RIN PNT Advisory Group – White Paper Release Ahead of Leadership in PNT Seminar

By Andy Proctor and Guy Buesnel

The RIN PNT Advisory group Executive group met recently and a significant topic of discussion was the initial release of the RIN white paper “Recommendations to promote the adoption of Resilient Position, Navigation and Timing in the UK”. This is an important milestone for the RIN PNT Advisory Group.  

The report makes some significant recommendations on the best ways forward to drive a greater understanding and adoption of the principles of Resilient PNT in the UK.

In his foreword to the report, Professor Terry Moore, former RIN president and Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham, details how society has become increasingly dependent on the services provided by PNT and that the increasing vulnerability of these services has become a critical issue to resolve.

The authors of the white paper, Ramsey Faragher and Mitch Narins (both FRIN’s), with support from the RIN PNT Advisory Group, believe that Resilient PNT is an area in which the UK could provide leadership to improve PNT performance given the high level of expert knowledge and track record in innovation and excellence that the UK possesses.  

A RIN- led approach is advocated by the authors who go on to make several key findings and recommendations as a result of their research – which they believe could be transformational to the future of Resilient PNT.

The paper was produced to help understand the values of developing standards, guidelines, and/or legislation for Resilient PNT in an already complex eco-system.  The importance of protecting Critical National Infrastructure from the consequences of increased vulnerability of PNT services to disruptions, was a strong driver in developing the findings and recommendations.

The paper considers the UK’s key strengths in PNT, making the point that the UK has historically been a global leader in PNT from the establishment of the longitude act (and prize) in 1714 following pressure from seafarers, the origins of the Greenwich meridian first established by Sir George Airy in 1851, and the “battle of the beams” in  World War II,  where the UK pioneered many radio navigation aids, counter-measures to defend against German radio based navigation technologies and early terrain-mapping radar navigation systems.  The UK carried this expertise forward into the 21st century and has taken leading roles in notable areas such as signals and control for GNSS systems, PNT satellites, receiver development smartphone navigation, precise timing transfer and control, system integration, PNT-enabled applications, and test measurement and verification.
The report goes on to examine the challenges facing PNT today and discusses existing PNT standards and guidance to propose a way forward to develop UK Resilient PNT best practice and guidelines. 

It is a wide-ranging white paper and contains a wealth of information along with its measured recommendations and conclusions.
With the “2nd Leadership in PNT” event being planned to take place at the Royal Society on 07 November 2023 the white paper will obviously be a major discussion point on the day.  A panel session at the event is being planned along with a video introduction from the two principal authors.   Event delegates will have the opportunity to read the white paper in advance of the seminar and to provide their input – and additionally they will be able to register their interest in being directly involved in the follow up activities proposed by the white paper. This will be an excellent opportunity for attendees to play a significant part in contributing to the development and excellence of a strong UK approach to Resilient PNT, and to the development of the RIN programme over the next year.

Andy Proctor, Chair of the UK PNT Advisory Group, and the part of organising committee for the Leadership in PNT event, hailed the release of the RIN white paper, “Standards, best practices, and legislation play an important role in the resilience and preparedness, to disruption, of infrastructure that uses PNT now and into the future. This new initiative and proposed working group could bring together UK expertise in the field to address the challenges it identifies.”

The RIN PNT Advisory group is also working on matters relating to Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Sensing, PNT in Defence, and PNT Innovation. It also taking learning from across the RIN from its other groups, such as the newly formed Maritime Navigation Group and the Cognitive Navigation groups, some of this learning will also be discussed at the Leadership event in November. Register here.

Networking And Poster Preparation at an International Conference: Tips From Emre Yavuz

Emre is a PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, fellow at Founders of the Future and member of the RIN Younger Members’ Group. This article was first published in the July/August edition of Navigation News.

At the beginning of May, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present a poster at the FENS (Federation of European Neuroscience Societies) regional meeting in The Algarve, Portugal. The poster reported on my PhD work investigating the association between GPS reliance and human spatial navigation performance. In particular, the focus was on a part of my PhD research, supervised by Professor Hugo Spiers, where I looked at the association between reliance on GPS use as measured by self-report questionnaires and human spatial navigation performance measured using Sea Hero Quest. Sea Hero Quest has been mentioned in Navigation News before but for those unfamiliar, it is a series of navigation tests developed by our team in the form of a mobile video game app. 

Both presenting and networking at an international conference can be a daunting experience, so I’d like to pass on the following insights to anybody who feels apprehensive about doing the same.

9 Tips for Preparing a Poster

1. Visuals

Focus on the visualisations first. What will look most enticing, the clearest and the easiest to interpret for the reader? People will be scanning 100s of posters, and so ensuring that the key figures are as bold and as clear as possible, with clearly labelled axes, will very much help the reader take away the gist of the results.

2 Be clear 

For the introduction/background, try and keep this to around three clear bullet points, to give the reader a brief enough overview of why you investigated what you did, and where it fits into the broader scientific literature.

3. Make sure your reader can understand your logical flow

For the methods, presenting these succinctly and in a visually appealing way is key. If the reader can understand the logical flow of the steps you took to get from your hypothesis to your results, such as by using arrows and flow diagrams etc., it will help them to understand the pattern of thought you had when designing the experiment and analysing the data. 

Read More - available to logged in members

Author

Emre Yavuz

LinkedIn

UCL profile

To read the rest of the article, as well as access the rest of the Navigation News archive, sign up to become a RIN members - student membership is available from £16 per year. 

Younger Members' Group

rin.org.uk/YoungerMembersGroup

Get Lost – Spatial Disorientation in Dementia

Prof Michael Hornberger sheds light on the link between spatial disorientation and dementia, highlighting the significance and impact of this in the real world. Michael is Professor of Applied Dementia Research at Norwich Medical School, UK. This article was first published in the July/August 2023 Navigation News.

Getting lost in an unfamiliar environment is a common occurrence for the vast majority of people. For example, we can easily get lost and have difficulty finding our bearings when on holiday in a new town. This can be amusing, in particular when we pass the same place for the third time, but it can be also quite unsettling and distressing when we get completely lost. Such ‘getting lost’ scenarios are very common for people with dementia, who often have difficulties finding their bearings even in highly familiar locations. It might come as a surprise to many people that such spatial disorientation is a key symptom in dementia, since we would assume that memory problems are the key early symptom. Spatial disorientation is actually as common as memory problems, but is under-recognised since it is often not noticed by family members, and is rarely inquired about as a symptom by clinicians and healthcare professionals. To better understand why spatial disorientation occurs in dementia, we need to understand how the brain is affected by the dementia disease processes. 

Dementia is an umbrella term for different dementias, with Alzheimer’s disease accounting for 60-70% of cases with dementia. It is thought that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the build-up of two proteins (amyloid and tau) in the brain. The exact reason why these proteins accumulate and cause the disease is not yet fully established. However, once the two proteins accumulate, they start becoming toxic to the nerve cells and subsequently nerve cells start dying. It is this dying of nerve cells which causes the symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease, since the brain cannot conduct its functions properly anymore once the nerve cells are gone. 

For dementia diagnosis, spatial orientation changes can potentially complement the reported memory problems, which helps to confirm the diagnosis. This is particularly useful, since many people report changes to their memory as they age, while healthy people would rarely report having problems with orientation.

Read the full article here

Learn more about the symptoms and warning signs of dementia on the Alzheimer Research UK website 

Author

Prof Michael Hornberger

Professor of Applied Dementia Research, Norwich Medical School

Michael's book ‘Tangled Up – The science and history of Alzheimer’s disease’ is available here.

RIN Cog Nav Special Interest Group

https://cognavrin.org.uk/