15 sites in the frame to become home to the UK’s prototype fusion energy plant

Article | April 24, 2020

At GitHub, working remotely has been in our DNA from the start. With over 80% of our engineers working remotely before COVID-19, the team has established some amazing best practices that foster a strong collaborative environment, inspire creativity, and a bit of levity with the ultimate goal of building trust within teams. What’s it like for GitHub engineers to work remotely?

CONSTRUCTION

Article | May 18, 2021

The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has published a new assessment of how behaviour change brought by Covid-19 will impact infrastructure networks as part of its prep work ahead of the second National Infrastructure Assessment. The NIC’s findings are that it's too early to assume that Covid-19 behaviour change will lead to completely different patterns of infrastructure use, even if these changes remain in place. The commission recommends using realistic scenarios and planning responses to the range of possibilities these scenarios present to manage uncertainty. They also suggest a more ‘adaptive’ approach to longer-term project commitments and using data to understand how changes are unfolding.

ENGINEERING TECH

Article | July 1, 2021

While an important milestone, the remainder of Phase 2B connecting Birmingham to Leeds awaits similar backing. Delivery programmes can often become constrained by timescales associated with land acquisition, procurement and site mobilisation at the start of a project. As this legislation makes its way through Parliament, continuous and prompt delivery of the integrated route must be supported. This will enable efficiencies and benefits to be realised during both delivery and operation phases of the complete HS2 route, as well as Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR). HS2 will provide 50% of the infrastructure for NPR; a project designed to transform the rail network in the north of England. Encouragingly, the Queen’s Speech recognised that improving existing processes can be equally conductive to positive transformation. The Planning Bill will modernise our current systems with simpler frameworks, enabling those on the ground to deliver environmental and commercial opportunities more promptly. This will also support delivery of the UK’s ambitious net zero target. While efficiencies are encouraging, the importance of public consultation, as many major infrastructure projects currently undertake from conception to completion, should not be forgotten.

Article | April 24, 2020

Feature engineering is the process of extracting new variables by transforming raw data to improve the predictability of a machine learning model. But feature engineering is not just this kind of simple translation of categories like names or colors into numbers. The following section includes a collection of different kinds of engineering approaches that go beyond a translation of categories into numbers and address needs such as transforming numbers into categories or filtering data points due to missing or false data.