This conference aims to provide an international forum for scientists and engineers from all around the world, and also for the dissemination of information and knowledge exchange in biomimetic and bionic engineering. A broad range of topics and application areas will be devised to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of this conference. Just before the conference launch, we caught up with Professor Julian Vincent, President of the Bionic Engineering Society, who will be holding a number of lectures during the 3-day event.

First of all Professor Vincent, can you precisely define bionic engineering?

Hollywood and TV have tried to hijack the word, when in truth bionics comes from a mash-up of biology and technique. However, it means much more than simply taking inspiration from the natural world. My focus at the moment is biological tradeoffs. That’s to say, when an animal or plant finds that its world or environment has changed in some way – perhaps other plants or animals invading, so the balance has been upset. How does the animal react to this? How does it define its choices? Another area I am looking at is the tradeoff between speed and accuracy. A pianist playing a tune, a footballer shooting, an insect hunting at the bottom of a sandpit - all of them attempt to balance accuracy and speed. We know that speed universally impacts on accuracy and there are number of different ways we can measure this impact.

What do you hope the UNNC conference will achieve?

The practical stuff is already happening, because I am here and doing these lectures. I am talking about stuff which nobody will really have heard of, because it hasn’t yet reached a certain level of popularity where everyone wants to do it. That’s the great thing about a conference - a lot of independent thinkers come along and make their presentations about little known but exciting projects that they are working on. As usual, there will be a lot of focus on the popular things. For example, one buzz area is the study of geckos, and how they climb up buildings, so that one day a machine could just crawl up and clean all your windows! At a conference, though, some thinker will come along and say “hang on, it can’t work like that”, and will lead the research in different directions. I’ve spent 40 years working as an apprentice in this field and I am finally getting the time to really think about things.

The 5th ICBE runs until Friday 24th June at UNNC. Check out the conference website for all the latest updates: http://www.icbe2016-unnc.org/home.html