and on the relationships between poverty, ethnicity and gender. Dermi, over to you. I just want to start by saying, wow, thanks to Llan for such a powerful and heart-breaking keynote speech of his journey of finding out about himself, his story and his family in the face of being made invisible in data. Thank you very much for that. Thank you to the UK data service impact team for inviting me to speak here. The past year has seen inequalities in the UK where, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, inequalities faced by those living in poverty, by women, those working in insecure jobs and not least by ethnic minority people. I've been working on ethnic and racial inequalities in the UK for the past eight years as a member of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, led by the University of Manchester and at the moment from a research and data perspective there's a lot of interest in the inequalities faced by minority people and this is more so than before. But when researchers come to look at the data that's available on these groups, what do they find? So the phrase that I used in my blog published by the UK DS impact team last week was represented yet excluded. But another phrase came to mind this morning and Llan's already mentioned it. This phrase comes to mind repeatedly when I think about the experiences of ethnic minority people, both how they're treated in their everyday lives and in data and that phrase is so visible yet invisible. By this I mean that many ethnic minority people are visibly minorities but often their experiences to a large extent are not sufficiently acknowledged and sometimes are completely erased from our data sources. And today I'm going to talk briefly about two research projects that I work on. The first project is about inequalities faced by ethnic minority older people and this is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and this project was born out of the research team's interest in severe disadvantages that this group, these ethnic minority older people face and these disadvantages are often accumulated over the life course leading to worse health and economic circumstances in later life. These experiences that I'm talking about are experiences of racism, poor housing, poor job opportunities. Quite a lot of I think minority older people living in this country came to the UK as migrants and they faced a lot of hardship, a lot of racism, a lot of discrimination when they arrived. So because of our research interests we checked in a number of surveys housed by the UK data base and found that quite a lot of the data wasn't what we wanted, it couldn't answer our research questions. And we found that the number of people aged 65 and over was very low. So not enough to do the kind of statistical analysis that we do as quantitative researchers. So for example there are only 36 Bangladeshi women aged over 65 in the latest wave of understanding society and that's the UK's largest household longitudinal study. In the survey that looks specifically at older people, that's the English longitudinal study of aging or ELSA, there's only 500 ethnic minority people which comprises just over 5% of the sample of the latest wave. So to address these data problems we've pooled a number of data sets, data sets that include ethnic minority boost samples from the period from 1993 to 2017 to have enough people in each of the ethnic categories to do sound data analysis. And this is important because we want to keep different ethnic groups separate and we oppose the use of combining ethnic groups just to provide data on an overarching vein group, a term which I don't like and I encourage people to use to conduct data analysis and use terms ethnic groups distinctively. And I would find and ensure that inequalities in health, ethnic minority older people in this country have persisted for more than two decades up to the present day. The second research project that I'd like to talk about is the evidence for equality national survey or evens that launched last week to document the experiences of ethnic and religious minority people during the COVID-19 pandemic which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council ESRC. The service being administered by Itsos Mori and can be completed online and on the telephone and we're aiming to recruit 17,000 ethnic and religious minority people. And we're asking participants questions related to racism and discrimination, their health, how their job has been affected during the pandemic, how caring responsibilities have changed and how they've been policed amongst others. And we're using non-probability methods. So this is snowball sampling convenient sampling as you might know it. And really now these methods are becoming more the norm especially during the pandemic for surveys where we can't go out to people's houses. And this perhaps represents the future of large scale quantitative data collection and indeed the ONS expects that 75% of the 2021 census forms will be filled in online. In our survey in evens in order to ensure that we can recruit 17,000 people we're working in partnership with large ethnic minority led volunteering community organisations such as Muslim Council of Britain Operation Black Vote Race Quality Foundation to really get the message out about this survey and encourage people to fill it in. And the innovation of this survey is not only its sampling design, we're also collecting ethnicity in a number of ways. So as Len mentioned in his answer to the question that was posed by an audience member not only providing a drop-down box where people can tick their ethnicity but also including a writing box for people to self-define their ethnicity. So this is new in this kind of survey. It's also the first time in a national survey that we're going to differentiate black African people of sub-Saharan descent on those who are not and it's the first time that Roma and Gypsy traveller populations will be meaningfully represented in such a large national survey. So just to kind of sum up I'd like to say that a lot of my presentation may have come across a little bit critical of the data sources that we have in this country but really a lot of advances have been made towards including and representing ethnic and religious minority groups in surveys. We've seen that there'll be an addition of a Roma category for the 2021 census which is the ONS and this country acknowledging that Roma people in this country do face severe disadvantages. But moving forward we need commitment to collect data to produce database evidence to tackle inequalities and we need this commitment from statutory organisations as well as being a key principle for large scale national surveys in the UK. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much, Jeremy. We're going to move on to the next panellist and at the end there'll be an opportunity to ask questions of all of the speakers so if you could save your questions until we've got into all the panellists who had a chance to speak. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Statsky. Daniel Statsky is a senior research fellow at Jewish Policy Research and Director of its European Jewish Demography Unit. His expertise spans the disciplines of demography, applied statistics in history and he's a former researcher and analyst at the Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel and at Rand Europe. He specialised in Jewish European and Middle Eastern demography with over 20 years of experience and a long publication record in those fields. Over to you, Daniel. Thank you. Thank you very much and hello everybody. I don't have a very long presentation obviously. The limitation is significant. I only have five minutes so I would keep this exhibit in front of you at all times and don't try to go through it in a very detailed way right now. Just relate to it for now as a picture of a person where you basically see three differently coloured fields and I will slowly unfold and explain what they are. It probably it's worth saying from the start that the Institute for Jewish Policy Research which is a body I represent today we are, well as it says as it basically says it tells you only ten way research body we collect not only we collect, we analyse and disseminate statistics and statistically based insights I should call it that about the condition of Jews in Europe and in Britain and this is our core activity. We do that for the sake of Jewish communities global Jewish community, European and British Jewish community but we don't we don't just work with Jewish organisations we work with every single organisation on the planet in Britain that has something to do with Jews and needs data about Jewish people. It's worth saying parenthetically that we are quite an old institution we exist since the 40s we were established in the United States of America actually moved to European soil in the 60s under the conditions of Cold War and since that time pretty much consistently demography and social statistics are our core activities. Now what we do here basically I'm moving to describe our activities with respect to inclusion and solutions around that and our activities are dictated by the essential condition of Jews everywhere apart from Israel and that Jews are a religious and ethnic minority first of all and secondly it's a small minority and that's important so in the data we more often than not display what I call the rarity problem is highlighted on the right there's a box on the right says the rarity problem this is something that dominates our activity in Britain just to give you an illustration Jews are less than half percent of the population and that has implications on how we captured in service if we are at all and the second box the second blue box is another problem if you wish it's an objective problem which I could relate to in minority status not on any particular political sense but as a factual sense being a minority you need to be part of the minority you need to be identified in the sources it's as simple as that not only we want to be identified we need to be correctly identified and not only that we need to be identified and correctly identified but also counted so all of this these are conditions that need to be in a way fulfilled in the middle between these two problems highlighted or issues highlighted and blue which is minority status and the rarity problem that is not going away I listed in a sort of an orange box the sources which contain or should contain or may contain data on Jewish individuals and the sources we work with and there are different degrees of let's say some of them include information on Jewish, some of them don't and some of them include it in the correct form some of them don't include it in the correct form all of that we're trying either to change to introduce or sponsor or lobby for changes in this particular data collection modes that lead to the creation of the sources in such a way that Jewish individuals could be identified in them or we create our own tailored solutions so we create group specific sources or resources which we sponsor ourselves and I will give a few illustrations in that respect so let me give you a few illustrations of how inclusion, what I mean by ensuring inclusion, what we actually do in that respect now a lot of sources today, whether it's administrative data or census or surveys, they rely ultimately on the forms that people fill in questionnaires that are given to people and it's incredibly important obviously in order to create to ensure inclusion of Jewish individuals or any other minority group to simply identify that group to create a response scheme in which people or members of this particular minority see themselves and they simply know how to identify themselves and Jews in Britain, there's a tradition of identifying Jewish people by religion and that works, it works in the context of the census, it doesn't work it doesn't exist in the context of vital registration so while census tells us about how many Jews are in Britain and tells us the truth as far as we can tell the vital registration so statistics of births and deaths doesn't tell us that so that is something to be from our point to be changed and enhanced administrative data sources don't collect information on religion or collect it on insufficient quality of insufficient quality so even if we have this, such as NHS for example it makes it also often it makes it unusable as for the surveys most surveys today I'd say most surveys collect data on religion Jews can be identified but we have a formidable rarity problem on the right where being just half a percent of the population we can't have much hope with respect to surveys that have typical samples of thousand two thousand, three thousand people so we need to literally wait for decades to create a sufficiently robust number of Jews in the survey so this is basically a very schematic description of our activities as I said ensuring inclusion in all of these sources listed in the middle and correcting the deficiencies in that respect when these occur and secondly solving somehow overcoming the rarity problem which is an objective problem that doesn't go away simply through removing non-inclusions through ensuring inclusion still a small minority such as Jews by no means a single minority of that kind need special methods if these people need to be captured in the sources it's either boosting or creating group specific resources a simple inclusion may or may not help so far from me this is the data dance of the institute for Jewish policy research in a nutshell thank you thank you Daniel, thank you very much so we'll move on to the next panellist which is Kevin Guian now Dr Kevin Guian works as a researcher for Advanced HE an organisation that focuses on equality diversity and inclusion among staff and students in UK higher education Kevin is the author of the forthcoming book queer data using gender sex and sexuality data for action which examines the collection analysis and use of gender sex and sexuality data particularly as it relates to LGBTQ people in the UK over to you Kevin thank you great, thank you Gillian and thank you to the UK data service impact team for the invite to speak today so I'm going to be speaking really wearing two hats as Gillian mentioned I work as a researcher for the higher education organisation Advanced HE but alongside that I'm also engaged in scholarship around the collection analysis and use of gender sex and sexuality data as it relates to LGBTQ individuals in the UK so as part of Advanced HE's research team we publish annual statistical reports on the identity characteristics of all staff and students in UK higher education and so our most recent reports published last year last October cover data collected by the higher education statistics agency for the 2018-19 academic year this was information on just under 2.4 million students and 440,000 staff as you can see that was a gigantic data set and what's particularly exciting for someone engaged in equality and diversity research is that this data includes information on a range of different identity characteristics including gender sexual orientation and trans status so my presentation this morning is going to focus on the three strands what we might consider gender sex and sexuality data so it's time and short and rather than consider what data tells us about LGBTQ staff and students I instead want to offer some provocations as to what happens at the intersection where data practices and concepts of gender, sex and sexuality meet for these reasons I'm not only interested in what data says about LGBTQ individuals but I'm really interested in what data how it relates to power and its expression and use in terms of representation I'm interested in how we establish who counts and how this brings some identities into focus while casting other identities further into shadows I'm also going to look at how we acknowledge the data practices are both productive and partial and thirdly how we might use the idea of something I label queer data competence to ensure that decisions about data are made by those who are most affected so firstly the broad question is something we're going to tease out throughout the day the question of who counts so attempts to categorise and establish who counts as LGBTQ means that some people are always left behind those most likely to gain from efforts to tweak data practices so they're more inclusive are individuals who are often closest to the ideal of full equality so in my work is often white middle class cis gay men one example where we've seen this play out quite recently is developments in Scotland related to the design of the sex question in the 2022 census so the next census taking place in 2021 next month in Northern Ireland, England and Wales and the following year in Scotland will for the first time provide an opportunity for people to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans however the census will not meaningfully count those who identify as non-binary who will still be required to identify their sex as either male or female I raise this example here to show that surface level changes to data practices can actually stifle structural progress and potentially entrenching equality in ways that are sometimes harder for us to tackle Secondly the idea of data practices as something productive and partial this really underscores how decisions made by data producers bring some identities into being while leaving others behind a critical approach data is therefore required to expose the limits of quant data that can test the decisions made during the collection analysis and how efforts to count LGBTQ communities only ever presents one representation of the social world and thirdly the actions of data producers are never neutral and therefore must ask what is being precluded from view for example what is lost when a team of cisgender and heterosexual individuals design questions intended to capture data about LGBTQ lives now it's not practical for those in decision making spaces to always bring lived experiences to the table we therefore need to ensure that those with power can make decisions about data which impacts the lives of LGBTQ individuals are queer data competence so very briefly this requires a basic knowledge of language and concepts associated with LGBTQ identities and understanding of historical and social factors that means the quality of opportunities of fiction and an awareness of power differences both between and importantly within LGBTQ communities so to bring things to an end I presented here some really critical provocations as to the collection and analysis of gender, sex and sexuality data for data producers the design of collection tools didn't arrive as some sort of a historical or a political artifact they are crafted, tweaked and changed to serve the particular interests of individuals organisations or ways of thinking so when engaging in critical studies of data we must deal with multitudes, we can celebrate developments while also reflecting upon what was lost along the way and ensure that we continue to fight to ensure that when data about LGBTQ individuals is collected is used in ways that really improves lives and experiences of those about whom the data relates okay great thank you very much Kevin on to our next speaker who is Craig Moss Craig is the research manager for scope responsible for most of the social research conducted by the organisation Craig has worked as a social researcher for 20 years within research and policy for the third sector and has delivered a variety of research programmes with marginalised and socially excluded groups Craig is passionate about data accessibility research ethics and celebrating diversity and equality for all as well as working for scope he's vice chair of the social care research ethics committee as part of the health research authority thank you Craig very much one in five people in the UK identify as a disabled person yet for such a large proportion of the population it's only relatively recently that disabled people have gained significant equal rights under the disability discrimination act despite this milestone which is celebrated as 25th anniversary last year disabled people continually struggle with the way society identifies them within the equality act 2010 which has now replaced the DDA disabled people are identified and framed by a medical definition basically to ascertain what conditions or impairments that they have and whether their condition affects their day-to-day activities for an extended period and is this application of this definition within the data collection and subsequent policy and research that can be a challenge for identity and the self the definition is inherently a medical model of disability rather than the social model of disability which when introduced revolutionised the way society's relationship to disabled people was framed and empowered disabled people to reframe how they thought about themselves the individual rather than being the problem is disabled by societal barriers environmental, attitudinal and institutional restricting people's ability to live the life they choose furthermore disabled people are often classed as one or larger simplified groups rather than people with individual needs and experiences to be heard there are parallels here to other groups who are also experiencing equality such as the LBGTQ plus community or ethnic minorities communities where in pulling together as a unit to address inequalities society can often perceive each group as an uncomplicated homogenous whole with broad brush often informed assumptions about the individuals within them meaning for consultation is to ascertain the need within these groups is frequently neglected or under resourced which is particularly affecting at government and institutional levels these institutional barriers can continue to perpetuate the way communities experiencing inequalities are measured understood and represented by data and how they are subsequently framed in policy and reports for example could disability rather than being measured as a list of long-term impairments or conditions be framed as an individual's access needs to society so that data can be utilized based on individual need and societal support structures so next slide please I've decided to leave this slide just for time but just wanted to say that coronavirus has exposed inequalities and widening cracks sort of further and it's just great that we have these opportunities to discuss things and debate a bit more and these kind of conversations are starting to happen and we'll obviously bring that up in a discussion sessions later so I'll skip on to the next slide please thank you and here is just an example some of the work that Scope's been doing happy to chat with anyone after the fact and one of the things I'm going to pick on is the disability price tag work and go on to talk a little bit further about some of our co-production work we're doing so the disability price tag research is a good example of where Scope has been able to complete some detailed analysis on a large representative using a large representative data set including disabled people it was an economic analysis to ascertain the estimation of extra cost of disability and equivalent cost of being a disabled person when comparing households in the UK we used the family resource survey from the ONS and through structured equation modern we calculated the extra cost of disability for UK households by comparing the standard of living of those households with disabled people against those without we created a number of indicator indexes our standard of living index which is the diagram there which I just described as a very complicated flow diagram but basically it uses deprivation indicators that covered areas of people's lives such as fresh food access furniture repair and the ability to go on holiday and it allowed us to create a comparable standard of life between households it would have been useful if we could have covered areas important to disabled people as well such as detailed information on transportation or energy use but we married this with identity dependent variables such as social demographics personal details, family size educational level for example and health indicators and on average the monthly cost of extra disability of disability sorry was £580 roughly £580 for disabled people and their families basically the extra cost came from three main areas, higher cost for standard services such as insurance higher usage of standard service such as energy and specialist equipment such as assistive tech and we're now using some of this work to talk to the government about calculators of poverty and about how to inform strategy and policy one of the ways we've also been engaging to work with alongside disabled people in research we've produced and support identity through scope is to embrace inclusivity through co-production across the organisation this supports embedding disabled people's direct input into the process and decision making of moving from the doing for approach to the doing with where we can and firmly embracing the mantra nothing about us without us true collaboration partnership working one such project is where we have recently completed in collaboration with the IHuman Institute of the University of Sheffield exploring social capital of disabled young people the research was conducted by the units co-research collective a group of young social researchers who are disabled people they work with disabled young people to explore key assets and elements of their lives and document their identity and extension of self and independence through their connections with the world around them the findings are yet to be published but following the success of this work scope is now looking to establish its own research collective and produce and co-produce sorry research activities working alongside disabled people as researchers and key informants to address how to identify how disabled people are expressed through statistics presented on scope's website statistics are commonly used to portray people experiencing inequalities disadvantaged to solicit empathy and we want to change this by involving disabled people in our reframing representation project to address how statistics are presented is our ambition that would be more informed about effective and engaging data collection methods how data will be more representative involving people with lived experience and using the accompanying language to frame statistics which disabled people identify with which describes them as people with their own individual lives rather than numbers and that this is inclusive and accessible as possible thanks very much and anyone really that's interested in taking part in this research project either as a researcher or a key informant please don't hesitate to contact me and if you need anything described about the work further just come back to me later in my email is available on the final slide which I think will be circulated thanks very much okay thank you very much Craig and then on to our final speaker for today which is Karen Harrell, Dr Karen Harrell is a professional statistician who's worked for the Equality and Human Rights Commission since 2007 and previously for the Equal Opportunities Commission she's worked on a wide range of issues over the years for example pay gaps stop and search and hate crime statistics and on all protected characteristics covered by the Equality Act 2010 she's currently collecting data for the next various statutory review Karen thank you yes I'm just going to say a bit about the work that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been doing to measure progress thank you so we're a statutory non-sponsored department of public body which was established by the Equality Act 2006 and we're a national equality body as well as a national human rights institute and we cover Great Britain so England's not with Wales but not Northern Ireland and one part of the Equality Act says that we should report to Parliament at least every five years on his progress in equality and human rights and to do that we are required to define a set of indicators and those indicators have formed a measurement framework which we've created to specify the topics we will count and the types of evidence we should look at to give us a framework as it says and for pulling together the information for each of these reviews so this is the structure of the framework for the six domains education work, living standards, health justice and personal security and participation and then as you can see on the slide within each domain there's a number of indicators looking at different areas the ones in bold are the ones we look at each time and the ones in a lighter type are supplementary indicators which we will select each time we do a review according to what the most important topics are at the time and some of you may have seen our last review which was released in 2018 and we're currently working towards the next one which because of the pandemic is likely to result in reports coming out over the next couple of years the exact timetable we're still thinking about because obviously it takes some time for data to be released that actually covers the pandemic next slide please so within the measurement framework for each of those domains there's a set of measures over 50 in all and on the statistical side statistics isn't the only thing we're looking at but the statistics part of it is mainly these 50 measures and we're trying to include a cross sectionalysis each year and also look at the change of the time and you'll see here so this is the nine protects characteristics covered by the quality legislation in the top left of this diagram we're also trying to look at socio-economic group groups of people who are at high risk such as as this here is the homeless people in detention and we're trying to look at different parts of country geographical analysis so that adds up to quite a significant amount of statistical analysis we'll have the next slide please so this is a diagram of some of the sources that we draw on and given that given his authority this meeting these are the ones that we where we obtain evidence from the UK data service and these by no means all the sources we use there's a lot of admin sources as well but these are the main survey sources and I'm just going to say that the look in particular at two of the two of the protected characteristics if we'll have the next slide and and these are two areas where we have been trying to obtain a broader range of data because obviously it seems like data of sex and age are relatively easy to get hold of but this one is looking at disability data and the more details you can get if you have information on payment tab as well and you see here the very pale ones are the ones where we only have a very basic measurement of disability the others go into more detail although in a few cases they are very much based on questions about diseases rather than the complex questions that we would prefer to see asked about disability and if I can have the last slide please and this is a summary of what data there are on sexual orientation so this is in an area that is expanding and still expanding with most of the surveys now asking a question but the darker ones are those where there's a clear place to get the data from the others so in development generally you have to be requested so I think the availability of data is an improving situation but still some areas where we do have more information and I shall finish there Thank you Thank you Karen, thank you very much to all of our speakers for really excellent thought provoking presentations Okay, thanks everybody so back to the seminar and we're going to move now into our discussion session with the panel we'll start with a few questions that have been asked by the audience and then move on to some general questions we want to put to how to kind of continue this discussion going forward so first of all, could I just ask the panel first of all to just give us your reflections on the discussions we've been having so far I was going to say just first thing was how much alignment there is across all the different groups about the sort of shared experience of people in the different communities and how it's the same issues really that are raised by everyone to be honest that would be my first reflection to start the conversation That was my main takeaway as well as I think really being led by what people say, led by people's lives people's experiences and building our data building our systems, our structures around that I think sometimes we follow trap I was trying to get our lives to match what the data says it should do or the system or the way of doing things and I think that real community dimension about valuing what people say I think came out really key across everyone's talks That stood out for me as well and I think it feels quite feels a little bit disappointing that so many marginalised communities are facing such hardship exacerbated by the pandemic and then as researchers and people working in organisations advocating for people who are suffering are really having to fight to get them represented in data as well I think that feels a little bit frustrating because it seems as though that should really just be a given that if we have these really marginalised communities then of course we should direct resources towards making sure that they are appropriately appropriately represented to ensure that we have proper data on them I think these things are cyclical as well so if you don't involve people in their data then they're not going to give you the data for you to understand more about people themselves so it can be sort of self-fulfilling a bit and people then get further excluded I think as well one comment that we had on the launch of our survey last week was that well we have lots of data that show us about these qualities that different groups face so for those ethnic minority people why do we need more data why do we need more data to tell us about how badly people are doing why don't the people have the power to do something about this local governments, national governments do something about this and I think when that was paused towards I really emphasised with that and thought well that is kind of how I feel as well but the important thing is that we do need to keep pushing the message of how marginalised and how disadvantaged people are and one of the best ways to do that is presenting people with the facts about that and presenting people with the data about that Can I start with one question that's been posed from Matthew Woolard So he says can we talk a little bit about language so for years survey designers have used language to describe things which are not in their competence so and it speaks to the kind of co-creation point that some of you are making in your talk so white statisticians coming up with terms with ethnicity questions How do we allow minority opinion to have a voice without being as culturally inappropriate as some language has been in the past I think from my point of view you know I said specifically I don't like the term BAME and that an opinion I think that is shared by other ethnic minority people and researchers working in the field of ethnicity and race because it lumps together people who have very different and distinct experiences and it it's as though that term is essentialised as if BAME is a thing it's not a thing it's an acronym and I think maybe other people would disagree because it's a shortcut and it's a way to describe groups of people who we all think we know who we're describing by using that term but I think wherever possible I think this applies to any kind of marginalised community we should be being very specific about what we're talking about and who we're talking about in this country the experience of for example British Indian people is very different from the experience of Chinese people or black African people or gypsy and Irish travel people but they would all come under this category BAME and you know I think this term is now you know that's the term that's on trend at the moment and in the past it will have been other terms and I think I tend to use ethic minorities some people like to use minoritised groups instead to show the disadvantage that they face so I think terminology and the language we use is very important because it signifies what we think about these groups it signifies the importance that you're giving to their experiences what do others think and that Daniel's got his hand up I think Oh sorry yes Daniel go ahead Yeah thank you I think I would continue the subject the topic that the army started and I would say that indeed BAME is a concept that's I mean close to meaningless and I think people who do use it use it it means something for them and we need to ask ourselves all of these labels what actually do they mean do they serve any kind of practical problematic question do they help in terms of policy for example that's the that's the fixed star that I think we often should be guided by now I would share with you probably an event or that is basically unfolding the Jewish community today and in the past five years I'd say we have been consulted about the use about the proper ways to capture Jewish population and the census and service and basically it's a discussion it's a debate between religion and ethnicity okay how do you capture Jewish population is it a type of religious group is it a type of ethnic group is it maybe both so the reality the truth of the matter that it's both that doesn't particularly matter in the administrative context you really have to create a way for people so they can see themselves in the questionnaire it may be a compromise with their inner feeling for example but they have to be able to identify themselves in the questionnaire and so we advocated early on that Jewish population is reflected as religion and ethnicity later we changed this position slightly we adjusted it we could see that religion is enough even people who are not religious who don't hold very strong version of faith the Jewish people will know that religion question is there for them so they will see themselves so that particular emotion or that particular sentiment needed to be identified and reported but there is a bigger question for us and that's not a Jewish question far from that and the reality is changing all the time meaningful groups are being created all the time equality or outcomes have to be monitored along certain lines all the time and these are changing so how does the statistical system create well adjust itself is it flexible enough to reflect these changes that occur all the time and still can we marry the attention to the small groups often disadvantaged groups with the requirements of statistics because sometimes you attempt to create sizeable categories of people and when you attempt to create sizeable categories you don't want to split you want to somehow increase the size of them so I think for us at least the meaningful very meaningful discussion is A how we are reflected and is this data collection flexible enough to incorporate changes but also we need to ensure the situation should be such that we create statistically significant not in any political sense but analysable groups with all the labels that we use can this be done, how this can be done that's my preoccupation and that opinion that view is supported by what they have heard here Thank you, that actually leads in nicely into a question from Sarah Metcalf which is how can we start to approach the improvement of data collection to ensure the amplification of diverse voices if people we want to reach and not engage for various reasons and we cannot obtain their data we cannot tell their stories how can we improve this so I think that's kind of the million dollar question isn't it in this I'm really interested in in what people think about this I think that's a really interesting question I think again kind of continuing the thread from Daniel's answer in the census it's really kind of come to fruition of late around sexual orientation and transgender identity questions in the upcoming census and I think how do we how do we show people that being counted in a state data collection exercise is safe, secure but also meaningful for their everyday lives and I think for a lot of minoritised groups a lot of people's relationships to data collection activities whether it's through police, surveillance law enforcement is quite a negative experience so I think how do we ensure that when data is collected about minoritised groups whether it's gender sexual minorities or racial groups or religious groups actually that data is being used to improve people's everyday lives and I think that's really the key knob of how do we get people on board about participation and being engaged is actually ensuring that we're not collecting data for data's sake but we're actually using it in ways that has material everyday impacts and I think also sort of marginalised groups they're often they are stigmatised so and that drives those groups also experience extra levels of other issues for example domestic violence you know one in twenty people in the UK I think that suffer domestic violence but it's something like one in seven for disabled people so those those experiences push people further away from being able to engage with data collection and it makes it much more a complicated story and I think that's why I believe co-production is a really important way of approaching that to engage with the community and also to to sort of I don't know it sort of shakes the box a little bit co-production you hand the reins over to other people and the communities themselves and that's quite a scary and liberating thing at the same time being a research manager and trying to have a programme of research it would deliver for example we're trying to steer that but also let that be as free as possible and that's why I think co-production is quite a powerful thing which I mentioned obviously in my talk I think as well you know I kind of really agree with what Kevin was saying about people feeling excluded for research because there's such a lack of trust in state institutions which have been the site of discrimination so if the people that are asking you to fill in a survey are the people that have treated you very badly in the past when you think they are the people that treated you badly in the past why would you want to hand over very personal information to them I think this is one of the reasons why some people don't want to take part in data collection initiatives and they don't see the importance of them sometimes because they have participated before and nothing's actually changed so I think there is disillusionment within people but that's up to data providers data collectors and state agencies to fix, this is not about encouraging people on an individual level to take part and just to add to what Craig said about co-production we have to remember when we're talking about data we're talking about all forms of data not just quantitative data that is not the most important form of data so I'm a mixed methods researcher but I'm trained as a quantitative analyst but I don't believe that quantitative data holds all the answers so using co-produced qualitative data to add richness, to add nuance to the quantitative data we have is imperative and we do need a shift in the thinking of what counts as data what counts as important data and people's lived experiences and those stories should form part of that important resource that we have OK, thank you very much for that so we're going to capture all of the Q&As that have been put and asked people to respond separately but now I'd just like to move on to the issue of really looking at what do you think is the key development that would support the continued and evolving representation of self diversity and data so to our panellist what can we really do to make changes here I think it's embraced the communities as expert themselves empowering communities to conduct research as well that's been very self rewarding for the people involved and to expand the research that I've been working on with people it's very been quite a reciprocal relationship and that builds trust and people are able then to go into the communities and to think about in creative ways to engage people and I think that trust is a really important thing especially when elements like benefits are affected or people's statuses in the UK for example are affected and how society responds to them I think I can kind of add to that as well thinking about I guess again what happens at space between data practices identity and I think as data has more and more interest in work around identity characteristics I think we do need to really acknowledge that people for a variety of reasons will not want to share data about their identity I think we need to build systems and structures that fully acknowledge and recognise for refusal, that space for not participating in these systems and I think there is a lot of particularly fantastic work taking place in the US among data justice campaign groups particularly around the issue of data on black people in America and again how do we build systems and structures that acknowledge people's refusal and acknowledge people's decision informed decision to participate in data collection exercises I think we often have an assumption that everyone will give data if we can just push them hard enough actually I think we need to turn the head kind of turn that issue slightly and think how do we really acknowledge people's refusal in meaningful ways as well and I think that's kind of lacking at the moment OK and actually one question I think that we should come back to and it relates to this you know the small size of some group so how do we address the situation so marginalised groups make up such a small proportion of the available data that the data controllers won't let researchers see the data because it might be disclosive and things like won't have to be linked with other data or it's classed as statistically insignificant how do we make sure that we involve the groups whilst also protecting their privacy when it's administrative data or census data and that is the actual number of people looking at it on a local level then there's not much you can do about that that is a statistical disclosure control issue and you can't access data that will put people at risk but obviously if you are looking at things on a country level there probably wouldn't be such small groups that you can't access the data but it might be the case of some groups but when we're talking about data that's collected in national surveys we need to go back to the beginning and think about oversampling groups that we need to make sure we've got a big enough sample to do proper analysis so as I mentioned in my talk I use surveys that use ethnic minority boost sampling to try and make sure that there's enough ethnic minority groups understanding society tries to aim for 1000 people in each of the large ethnic minority groups that's Black African, Black Caribbean Pakistani, Bangladeshi and India so that when researchers are looking at the data you can do some subgroup analysis obviously that gets hard if you want to try and do it by geography so for example at MSOA level so things do get difficult but I think for surveys and smaller data collection initiatives you need to think about this at the design level and obviously for some admin data I don't think that's an issue that can be solved I just added a very quick point to that as well I think the bulk of work I see actually people often use small numbers as an excuse not to do things and actually when we jump into the data whether it be quant or qual is often enough to work with and I sometimes feel that meaningful concerns around small numbers often stops work before it even begins and I think that's what I tend to come across more so particularly in the higher education sector with quite large samples and the issue of overly small numbers OK there's one kind of overarching question so how would you see intersectionality in supporting identity and data and could we go around the panel and ask you all to comment on that so Craig your top left of my screen so can I begin with you thank you can you just repeat it sorry how would you see intersectionality could support identity and data well one of the things that has jumped out on me is as I said at the start the issues that have crossed over the different groups that we are sort of talking about here and I wonder if there could be a way there would be a standard approach where all of these groups have kind of captured as standards within any survey that someone might do and that's obviously tricky because it's hard enough to get that data collection any way for the group so but I wonder if there's a way that that could be done so then any kind of piece of research that's being conducted could be analysed from the different points view of the different communities involved thank you that's a good point Daniel could you comment I think the greatest lesson really for my 11 maybe years of involvement in the minority research let's call it that in Britain was that first of all there's a tremendous very obvious for me need to ensure that the major administrative sources at the level of for example organisations like NHS they include the relevant variables that describe the diversity in Britain so they either they don't include them or they include them but actually data are not collected it's left to the discretion of the respondents for example if you register with a new practice there isn't ethnicity question on the questionnaire and it's made clear to you that you don't have to fill it in now so there has to be some sort of shared position on I mean if we are serious about collecting the data how do we go about it because most people don't fill it in or a lot of people wouldn't fill it in not because they object they don't want to be identified but they would they don't particularly enjoy filling in the questionnaire as simple as that however to capture ethnicity to capture religion that needs to be done it needs to be done in NHS perhaps other data administrative data sets it's an imperative to include these variables in the deaths and birth certificate in these systems I have to run short of time actually thank you so that's basically that's basically why sorry to cut you short Karen I wonder if you could comment on that from your perspective yes I mean in sectionality I didn't mention this during the presentation earlier but that's an important part of our analysis and we try and look at combinations of characteristics and not just each of them separately because you really don't get a a sufficient picture of what's going on if you just look at a disability separate from sex and all the other characteristics but again of course there are limitations then from as we have mentioned before if you're going to divide up a population into very many different groups then it can make it more difficult to get good robust results thank you Kevin sorry I have to say perhaps 30 seconds each on the intersectionality point I'll try and say something very quick I think I'll go back to the point I said about looking within groups so I think if we treat the LGBTQ community as a monolith actually what that does is bring to the four those who are already most privileged so often white gay men and it leaves some of the people who are maybe experiencing multiple kind of intersections of disadvantage often cast them further into shadows so I think it really needs to be baked into all the work we do to ensure that when we do work it's not just kind of going for the people who are the least minoritised within minoritised groups and I think this is an issue that we thought about when we were designing the evens because we wanted to make sure that obviously our interest is in ethnic inequalities but we want to make sure that we collect lots of different characteristics as well so on socio-economic status sexuality some questions on living so some people living for example the Roman and Gypsy travel community living different types of accommodation so we made different questions which would ensure we would capture their experiences but I think what tends to happen in these kinds of surveys and when we're doing individual work on our research areas is we're limited in space we have limited space we want to capture the variables that we're most interested in to do our research and I think this is where statutory organisations have a larger role to play to make sure the data that everybody needs is collected in more detail rather than leaving it to different smaller surveys which are great but at the end of the day we all have limited resources Thank you so much I'm really sorry, really interesting discussion but I'm going to have to draw this to close I do want to say so the UK data service is going to be setting up an open community so that there will be opportunities to continue the engagement and continue the discussion there'll be information on the last of a disk mail address and information on that in the final slide and going into the chat so do sign up to that if you're interested in continuing the discussion so it just leaves me really to really thank all our speakers today so thank you very much to Lem Tisei, to Kevin Guillam Dermi Cepardia, Karen Hurill Craig Moss, Daniel Statski Thank you so much, really really great interesting presentations and a great discussion special thanks also to Dr Victoria Moody who's Deputy Director and Co-I of the UK Data Service who devised the concept of this event and also thank you to Neil Diamond Greene who's been doing a lot of the admin and bringing the speakers together and other technical support from the UK Data Service for running all the technology today so thank you so much for that yes so thank you thank you very much for joining us this morning hope you'll join in continuing the conversations that have started today and there's the disk mail details for you thank you