Hassan Abdalla
HA: Hassan Abdalla
INT: Interviewer
INT: Can you say who you are?
HA: I am professor Hassan Abdalla. I am the Provost of the University of East London. My area of expertise is around smart and future cities. I work with large organisations on that topic such as Siemens. My role, that I am leading the development of academic portfolios of institution. We have been growing the institution from 10.5K to now 35K. We, as an institution, are focusing on careers and transforming lives and societies; that’s quite important! There are various projects we are currently working on. One of the major projects is Near Zero. Because of the climate change and the impact of climate change on our environment, our society, our lives and the predicted increase in temperature and the predicted increase in temperature from 1.5 degree celsius, it will have detrimental impact on our lives and that’s why we can see, for instance, catastrophic events happening across the clothes like tsunami, em and so on. So, we have been working with Siemens because they are pioneers in that first to try start to transform our campus to be Near Zero or be carbon natural by 2030. As a result of that we will be able to showcase to the rest of the community how to achieve a similar thing. We also establishing, what you call, ‘a living lab,’ you will be able to experiment basically design of things whether these are buildings or cities or a complete district to see how that would be more environmentally friendly.
INT: Can you tell us about your connection with Rosetta, how you become involved?
HA: We have been involved with Rosetta Arts since its inception back in 1993 and it has been an amazing journey, and I would like to take this opportunity to really congratulate the team, first the founder Yvonne Humble who established Rosetta Arts first ,and Sanaz Amidi current Chief Executive for Rosetta Arts for their incredible work! They established this incredible foundation for the community to offer access to the higher education and to the creative industries and arts and culture in general which enriches their lives and transforms the borough in general. So, I would whole heartily like to congratulate them for this exceptional work. We have been jointly been delivering courses in arts and also here at Rosetta Arta and the university. And we have been working on a number of very very exciting projects, there are so many, but to name some of them, we have been working with Rosetta Arts on culture in Newham, and that project is about £1.8million funded by The Arts Council, and again, is all about how would you offer the community access to arts and creativity in order to enrich society and their lives?
There is also another as well, very exciting project between Rosetta Arts and our Wrecks Centre focusing on how to enhance experience of disabled children in creative learning. That’s obviously important, at early stage, because it makes them feel, eh, more supported or equal and opens up great opportunities for their bright future. So, that project is important as its close disciplinarity in nature brings together arts and technologies in order to come up with this, sort of, very creative learning environment to help resource disabled children.
There are other campaigns we are working on together, especially around equality and diversity and that’s a major thing around East London and Newham borough in general, especially for the youth in order to build their confidence, and make them feel, eh, basically equal and make them excel and make them feel they have no issues make them develop a very bright and successful future.
INT: Thank you. Em, can you tell us about the changes in your work and connecting it with Rosetta?
HA: Yes, East London has changed and transformed in the last few years quite significantly, So, we see now the standard of living, has, substantially improved. We can see now the standard of service, which has been made available which has enhanced quite substantially. We can see the development and urban regeneration around East London and that obviously brings more prosperity around what’s happening around East London and Newham in general. I thinks arts has been central to reinvigorating our society and our community and enriches the talents of the young generation so this has been quite instrumental throughout that journey.
I think, also the agenda for focusing on green economy and green corridor for Newham and East London has been quite impressive, and started to, emerge, to bring more prosperity to the economy and to the region in general. You can see quite significant improvements to the standards of education, so education has improved quite significantly so you can see universities from around the country starting to move to East London. The Olympic Park in 2012 and Queen Elizabeth Park made significant difference in terms of social mobility and inclusion. And also, how the sports can help with the health and well-being of our society. So, there are a number of significant developments has taken place around our region which is something we should be so proud of.
INT: Maybe , kind of take us through your vision for the future.
HA: Em, I think there are a number of global challenges which we need to focus on. I would like to mention just a few of them very briefly. The first one is the global climate change and how climate change will have significant impact on our lives and how do we individually, collectively and globally stick together in order to be able to, basically, put forward some sort of solution and raise awareness at all levels about, eh significant impact the climate change could have on our lives, and I would like to urge everyone to. Work collaboratively in terms of having a more measured way in how to use energy. And how to use transportations and also, how to move towards this hydrogen energy, green energy, and more toward electric vehicles to minimise the CO2 would be important because that will have significant impact on lives and health and society in general.
The other area I would like to touch on is measuring of disruptive technology . Disrupting technology is a way of thinking how work, how we do businesses will perform and conduct their business. Basically, work would have to change quite significantly and have to develop or current taskforce and new the graduates and new employees and to skill and re-skill them in order to be able to cope with these sorts of disruptive technologies, such as AI, internet, deep machine learning, data science, data analytics, because these are very strong enablers and that will enable us, as a nation, and regionally to be more productive and more responsive and that will enable us to be pioneers. We have major industries around us. We have Ford Motor Company, for instance, we have the financial city and the Fin Tech and these incredible developments which, from a technological point of view, will help us shape our lives and future. We need to be ahead of the game for that, and we would like to make a concerted effort, in order to ensure that our community and out task force , is very developed and well trained in order to be able to cope with these sorts of challenges we are facing.
